TEKES Finances 9 Innovative Young Companies
We have found out that regarding, the Finnish government funding agency, TEKES' controversial Young Innovative Companies financing - 9 companies have passed the tighter application procedure and secured themselves a good backing from the organisation. TEKES has created the program to substantially increase the pace of growth and internationalisation for these future promises.
The companies in question are 7Signal, Astarte, Footbalance System, Navigil, Nidecon Technologies, RM5 Software, Ubipart, Whatamap.com and Wristop Technologies. These companies have passed on to the first phase, meaning that TEKES will cover certain costs up to €250.000. The best of these will pass on to the second phase where the funding goes up to €750.000.
It's interesting to see that there are no web startups and the companies are mainly from the healthcare and software industries. Then again, this is a safer route as these markets are already existing and annually represent multibillion euro turnovers.
How do you find the list? Is TEKES betting on the wrong horses here?
Whatamap.com launches web-to-mobile map platform
Whatamap.com, the Finnish custom mobile maps provider, has launched a technology platform targeted towards directory businesses. The platform is called Whatamap Directory Assistance (WhatamapDA), and it is designed to help the directory businesses to enable business on custom maps and provide web-to-mobile tools for maps and other rich content. With the technology the directory businesses can offer consumers context-bound street and custom maps directly to the customers' phones from call centers and web and SMS services.
The main value proposition of the technology is to enable the directory businesses to increase the revenue per customer. Whatamap.com claims consumers are ready to pay for "Rich Map Content", but the problem is on the provider side in enabling and optimizing the content for all different phone models. With WhatamapDA the company promises to provide easy transformation of any map content to several different mobile formats, suitable for the vast majority of phones models (yes, they mention iPhone as well).
Whatamap.com explains WhatamapDA Platform is the basis of all of their products, so this is another way the company is trying to monetize their technology. The service is offered quite typically for a fixed monthly price or fixed price per user.
Our previous coverage on Whatamap.com.
