Remember Zipiko? The service with a “quick and effortless way to see what your friends are doing and a way to invite them to your chosen venue whether it’s it a local cafe or your own place for drinks, lunch or whatever you fancy.”
Unfortunately the company that developed Zipiko, namely Zipipop, put the product development on ice already last June and moved on to service the growing Finnish enterprise customer base that is completely and utterly lost with social media wave that has hit the organizations. To scale their operations Zipipop, lead by its energetic CEO Helene Auramo, has teamed up with the former Managing Director of Accenture’s Finnish and Nordic offices.
Richard von Kaufmann of Zipipop states in the company blog the following:
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I received several phone calls yesterday where I was asked about what is happening at Nokia and whether they are buying the Finnish SMS based social intention broadcasting application Zipiko.
The whole thing started when the Zipiko gang shared a taxi from the Nokia House located in Espoo, Finland with Prashant Agarwal, The director of Product Strategy at Fjord. Prashant Jaikued about it where it was picked up by the Jaiku co-founder Petteri Koponen who proposed that Nokia is about to acquire the small company.
This was enough to start a chain reaction in the Finnish social media and got it really boiling which 
eventually reached US and at that point it had already crossed over from Jaiku to Twitter. Co-incidentally the Zipiko servers where down just at the time that US was waking up and checking their Twitter feeds for the morning. All this would imply that Zipiko.com had received enough traffic, ignited by the news from the taxi ride, that their servers couldn’t handle it anymore .
Just a week earlier I had been watching Zipiko lead developer’s presentation on Google App Engine that they are using. Knowing that they use the App Engine lets me figure out exactly the amount of traffic that the service received to go down. Google App Engine manages up to 5 million views per month before letting the service go down. Now, that would be a rather remarkable amount of traffic ignited globally by just Jaiku and Twitter messages.
This makes would make a very interesting story if the protagonist herself, the Zipipop* CEO Helene Auramo, wouldn’t have admitted to me that the juicy rumor was just that, a rumor. Also their service was down from some unrelated reason. So it seems that Nokia is not yet going after this Finnish startup.
But the question remains: What did Zipiko do in the Nokia house in the first place?
*Zipiko is an app made by Zipipop and has part of the company working exclusively on it.
Zipipop won the competition for the best Early Stage Start-up at Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona. The winning service application was Zipiko (more about Zipiko here). The grand prize was an invitation to present at the next Mobile 2.0 event on 3 November in San Francisco – the home of Mobile 2.0.
Arctic Startup talked to Helene Auramo, Zipipop CEO, after it was announced that they would win. Here’s Helene’s feelings after the announcement:
During the seminar we were just working in the corridors, coding and other stuff.We would have wanted to listen to all the great presentations, but we just didn’t have time. We were really nervous during the whole seminar and we were not expecting anything like this at all. When they announced that we won, we were just really surprised. After the winning we just went back to working, sending press releases and more coding. And after that some champagne and relaxing.
We come back on Monday to our new office in Museokatu, Helsinki, and then we will focus on developing Zipiko service even better. We are hoping to receive a lot of feedback that we can make it even better.
[...]
We want to thank also all “Mennäänkö Yhdelle?” users for their feedback that we could use to make Zipiko service as good as possible. We are so grateful for everyone who has helped us and giving us good advices.
We congratulate Zipipop for the great achievement so far! The service is in closed public beta and we’re waiting to see how it will go down with the wider public when it opens up and whether Zipipop can lure enough advertisers to sign up.
Zipipop has been chosen to present their latest mobile service tomorrow in the Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona. Mobile 2.0 Europe is a extension of the famous Mobile 2.0 event which started in San Francisco. The new service is called Zipiko and has been kept secret until the Mobile 2.0 Europe launch.
Zipiko is a quick and effortless way to see what your friends are doing and a way to invite them to your chosen venue whether it’s it a local cafe or your own place for drinks, lunch or whatever you fancy. You can also see what your friends are doing throughout the day from the main page where it’s only a matter of a few clicks to join an event, given that you’re invited.
The service itself has born out of Facebook application Mennäänkö Yhdelle (Let’s go for a one in Finnish) that Zipipop developed earlier on, where the best bits have been transferred to this new browser based mobile service.
I interviewed Zipipop CEO, Helene Auramo, after the festives had already started in Barcelona and she explained that “when you invite friends to a party they will receive an SMS to which they can then answer ‘Yes’ with a mere SMS. So the idea is that you don’t necessarily have to access the web at all to tell that you’re coming. And to make the experience complete one will receive a text message just before the event to know who else has answered ‘Yes’ to know who will eventually make it to the party” . Helene emphasized that the value of the service is in spontaneity and the ease of setting up a meeting on the fly.
Once you register to Zipiko you will receive 30 free SMS for organizing get-togethers, but in the long run Zipipop wants to bring in advertisers that would pay for the SMS messages, thus making the service free for the users. The advertisers would get their name on a discreet message at the end of the invitation SMS.
It seems that Zipipop has found a simple way to bring an aspect of a Jaiku/Twitter like service, SMS and Meetup together to organize spontaneous get-togethers . Now they only need to get the advertisers on board to pay for the SMS messages.
You can see a demo of the service here.
Techcruch also made a note about Mobile 2.0 Europe event and Zipko.
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