We just wrote about Xiha closing a $1m seed round as well as adding Jyri Engeström (Ex-Jaiku/Google) to their board. If that’s not enough now the multilingual, cross-cultural social network comes out with its own developer program. A developer program is nothing revolutionary in itself, but shows that Xiha aims to innovate right on the heels of the fatter cats like Facebook by giving developers access to their APIs and facilitating embedding new products into XIHA Life.
XIHA developers will receive premium support, including customizing API calls to their needs and help with the integration to maximize the success of their app. Once the integration has been finished, XIHA promises to actively promote the new applications.
XIHA Life has partnered with a French company called BlueTeach to enable online teaching at their multi-cultural and multi-national social network. XIHA Life is a Finnish startup that has moved to Switzerland (Update: They’re still registered in Finland). They have steadily grown their user base and Jani Penttinen, Co-founder of the company has tweeted that they recently passed the 600 000 registration mark.
With the help of BlueTeach’s in-browser application, teachers are able to go through a variety of material together with their students. BlueTeach is also able to monetize the teaching situation as teachers are able to ask for a price for the session or teach for free. Looking at the offering BlueTeach has, I have to state that it is a pretty neat package put together. The service is also easy to use and you are able to use it to record your lessons and have them online for later use. Continue reading »
XIha Life has just lowered prices in all it’s games to 6.99 and 10 euros to attract better sales. This means that more than 1000 of their games have been lowered into more affordable price groups. This is something, having a casual gaming background, I’ve been waiting for. Xiha Life is growing strong, according to Jani Penttinen – one of the founders. Xiha Life received a nice investment some time back from some Chinese investors and are building their network with that, they already have 4 international offices open.
If you look at pricing on a larger scale – it doesn’t make much sense to try and sell casual games at 20-30 dollars. Even World of Warcraft is priced at 13-15 dollars a month (depending on contract). Even with low prices, its extremely hard to build a healthy consumer base. Habbo Hotel for example has some 10% of its users paying for its services at around 10€ a month. With such figures, Habbo is considered to be one of the benchmarks in the industry.
Furthermore, looking at the price distribution of the iPhone appstore (data from July 2008), you can see clearly that most products are priced extremely modestly. With such competition, it’s very difficult to build a sustainable business. Then again, pricing online is relatively simple as you can find out the elasticity over time and thus price your products accordingly.
What’s the most you’re willing to pay for an service online and do you differentiate your willingness between service genres – entertainment, music/videos and others?
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)
There has been lively discussions of whether the many web conferences are really the most effective use of time for a startup. Similarly many people see the value in these conferences very differently, for example people from the United States tend to spend most if not all their time networking in the lobbies and hallways, at least more so than the Europeans are used to. We, the Europeans, on the other hand, tend to pay equal attention to the speakers at the stage.
At ArcticStartup we believe that meeting friends and strangers, as many as possible, is the best way to spend your time in these conferences. But that’s just us. Thus, we wanted to know what other startups think and decided to ask a group of Finnish startups, who travelled to the LeWeb with us, what they think. Here are some perspectives:
XIHA is a Finnish startup developing XIHA Life, a multilingual social media platform and an online community targeted at people living outside their home country, and the multilingual people around the world. XIHA invites users of any language, but adjusts the user experience to each user so that they only see automatically the content they understand. Despite the current economic climate, XIHA has raised a significant amount of risk capital from a Chinese VC.
Jani comments it’s hard to find risk capital in Finland to support global growth. According to Jani the Finnish VC’s thought the risk was too big. Out of the international VC’s Jani thought Chinese were the best, as they have both money and vision.
The amount of investment was not disclosed. However, the amount is rather significant, as the founder and CTO Jani Penttinen says with it the company will open offices in the US, Switzerland, and China, and will hire ten more people, developers and business roles, to achieve 24h global operations. Another ten will be hired later depending on the economical climate. There is also more money coming if certain growth targets will be hit. XIHA has strong Chinese roots due to Jani working in the country, and Jani’s spouse Sun Xiaowen being Chinese. “Xiha” means ‘fun’ or ‘happy’ in Mandarin Chinese, and also ‘Hip-Hop’ in Cantonese.
As of now, XIHA is still losing money, but the goal is to get to profitability by the end of the year. So far the main income source has been downloadable games, but XIHA is planning to expand to other digital products as well. Below is a quick interview with Jani Penttinen from Slush Helsinki.
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.
Mark the 8th of May down to your calendars – we’re hosting another meetup in Dubrovnik Lounge and Lobby to discuss social web applications. We will have a panel discussion with Asmo Halinen (from Apaja Online Entertainment), Jani Penttinen (XIHA Ltd) and Kristoffer Lawson (Fishpool Scred). These guys have first hand experience in running social web services, so don’t miss out!
Floobs has agreed to film the event and stream it online through their service so you’ll be able to tune in if you happen to be out of town (however, you’ll miss out on the excellent networking chances!).
See this page for more information and do leave your comments on the topics of discussion you’d like to hear!
Update: We’re having Jani Penttinen on the panel from XIHA instead of Juhani. Jani is one of the founders of XIHA Ltd. Also, Kristoffer Lawson will be replacing Matti from Fishpool.
We just wrote about Xiha closing a $1m seed round as well as adding Jyri Engeström (Ex-Jaiku/Google) to their board. If that’s not enough now the multilingual, cross-cultural social network comes out with its own developer program. A developer program is nothing revolutionary in itself, but shows that Xiha aims to innovate right on the heels of the fatter cats like Facebook by giving developers access to their APIs and facilitating embedding new products into XIHA Life.
XIHA Life has partnered with a French company called BlueTeach to enable online teaching at their multi-cultural and multi-national social network. XIHA Life is a Finnish startup that has moved to Switzerland (Update: They’re still registered in Finland). They have steadily grown their user base and Jani Penttinen, Co-founder of the company 
Blue White Partners
Mark the 8th of May down to your calendars – we’re hosting another meetup in Dubrovnik Lounge and Lobby to discuss social web applications. We will have a panel discussion with Asmo Halinen (from Apaja Online Entertainment), Jani Penttinen (XIHA Ltd) and Kristoffer Lawson (
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