ArcticStartup have earlier reported about a promising Nordic visual search engine initiative – the Stockholm based Spezify.com, a visual multimedia search engine founded by Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson, digital creatives and freelancers. Their concept have a great potential to grab a big piece of this market. Continue reading »
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Spezify, Doing Well In The Visual Search Boom
Sales Guy vs. Web Dude
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!
TheVideoBay to compete with YouTube?
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.
Youkebox Makes YouTube Social
A Finnish music enthusiastic Lauri Soini who has been very active in the Finnish DJ scene along with Pirkka Hartikainen / DJ Pirkka have come up with a fantastic service, Youkebox, that make listening YouTube a social experience.
Youkebox is ensentially a YouTube window with a queue that people can list a song they wish to be played next. On the left hand you have a dynamic messaging board where you can discuss anything regarding the song that is being played or anything related to that. The beaty is that you will be able to create rooms for you and your friends where you can play the music you like …or would you will be as soon as the Beta development reaches that point. This makes listening a social experience despite people are watching the YouTube video in different locations. Similarly you can join rooms that play music you’re interested in and chat with strangers.
You can also skip the song that the community (the room) is playing, and as Lauri pointed out, people will not look it very favourably if you go and press the skip-button without consulting others in the room. I did it once and found out this very quickly. The conversation went something like this:
Me: [Pressed 'Skip']
Other listener: Why did you skip the song?
Me: I did not like the song that was playing
Other listener: Dickhead!
Other listener: There’s Mute-botton right next to the player for that
Me: Ups. So there is. Sorry!
The service is in closed Beta at the moment and you can’t create your own rooms just yet, but all that should be in place soon I hope. I liked the service from the get-go even without being able create my own room yet and will expect it to spread like wild fire among music fans when it will be opened to public.
We have 5 invitations to the first 5 who tell us in the comments why they should have them …and watch out for that Skip-button.
Online Video Editing And Exporting By JayCut
JayCut, founded in 2007, is a Swedish online video editing startup offering free and simple video editing service.
You can upload unlimited amount of videos and photos in a wide variety of file formats to JayCut’s service, and then combine, mix, or trim different clips into one, and add captions and music. You can share the photos, raw video or the finished mixes with friends either using their service, downloading the file to your own computer, iPod, or other device, or sending the files to MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, or your blog. Public videos can also be rated and commented on on their web page. Downloading a file only seems to work in WMV format, and seems to sometimes require some waiting time to get converted before the download can be made. The online service might also be suitable for “open source” film projects like Stray Cinema where people share, re-edit, and mix the raw film footage.
According to some rumors the company has angel financing from London based investors. The business model could be based on including ads in the exported videos, which isn’t probably the best alternative, though. Interestingly the company has roots in student entrepreneurship, as they mention nearly all of the founders have been involved in the entrepreneurship association Excitera at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.
Fortumo Enables Easy Creating of SMS-Based Services
Fortumo is an Estonian mobile service startup. The company advertises you can start earning revenue with SMS services in just 5 minutes, without any technical skills. They offer a simple way of creating different mobile services without startup or monthly fees.
The basic service version allows for different models like selling information via SMS, creating SMS-based text-to-win campaigns, or SMS-based chat boxes or advertisement columns to web pages. You can set the end user price and SMS keyword for your service yourself. In case you know your stuff and have a place to host your service, with a little coding you hook up to their APIs, create practically any kind of service you want, and get better revenue share. One of Fortumo’s client is MTV Estonia, who uses SMS services in the programs and webpage e.g. to choose songs or win tickets in competitions.
Fortumo also has a couple of trial services: other enables pay-per-view video business for your YouTube videos, and the other one allows you to set up SMS chat board on your Facebook profile. While the services might not make too much commercial sense, they do give a good example of what kind of options you have with Fortumo.
Fortumo takes commission of the revenues earned by all the services created using their service. Fortumo takes 2-3% of the end-user price depending on country, type of service and volume. (I have to love the way they frame it, though, as after tax and operator share that would be more like between 6-10% of the net revenue.) In essence, the customer payout rates range from 30-60% of the end user price price after the tax, depending on the country and service type.
Fortumo currently supports billing in the Nordic countries and Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and, interestingly, China (China Mobile and China Unicom). They mention in their blog two new countries in the Balkan Peninsula will be added soon, while continuing expanding in Europe, Asia and to North America. The biggest challenge for Fortumo most likely is that the mobile billing channels are notoriously hard and slow to establish (if trying to go direct).
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