We all know the Swedish startup Videoplaza has been on a roll lately with their ad serving technology for managing and monetising online video. Venture capitalist are not disagreeing: Today Videoplaza announced the completion of its €3.5 million (US$5 million) round of investment led by Creandum and Northzone.
Not surprisingly, the capital was raised to support a further commercial development and a roll-out across Europe. More specifically, the funding will enable Videoplaza to accelerate the deployment of its Monetizer ad server platform technology for managing, displaying and tracking advertising in and around publishers’ online video content into more European territories, including Germany, Spain and Italy.
Fuugo is a new kind of television product created by Axel Technologies, a company based in Turku. You can’t really call Axel Technologies a startup as it has been registered way back in 1988. However, Fuugo is a very interesting concept that requires more analysis into it. Fuugo claims to be the next generation TV application for mobile and handheld devices. Continue reading »
Eqvitec Technology Fund III has invested a hefty 26 million Swedish Kronors (about 2.55 million euro) into Voddler, a Swedish startup looking to disrupt the way we watch movies at home. Hadar Cars, a partner of Eqvitec will join the Voddler board with the investment. This is great news for the whole ecosystem as consumer internet had been a little less active in terms of investments in the recent quarters. Also, another sign of this investment for the ecosystem is its size, if there is potential – investors are willing to invest and with Voddler’s 26 million Kronor investment it has been proven. Continue reading »
I wanted to take a different approach to start your week this Monday. Being an entrepreneur is considered sexy by many, but very few people realise the amount of energy and work entrepreneurs invest in their ventures on a day-to-day basis. Working for minimal pay, with extremely high risk of failure while aiming for that nonexistent chance of success and making a dent to the way we live our lives – it’s not easy. Sometimes a little push is needed and here’s my two cents for that motivation.
Your work is important – keep at it, stay hungry, stay foolish and start your day by watching the legendary Al Pacino’s inspirational speech in Any Given Sunday.
I know this is old and most of you have probably seen it, but I just had to share this with you. I tumbled into the video again and could not stop watching. If you’re having a heavy and hectic day, take a few minutes to watch this. Its worth it and best of all, its true. A Classic!
I accidentally bumped into Pouria Ruhi, the VP of Business at Bambuser the Swedish live video streaming startup (thanks to Janne Saarikko for letting me know he was in town!). I’ve been following the company through different news for a while, but didn’t personally know anyone from there until now. While Ruhi was in a hurry to head to the airport we managed to exchange a few words about the current state of Bambuser and where they’re headed to in the near future. Continue reading »
Guilty as charged. We sometimes need a helping hand from a copy editor here and there, because we are not native English speakers, but want to write in English just because its the global lingua franca. Now there’s Wordy, a Danish startup, to help out. We saw Wordy already present in Copenhagen back in June at the ArcticEvening event we held there. Back then they were still in closed beta and only now have opened up.
Here’s a presentation (video below; start at 00:23:20) from Wordy, when they were at LeWeb last week. Continue reading »
Yesterday we reported that a big name team has come out with a new startup called Sofanatics. The team consists of Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman, a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto.
We have gathered some further information and believe Sofanatics is a service focusing on sociel viewing. Wikipedia describes a social viewing service as a practice revolving around the ability for multiple users to aggregate from multiple sources and view online videos together in a synchronized viewing experience. Typically the experience also involves some form of instant messaging or communication to facilitate discussion pertaining to the common viewing experience. This would fit our earlier prediction of ’something with video, football and doing all this is a social manner.’
There’s a new startup in town called Sofanatics. The company, based in Helsinki Finland, is in its early stages and has nothing but a simple splash screen on their website. Earlier today the team tweeted about this and thus broke the silence regarding the company – at least on the level that who’s on board the startup. The team behind the startup is Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve co-founder managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman. Nyman is a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto. Continue reading »
I talked to Videoplaza founder and CEO Sorosh Tavakoli just last week and Sorosh told me that videoplaza is very bullish on online video monetization. They see that throughout the industry the number of started video streams are up and the number of ads per video are up, on average moving from three to seven. Overall in the video advertising market demand is growing faster than supple and big media companies are waking up to online video.
During our call Tavakoli went on to tell me that Videoplaza could be cashflow positive if they wanted, but they are focusing on growth.
Today Videoplaza walked the talked and put out a blog post where they are looking for no less than 10(!) new employees to recruit before the end of Q1 2010. This is no small announcement in the current economy. The company is clearly scaling up for the storm ahead in 2010. Continue reading »
The Swedish video-on-demand service Voddler, has just announced a number of agreements with different Hollywood studios to distribute their content. In short, Voddler uses an open source XBMC media centre solution to distribute its content, so the user needs a set-top box to be eligible to receive Voddler’s offering. This could be said to be one of the largest agreements in the space of video for a Nordic company. Continue reading »
We all know Powerkiss from before, but to be honest you can get only so excited about wireless mobile phone charging.
