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.
I managed to get a fresh load of stories regarding the Finnish startup scene yesterday. While the companies themselves have not made too much noise about these, they are valid to break to keep the system as transparent as possible. There are 3 investment deals and one acquisition offer that was did not go down.
To begin with, we have Muxlim. The world’s largest online network for Muslims. They have about 200 000 registered users at the moment. The story is that they have recently closed a round of financing from Europe, possibly UK. There is no word on the size of the round, nor who the investors are but this is what we’re hearing from the street. Continue reading »
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)
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.
Last minute reminder to all those who are in the Helsinki region tonight; get yourself down to Dubrovnik, Eerikinkatu 11, at 6pm tonight.
The event is sponsored by Mysites.com and Floobs. On the panel we have Asmo Halinen from Apaja, Jani Penttinen from XIHA Ltd and Kristoffer Lawson from Scred.
We have about 70 people marked showing up through Open Coffee and Facebook. There are people I know are coming as well who haven’t signed up so it’s going to be a full house for sure!
Looking forwards to meeting everyone there tonight!
Nextweb, the conference organised in Amsterdam, will be blogging about Finnish startups this week. Ernst-Jan Pfauth met with a bunch of Finnish startups in Web 2.0 in San Francisco and has started the series with Xiha.
Nextweb has some 2400 subscribers through RSS so these companies are bound to get some traffic in the coming days.
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).
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.
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.
I managed to get a fresh load of stories regarding the Finnish startup scene yesterday. While the companies themselves have not made too much noise about these, they are valid to break to keep the system as transparent as possible. There are 3 investment deals and one acquisition offer that was did not go down.
Blue White Partners
Last minute reminder to all those who are in the Helsinki region tonight; get yourself down to Dubrovnik, 
I caught sight of 
Due to lack of time, I was unable to write about this earlier, but the 
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
