Angry Birds - Taking Over The World
People with iPhones may have bumped into a game called Angry Birds. Why am I so sure about this? Well, Angry Birds have reached the #1 position of Paid Apps in tens of different countries. 61 to be exact. That's a figure that hardly should go unnoticed. Their most recent measure of triumph is from the MacWorld Awards, where they won first place for the Best iPhone Entertainment & Lifestyle App. Angry Birds has been created by Rovio, a Finnish startup.
Spotify, TechCrunch And 30000 Users
On Thursday, TechCrunch wrote about Spotify having 30 000 users in the US and questioning why it hasn't launched there yet. The post is highly controversial compared to what Spotify has to say officially. Spotify has stated (at the end of the post) that they don't have 30 000 users in the US and they have good relations to all their partners. TechCrunch stated otherwise referring to their well placed sources, close to the company.
Spotify's Monthly Revenues Around 3 Million Euros
TechCrunch ran a story on Spotify a couple of days ago, where Daniel Ek had commented on some very interesting issues. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke at SXSW and told in his keynote that, Spotify as a service consumes more bandwidth than the whole of Sweden (on certain days that is). Those wondering why Spotify is built in a P2P manner now fully understand the need for such a solution. Ek also commented that it's a million dollar question why Apple remains to deliver all its digital downloads from a "single source" generating huge amounts of traffic that also need to be paid for.
It's All About Changing The World, Right?!
During the past week I was looking for topics to write about and there was a few rather interesting ones even though they weren't exactly scoops. But that's not what I want to write about. I want to write about all the useless web apps that I kept finding when I was looking for something useful.
I admit there's some truth in that if you just fiddle around and create nifty little apps or services you can make something very useful in the end, but only if you believe there's something much more than that, something big and game changing in the end. For example, I agree that fiddling is largely how Twitter got started. But if it's for a quick buck or quick success and you're putting all your time and energy into it, it's just cutting short your potential as a human being and wasting all our time.
Spotify And SoundCloud Winning At The Europas
The Europas, the inaugural TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, were held last night in London, UK. Nordic and Baltic countries had a rather strong representation among the nominated startups and consequentially took home no less than 5 out of 15 categories. But these five wins did not scatter around just any startups. Four out of the five were taken home by Spotify and the fifth one belonged to SoundCloud, which has also its roots in Sweden just as Spotify does.
So Sweden truly lead the Northern European pack and really were an example to the whole Europe: Spotify not only took home 5 wins, but more impressively won Best New Startup, Summer 2008-2009, Best Startup Founder(s) and Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA) as well as was given the The Europas Grand Prix award by the 19 expert advisors, which included some industry movers and shakers and which I had a privilege to be included in (consider this as my disclosure). SoundCloud on its part won the Best Entertainment Application or Service (EMEA).
Event As An Open API For You To Use
I’m writing this from The Next Web Conference at the lovely Westergasfabrik in the heart of Amsterderdam. It’s sunny and the there’s amazing people full of energy all around. This is exactly how events should be: providing an inspirational setting to bring the busy and smart individuals into the same place to bounce ideas from each other and lay those seeds for future projects. I’ve been here for a couple days now and still don’t know nor care much about the program or the content on stage. What matters to me is the people off stage. The content needs to be there to get people curious enough to come in mass, but once you hit the venue, the smartest of us ignore the talks and focus on the conversations in the halls. To mis-use the analogy for events that Adam Greenfield uses for cities: The Events Are Here For You To Use.
That’s how we at ArcticStartup see events, that’s why we take time to travel to events all around Europe and that’s why we go lengths to organize and make sure ArcticEvenings work for the people who take the time to spent the evenings with us.
Here's some events just around corner what are likely to be worth your time and effort.
Michael Arrington On What Works In The Current Economic Climate
I acknowledge that our postings have a been a bit video heavy lately and continue to be so this week, but still wanted to give you a few, what I think is very useful, soundbites from Michael Arrington, editor and founder of TechCrunch. Despite the on-going general post-LeWeb brouhaha in the web, this is worth a watch. Andrea Vascellari, CEO of iTive.net consultancy did a good job asking Arrington where he sees the startups given the current economic climate.
