TripSay Partners With Helsingin Sanomat
TripSay announced a couple of days ago their partnership with Helsingin Sanomat, the largest daily newspaper in Finland, on their hotel search. Helsingin Sanomat is using TripSay's hotel search as part of their travel pages targeted at Finns.
The service is a co-branded partnership where the community is run by Helsingin Sanomat, the hotel search by TripSat and the actual hotel listing and data by Booking.com. Read more about the partnership on TripSay blog.
Before It Was About Playing In A Band, Now It's About Being An Entrepreneur
Grand One 2009, a competition for the Finnish new media scene to showcase their year’s work, came and went. As we wrote earlier on, we got an invitation to partner with Grand One since they want to push the event forward every year and be on the pulse of all things digital, which is nothing short of admirable. This time being on the pulse meant to invite startups to the competition. This was the first time ever! If someone has missed (or ignored) the fact that startups have lately entred the mainstream hear in the Northern Europe and become the cool thing to do, now even they have to recognize the shift: When the marketing scene comes knocking on the door it means you have just hit the mainstreet.
How Good is Your Startup's Visibility?
Blue White Partners, which Finnish and US based team helps Finnish hi-tech companies to go global might shed some light in it. Blue White investigated(pdf, in Finnish) over 1100 Finnish hi-tech companies’ visibility on the web. Average Blue White Web Score for Finnish companies was 39/100 where as global average is 50. The score is made by investigating content semantics, language, search engine rank and index, and presence in social media.
The top100 mostly consisted of big companies but there were even few startups like 8. Muxlim(95), 13. XIHA(93), 14. Kuneri(93), 15. TripSay(92). (On side note ArcticStartup got 94.)
There has been some discussion what is the actual importance of SEO or is it a complete fad. While methods ranging from white to shady black, I wouldn't argue that SEO is the most important thing to consider when building a startup or product, but you shouldn’t ignore it either. Consider making your product crawlable. Provide some information on the inner workings of your service. Every public page should be your landing page. Use Google tools, like Adwords to select keywords for your product.
We living in the online world tend to forget how much less offline people know about current developments of the web. Help them to find you.
What is your experience, how important is SEO? Does search engine traffic stick?
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Edit: Added top42 companies, by Blue White Partners (note: may be subject to change)
TripSay Strengthens Board
Tripsay, the Finnish social travel site offering personalized travel tips (coverage), has welcomed Alfonso Castellano as their new board member.
Castellano has made a 25+ year career in the travel industry, being Managing Director of Southern Europe for nine years at LastMinute.com, and the head of Latin American expansion and global hotel contracting and procurement. Castellano had the role of SVP Consumer business at Travelocity following its billion-dollar acquisition of LastMinute.com. This year he has statedly two travel technology/innovation related companies to launch, InnovaTravel, a seed company to support travel innovation and travel start-ups, and MindProject, providing consultancy and training in innovation, technology, marketing and distribution for travel companies.
TripSays's service was launched a few months ago, and Castellano helps to bring in long experience and insight in building successful online travel businesses and compelling features for users and partners. Castellano's comment indicates also that his InnovaTravel will have a stake in TripSay: "Tripsay.com will be one of the jewels of the InnovaTravel portfolio.”
See full press release.
MindTrek Finalists Have Been Chosen
MindTrek Startup Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The following companies made the cut (in alphabetical order):
Floobs
HammerKit
MahShelf
One Did It
RunToShop
Star Wreck Studios
TripSay
Zipipop
There will be eight finalist in total in the pitch competition and each startup will have 6 minute pitch to present to the high profile jury. Read more about the Startup Launchpad here.
Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!
The free bus ride for startups to the MindTrek and back from Helsinki on 8.-9.10.2008 will depart 8.10. Wednesday morning at 7.15am in fron of Kiasma (the bus has MindTrek sign on it).
The bus will head back to Helsinki on 9.10. Thursday at 4pm departing in front of Hotel Rosendahlin at Tampere. If you want to come along contact Hanne Lehtola at hanne.lehtola [at] culminatum.fi
Antti Akonniemi from Kisko Labs is also running an Ignite while we are driving up there. Antti wrote a short intro on what’s on offer for the ride up:
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? And what if your stage was an actual bus full of startup entrepreneurs? Fun of karaoke and excitement of Powerpoint combined. Sounds too much like the movie Speed? Introducing Ignite:Mobile. Join ArcticStartup’s bus trip to MindTrek and experience the first ever Ignite:Mobile.
There should still be plenty of room in the bus, so drop Hanne a mail and come along.