But Powerkiss is not really what it looks like on the surface. One could easily think their core offering is wireless charging. Think again. Increasingly in the future it will be centered around Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled service platform which acts as a glue between different consumer services. Think location based advertising, where the location has been pinned down to the level of a restaurant table, or really selling any other service that is tied to a location. The variations are endless. Continue reading »
Over the years, as I have worked with several great designers, I have come to appreciate well designed info graphics more and more. At the same time, where I’m not that much of a designer myself but why I can help companies with their products’ user experience is because I am one of the most impatient persons you’ll ever meet when it comes to bad user interfaces – If I don’t figure out right away what’s happening with a given product, the interface is broken as far as I’m concerned. These two reasons added to the fact that I love big data go a long way explaining why I like Youcalc so much.
The company is not doing anything that revolutionary, but at the same time it just might be for those who use the product. In a nutshell, Youcalc is a Danish startup that let’s business people create and share custom reports and analytics on data from SaaS systems, in a very clear and easy manner I may add. And by business people I mean those impatient, busy people who can’t concentrate to learn to use (let alone set up) a complex reporting tool even if their life depended on it because they are busy making that next sale. And that’s what they should do, but that’s also why they may need Youcalc. The company’s mission is to create the world’s largest library of analytics apps by allowing business users to create and share those analytics apps. Here’s Youcalc’s presentation in ArcticEvening Copenhagen from a while back. Continue reading »
As soon as Ilkka Tiainen, Oppifi CEO, told me about the service I thought of MyHeritage and Geni, but as he quickly pointed out Epooq, Oppifi’s first product is more about subjective count on our memories than objective family tree what the two formerly mentioned services focus on.
Oppifi, a Finnish startup, is aiming to build solution for gathering and sharing subjective ‘life-experiences’. We all have our own experiences from the life that we have led and whereas many of us have aimed to get all those memories between the covers of a scrap book, Oppifi wants to help out by giving us better digital tools to do it. The founders are confident that there are demand for a such a service from the get go and will also charge the user from day one.
The service is still early stages, but we got a quick look at the alpha version and talked to the team about the service. See the video below. Continue reading »
Slashdot has an article about a new project coming from very interesting people, the guys behind ThePirateBay, competing against YouTube. Peter Sunde was questioned a few years ago in the Spectrial oral proceedings about a project they were working on that would compete with YouTube. Back then he answered the prosecutor that it was a project that failed. However, it seems that the Norwegian-Finnish computer guru has been working on the project since then. As it happens, TheVideoBay is about to be launched.
So what’s the catch behind TheVideoBay? The most notable one is the fact that it uses a totally different technology for the media files than other sites out there. TheVideBay aims to take advantage of the new features in HTML5, more notably the <video> and <audio> tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats.
The site itself is in its very stages of infancy and you cannot really talk about a functioning service just yet. One is able to browse the material there, but once you click on an audio or a video file, the user is prompted for a username and password.
There is no word on the launch schedule of the site or what other features it will have, compared to YouTube for example. Nevertheless, it is great to see some action coming out from ThePirateBay guys even though they must be going through difficult times.
We all know the Swedish startup Videoplaza has been on a roll lately with their ad serving technology for managing and monetising online video. Venture capitalist are not disagreeing: Today Videoplaza announced the completion of its €3.5 million (US$5 million) round of investment led by Creandum and Northzone.
Eqvitec Technology Fund III has invested a hefty 26 million Swedish Kronors (about 2.55 million euro) into 
I accidentally bumped into Pouria Ruhi, the VP of Business at Bambuser the Swedish live video streaming startup (thanks to 
Guilty as charged. We sometimes need a helping hand from a copy editor here and there, because we are not native English speakers, but want to write in English just because its the global lingua franca. Now there’s 
Yesterday we 
There’s a new startup in town called Sofanatics. The company, based in Helsinki Finland, is in its early stages and has nothing but a simple splash screen on their website. Earlier today the team tweeted about this and thus broke the silence regarding the company – at least on the level that who’s on board the startup. The team behind the startup is Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve 
I talked to 
We all know 
Over the years, as I have worked with several great designers, I have come to appreciate well designed info graphics more and more. At the same time, where I’m not that much of a designer myself but why I can help companies with their products’ user experience is because I am one of the most impatient persons you’ll ever meet when it comes to bad user interfaces – If I don’t figure out right away what’s happening with a given product, the interface is broken as far as I’m concerned. These two reasons added to the fact that I love big data go a long way explaining why I like 
Slashdot has 
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
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