Here's the key take aways from the video:
- In a tough economic climate winners find an aggressive way to expand without spending a lof of money by
- Reducing head count
- Paying lower salaries now that they are collectively down
- Paying less for everything = lower expenses overall
- Acquiring competitors pennies for dollar when they are about to belly up
- A lot of startups make headcount adjustments already, which is probably a smart move (Think Fruugo and Blyk)
- Those startups that have better execution end up being winners (this is something that I believe always bares repeating even though it's a no-brainer)
- Remember that this downturn is different! Those who act as they acted in the previous one probably end up being one of the losers.
- You have to be quick on your feet and agile
- Those who focus on technical market analysis on what used to work tend to too poorly in the new climate: You should look at the playing field as a new one and compete given that
Le Web: A Few Hiccups and The European Startup Culture
The web erupted in a fierce conversation (see especially the comments) on European* vs. US entrepreneurial culture after the Le Web in France. The conference itself was a disaster in terms of organization, even if many people dislike admitting it, even though the speakers were of high quality. I won't go into ranting about it, since the 'few hiccups' have been well documented by others. Helene Auramo, the CEO of Zipipop, summed it well on her Tweet on why she got a very high fever and cold after the conference: "...cold and not getting any food in LeWeb for two days... What can you expect?".
That said, I personally enjoyed the conference, largely because of the great people who showed up. I also believe that is the most important bit so, despite Loic Le Meur got a lot of shit for the organizing, I believe he got the most important bit somewhat right.
I don't believe I have ever enjoyed any panel as much as I did enjoy the Gillmor Gang panel at the end of Le Web's second day (see video below). This was mainly thanks to Michael Arrington, the infamous editor of TechCrunch, calling it as he saw it. He gave Loic a run for his money when Loic tried to tell different truths to different audiences. A minor disappointment was how the panel ended in loud music and everybody tapping each other on the back and all the important issues were talked only half way though. After what was very refreshing stance from Michael Arrington during the panel, he also got soft at the end and started praising the organizers. That said, as I told Mr. Arrington after the conference, it was very very refreshing to see someone brave enough calling it as he sees it, which at the end helps everybody improve their game.
A more serious point in this storm-in-a-tea-cup discussion was the stage of entrepreneurship in Europe versus in the US. I believe there is a cultural path dependency in Europe, which has set the course for generation after generation regarding the working culture. Thus, people who work over 60 hours a week are pitied and seen as unfortunate. In effect, not having life. Whereas in the US the opposite is true. They are seen as having the time of their life when they go after their dreams with all they have, not counting hours. I remember living in London, which is surely the most Anglo-American city in Europe (in fact, some people don't count UK in Europe at all). In London you could 'taste the blood' in a sense that people were willing to sacrifice something to get the other, whereas the sentiment in Helsinki is that you should be able to have the cake and eat it too. People believe, right or wrong, that you work to live, not live to work, and doing the latter is seen as unacceptable social behavior. I don't think either one's any more right than the other and that we're all different in that respect. Only the path dependency that I talked about earlier has shifted the culture to be very critical for those that choose to live to work. This is very unfortunate as we many people I know love their work and want to make it big whatever the cost and are thus looked down on or criticized. In fact, most of these people who work beyond 80 hours a week don't even consider it work. They love what they do and are grateful for every hour they can spend on doing it.
I, for one, like to have more life than just my work and personally struggle with the trade off as does Robert Scoble (see video here), a famous American video blogger who says it's really hard if not impossible to have a healthy balance, let alone manage it, if you want to be on top of your game. That said, I know people who are willing to pay the price and build the next big European success story and I very strongly believe we should respect these people for their choice in life instead of criticize and look down on them. The culture needs to change. Europe is a patch work of countries and national cultures. Therefore, we should not impose one working culture on the continent either by thinking we know what's best for everyone. There are room for both: Those who value the quality of life as defined by leisure, free evenings and weekends as well well as those who define quality of life by being able to work 80 hours a week to build something bigger and follow their dream.