Scred's Seedcamp Interview Trip
Editorial note: We're publishing Kristoffer's report from Seedcamp as they made it to the semi-finals for screening. Depending on the feedback we'll see if we should make this a habit in the future as well. Please let us know in the comments. Thanks to Kristoffer for an excellent report!
On the left two founders from Uniki, Teemu and Tuomas from Scred and Adil and Anthony from Entrip.
Last week we got fantastic news. Scred had been shortlisted as one of only about 40 companies to be interviewed by Seedcamp's distinguished panel — a group of prestigious international VCs. Considering that several hundred companies, from all around Europe (and even some from outside) had applied, this was huge for us. In fact Scred is the first Finnish company to make it that far, and was one of only two Nordic companies present.
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.
TripSay adds groups
TripSay adds groups to its service, continueing on the strong community path. With groups, users of the service can more easily see what their peers in the same group are doing. Users can also add certain places to different groups.
Juha Huttunen, the CEO, commented groups in the following manner; "We added groups because they are a crucial element for finding people that share the same travel passions. With groups it is now again easier to find tips related to your interest. You can now easily find the places and tips recommended by e.g. fellow surfers or party animals. You can also create your own group with just friends too."
With regards to their moving out of private beta, Juha Huttunen did not reveal all that much. The list of todo-items isn't apparently all that long - I'm guessing they are in the final stages of fine tuning code and sorting out the communications things with regard to getting everything in-sync. The launch date is still unsure, but we're guessing that its set for August.
Few rumours from Parteco picnic
I attended the Parteco picnic today, organised by Katri Lietsala and Esa Sirkkunen, who ran the Participatory Economy and Beyond -research project. It was a good event with old media companies slowly turning to social media (which I have to say shouldn't be done only for social media's sake).
I also heard some good rumours regarding the Finnish startup scene. First of all, regarding Dopplr - Marko Ahtisaari, Lisa Sounio and Taneli Tikka have left, or are leaving the company to continue to new challenges. Taneli Tikka is currently very active with his new startup RunToShop, which is creating some buzz among Finnish startups. The moves at the moment are not official, but there is a lot of buzz around that.
Juha Huttunen of Tripsay was also nodding towards August with regards to their official launch. Therefore we'll have to wait a few more months before we will be able to see the service they are coming out with. I understand they are currently making final moves towards the launch.
Last, but not least - rumour or not - the Iron Sky movie, followup to the largest Finnish movie ever distributed - StarWreck, will be launched in 2010. Currently the script is being finetuned for the "investment round" that will be a few million euros and that will begin during the end of this year.
However, there was a lot of positive talk among the startups there regarding various issues and I also received a lot of great ideas regarding our next event.
Network with the Finnish startups in San Francisco
I caught sight of Jyri's tweet on a gathering of Finnish entrepreneurs in Mission, San Francisco this coming Monday. An event co-organised by DIGIBUSINESS and Sombiz (Social Media Business Network).
Companies taking part are TripSay, Ironstar, ConnectedDay, Ideakone, Apprix, Waraamo, Ramblas, XIHA Ltd and Futurice.
Read more about the event here.
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!
Finns in the Nextweb Conference
Due to lack of time, I was unable to write about this earlier, but the Next Web 2008 was organised during the end of last week. There were a lot of companies there from Finland as well. I'm counting at least XIHA Life, Scred and Floobs were present.
Timo Paloheimo from Startupbin.com was also there and has some coverage of the two days of activity as well as some photos.
Juhani Polkko from XIHA Life, sent us an e-mail that they released a new language-based search feature in Amsterdam during the conference.
Update: TripSay was present as well, so quite a good presentation from the Finnish startup scene, I must say.
Vailoma changes name to TripSay, introduces embeddable application for partner sites
The travel information organizer Vailoma has changed their name to TripSay. Also the website has been polished up. TripSay's service aims to ease up the process required to plan new trips and vacations, by providing easy access to relevant and complete destination content, which is both updated by users and aggregated from around the web.
The company has also created a new embeddable application called the Destination Module, which is designed to share TripSay's content with travel agencies and other partners enabling them to get dynamic destination content from the web and travelers onto their site without any effort. The application can be checked out on Kaleva Travel's web site (the site's in Finnish, but scroll down a bit and you'll see the app), which has the first implementation of the application. TripSay has also plans to open up an API to allow tailored services, though no indication of the release schedule is given yet.
TripSay plans to monetize their service by targeted advertisements, along with commissions from bookings done via its site. Hopefully the new name is more descriptive to international users and helps to spread the word.
[via Startupbin , TripSay blog]
Juha Huttunen of Vailoma
I did a video interview of Juha Huttunen of Vailoma.com. Juha also tipped us to some invites they are sharing - if you want to get one to their service, send a request to info (at) vailoma.com.