Even though some of us, not least the LeWeb founder Loic Le Meur, might have had his ego bruised in the process, I believe the panel at Gillmor Gang and especially Michael Arrington's stone cold comments did us a great favor by bringing an important conversation to the fore.
I am, yet again, dumstruck by how easily the local media here in Finland dismissed all the efforts by us and
by the whole Finnish startup community to raise the awareness of the local startups and the formation of a startup culture here in the Nordics. First we set up the biggest startup event Finland has ever seen which was a big success and now we took a whole Finnish Sauna (video here and here) full of startups to Paris with Tommi Rissanen of Digibusiness.fi, just so the Finnish media can ignore all of it. This happens while at the same time tens of millions of euros are poured into programs to help Finnish startups, but most of this money go to those who know how to game the Finnish system and have the time to go through the endless rounds of red tape. Tommi Rissanen, who was pivotal in bringing the sauna to LeWeb, is the only person working for one of the supporting institutions in Finland, who I have met who knows and is interested in what is happening at the grass roots level in the Finnish startup scene and is willing to bust his butt to help out the startups. And I follow this space every single day.
Another sign to get the pulse: Christine Lagarde, the French minister of economy came to visit Le Web 2008. She actually came even to the stage to have a chat with Loic (previous years French President Sarkozy himself has visited the event). We in Finland, on the other hand, got an email from the Finnish President's assistand telling us that the president is too busy to visit the Finnish startups.
*Where I talk about Europe, I mean what we know as the Western Europe. I can't speak of the Eastern Europe, since I have not lived or worked there.
Live From TechCrunch Brunch
Reporting live from TechCrunch Brunch in Helsinki the morning following Slush. The theme for the morning's panel discussions are the implications of regionality and unique features in the Nordic startup scene.
The event was kicked off by Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK and Ville Vesterinen from ArcticStartup, chatting a bit about Slush, its background and the Nordic startup environment in general.
The panelists (from left to right in the picture below):
Kai Lemmetty, Founder of Floobs
Janne Waltonen, Marketing director Fruugo
Mark Sorsa-Leslie, Managing director of Hammerkit
Jussi Laakkonen, CEO and president Everyplay.com
Leo Koivulehto, Co-founder and chairman, TripSay
Mike set the scene asking how the panelists see the startup scene in the Nordics, whether the environment is going to stay a tough place to do a startup due to relatively high living costs, difficulties with angel and VC funding etc. A few highlights below.
Mark stated he moved from the UK three years ago, and has been impressed with enthusiasm people have, the great engineering skills, and the passion to get things done in a practical manner. Janne continued the people in Nordic countries are quite modest, which is somewhat hindering international expansion
.
Janne mentioned the Nordic market's been traditionally about local startups thinking of local markets (Swedes being maybe somewhat different), which should end. As Janne put it, we really have all it takes if we have the will to take over.
Peter Vesterbacka commented the downturn is a perfect time to start a company as you have less competition and could be able to take over a lot of the potential customers in a swift. Furthermore, it's perfect to start in the Nordics, as "if you can make it in the slush you can make it anywhere". The current global economic environment it's actually not even that much different from the "normal" challenges up here.
Mike commented in London the startup world is focusing nowadays on revenues much earlier in the game. According to Janne startups should start marketing as soon as possible, and not really wait until their product is "ready". Traditionally the startups have relied perhaps too much on virality (beta invites etc.). Janne compared his experience between Fruugo and two Swedish startups he's been in, and noted Fruugo has really concentrated on not showing anything in public before they are sure their technical back-end is top notch, whereas the Swedish ones were really open since the beginning without even much knowledge about the technical side.
Stephen Lee from Muxlim added, as an American who's lived in Finland for 10 years, that the governmental systems supporting startups are built around the concept of startups having to prove themselves in Finland first, before getting further money to go abroad. According to Stephen this model doesn't really work anymore, and the organizations (and startups) should turn their focus on going global from the beginning.
Jussi answered arguing the Finnish game industry has gone global since the very beginning. Nowadays the industry is healthy and buzzing with 50+ companies with over 90% export ratio, so it's been proved already we can make it from here. Jussi continued the process for pitching a game concept to a games publisher is really similar to pitching a company to VCs, so there are people who have been pitching successfully and know their stuff.
The second panel focused around the topics of finding funding and how to cope in the downturn market.
The panelists (from left to right):
Helene Auramo, CEO and partner of Zipipop
Heikki Mäkijärvi, Venture parter of Accel Partners
Mohamed El-Fatatry, Founder and CEO of Muxlim
Joakim Achrén, founder of IronStar Helsinki
Kristoffer Lawson from Scred
The panel kicked off going through the current status of the startups - Scred and Zipipop are bootstrapping and looking for funding. Mohamed told Muxlim got very well seed money from Finnish angels, which are quite active and willing to help, but for big rounds the money is difficult to get and momentum can be lost. Muxlim run through 500 international VCs in 6 months, and finally landed with one from Sweden.
Regarding the economy, Heikki from Accel Partners encouraged startups to look critically their business in the current economic situation - if the customers are not buying, it may be worthwhile to stop and rethink the business plan, rather than waiting for a sale or better times. They've had very good experiences of startups finding a great business model by refocusing this way.
Heikki also commented they are being more careful about the investments currently. He argued in the early stage companies the team is the most important thing, so that the investors can trust the team knowing what they're doing. Heikki also went on explaining one notable difference with Finnish startups compared to Silicon Valley is in the executive team. The ideas are typically good, but the executive teams are much more juvenile than in the Valley, whereas the board is typically very experienced. So Heikki would rather see people like the board members doing the execution, mentioning he'd like to see people learning business in big global firms, and then establishing startups in their 40s. He explained while you can build a good startup regardless of your age, in the end it will take great skill in execution to take a startup from 5 Million to 10M, and futher to 50M in revenues.
Finnish Startups Taking A Sauna Truck To LeWeb
ArcticStartup and Digibusiness Helsinki Region are organizing a trip for Finnish startups to LeWeb which takes place in Paris on 9th and 10th December.
LeWeb is the brainchild of Loic le Meur and his wife Geraldine le Meur. Loic is also steering the much talked about startup Seesmic. LeWeb is currently hands down the biggest and most talked about startup event in Europe that features many of the world famous anti-heroes and heroes such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Dan Farber of CNET News, Steve Gillmor of The Gillmor Gang, Om Malik of GigaOm and Robert Scoble of Fast Company along with hundreds of startups.
A group of Finnish startups will invade LeWeb with a massive Sauna Truck. Yes! You heard right, a Sauna Truck! The hottest Finnish social media startups, metaphorically and literally after a few hours in the sauna truck, will combine their efforts at Le Web’08 in Paris in December. The trip is a continuum to a successful joint business trip to the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco last April.
The Finnish startup mafia will arrive in Paris on Monday December 8th and the Sauna will be open for press, bloggers and industry leaders already in the same evening. If you're a Finnish startup and want to tag along contact tommi.rissanen [at] culminatum [dot] fi. There's still room for a few so hurry up!
Hope to see you all in the sauna.
Photo by wili_hybrid (CC:BY).
Nordic And Baltic Companies Non-Existent In TC50
Currently, the most talked about startup event in the world is the TechCrunch50 being organised in San Francisco by Michael Arrington's TechCrunch. Mike Butcher wrote an article in the UK version of TechCrunch about the non-existence of European companies, compared to Israeli startups (there were 5 Israeli startups present).
Now if we look at this from a Nordic and Baltic perspective - the only Nordic company we could find in the participation list was Burt (Sweden). While the investments required for such a trip is high, I was wondering if it really is worth the money for the European companies or do they already receive enough visibility here in Europe?
I know the Israeli companies in general are pushing more aggressively to the US market, while European startups can somehow still manage locally here in Europe with its 300 million domestic market. So there are differences in strategies, but I'm throwing the ball to the entrepreneurs - what do you guys think, is it worth the money? or do we need something like this in Europe? Or is there an explanation I've missed for Europe's absence (could it be that many applied, but did not get through)?
Xiha Life gets a double peak
Xiha Life, a Finnish based multilingual social network, got mentioned yesterday by both: TechCrunch and Mashable (here and here respectively). Regardless of the quality of traffic that a company's web page receives when it gets TechCrunched or mentioned by any other major news service this gave Xiha Life a welcome publicity boost in the US market
The main reason of this sudden interest towards Xiha is its public launch in US, which took place yesterday.The second and we believe equally compelling reason is their new Music section, which will challenge other social networks going after the less known artists who are determined to climb to the mainstream from the long tail, thus competing with the likes of MySpace.
Xiha has more than a decent user base for an organically grown social network from the Nordics: 500,000 monthly users worldwide. We wish the best of luck to Jani and rest of the Xiha Life team in conquering the rest of the world's multilingual population.
TripSay launches to the public
TripSay, a Finnish social travel service that gives its users destination recommendations based on other users' travels whose profile matches theirs, launches for the public tonight at 12am (Standard GMT+2; Summer GMT+3). Already earlier on they got TechCrunched among other news.
The service has clear and intuitive design and all the features that you'd expect from a such service, thus everything seems to be in place as long as the idea in itself will work. The make-or-brake question is whether TripSay can attract travelers beyond the web savvy kind that sign up to anything and everything new just to try it out and the travel industry professionals looking to fill their own guides.
In the larger sceme of things the success of TripSay like travel services depend on individuals' desire to share their travel insights. Not purely locations where travelled, but real insights. In other words, whether such social travel services will take-off comes down to travelers' ability to see more value in the service than they do in the Lonely Planet brigade after the initial Wow. It's a debate worth having: Whether people in general want to share the real gems home and away, and whether the frequent travelers want to channel the entire Ryanair or EasyJet fleet to that little cozy street cafe that has the best cinnamon rolls in the planet where they like to visit every time they fly via Budabest. In the short term perhaps for while, but long term is tricky.
The service might be good at recommending you destinations (which is nice in itself), but I personally want to know what to do and where to go when I get there. The point is this: Photos (think Flickr) might increase in value when shared with a close circle of friends the more they comment on them, but a small cafe or a restaurant let alone a secret powdery slope in Chamonix or Whistler hardly will in the same manner; you need the critical mass to benefit from the TripSay's service since not all your friends have travelled where you're going and when opened up to the larger public the venues only move from authentic and cozy to touristy and over crowded. Can TripSay draw a balance between not too much and just enough?
If TripSay can pull the trick and get people to come back to share their insights, I will never use Lonely Planet with it's dedicated editors again. As an enthusiastic traveler myself I am eager to the see the kinds of locations it recommends to me and how the service manages to attract people to do exactly that.
Sulake 9th most valued digital startup
At 25 times revenues Sulake is valued 9th in Alley Insider valuation for digital startups. The valuation is purely based on revenues and show the potential of companies in totally different perspective in favor of companies that have valued revenue creation, for example Facebook is valued at 9 billion USD instead of the 15 billion valuation which Microsoft validated when it invested in Facebook. More on the SAI25 at AlleyInsider.
This list tells something of the tides that are on the way, as tells this blog post. Companies are valuating themselves to check where their valuations linger. Sulake does relatively well when compared to the valuations of other US companies which have been hyped a lot in the recent months without a proper business model.
Is this a new sign as a result of the significant drop in investments that has been noticed in the US? Remains to be seen.
TripSay gets TechCrunched
Tripsay has gotten TechCrunched. There's a lot of good and encouraging commentary in the follow up to the blog post. Erick Schonfeld has done a good job explaining the service that is currently in private beta.
Congrats to Leo and co!
TechCrunch finds Scred
There's some good comments being thrown around as Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch interviewed the developers of Scred in Amsterdam's NextWeb Conference. There are a lot of competitor's names as well and it just shows what kind of competition you usually end up with once you execute.
I'd be even daring to say that the idea is nothing, execution is everything.
