Arbitron Acquires Zokem For $11.7M In Cash
News just out regarding Zokem, the Finnish mobile analytics company, has been acquired by Arbitron a NYSE listed public company for $11.7M in cash. Zokem is a provider of custom and syndicated mobile research panels, plug-and-play mobile media measurement tools and software building blocks for mobile device tracking. Arbitron Inc. is an international media and marketing research firm working in the radio, television, cable and mobile industries together with advertising agencies and advertisers around the world. Arbitron's market cap by today's closing price is a little over $1 billion.
Study: Tablet Users Spend More Time Web Browsing Than With Apps
There has been quite a lot of development in the smartphone and tablet arena with the plethora of new devices making entry into the market. Not only have they evolved how we communicate and access information online, there has been a transformation how these devices have been used as well.
Think of it, when the iPhone invaded the markets it was considered to be the ultimate in mobility, and even more when Android devices made inroads. However that was just the beginning of a whole new transformation, the advent of the iPad changed a lot, at least in having the tablets flood in from all directions.
Smartphones Are The Future Of Gaming
A mobile is no more your routine device for making calls on the go or texting while you are out of office. It has totally evolved from being a mere lightweight wireless communication device to an all- purpose connection to the entire world and lifestyle. Let's not dwell on emphasizing on communication advantages it gives us and focus on the other aspects - entertainment.
Zokem Launches In India
This week mobile analytics provider Zokem launched their first panels and research products in India. The products are based on Zokem’s on-device metering solutions that capture passively all mobile usage as it takes place in people’s everyday life. The company is also working on entering the Chinese markets. 'In addition to our existing 9 panels in Europe and North-America, India and China are the next big markets where we want to play a role, in mobile audience measurements', commented Zokem's CEO Hannu Verkasalo.
Zokem Releases User Experience Tracker: Know Your Device And Network Performance
Zokem continues to make concrete its position as the leading mobile app and internet usage analytics firm to help improve research related to the same category. Zokem has been tracking audiences, publishing reports on current trends giving both content publishers and advertisers in depth insights on mobile users. The mobile analytics firm recently published a new set of research reports named the Zokem User Experience Tracker that is focused at the quality of device and the network.
Zokem Strikes Another Partnership, This Time Its Cint
Zokem continues with its expansion and moves into ensuring that it becomes the largest source of mobile market research globally. Recently the company announced its partnership with Cint, a firm focused on providing SaaS based solutions for market research industry. The partnership will help Zokem’s Mobile Life panels expand further into the Western markets by utilizing Cint’s Thumbspeak.
Reports State iPhone And Android Dominant In US Markets, While Others Continue To Lose
Zokem is a Finnish based market leader in the next-generation mobile analytics, providing its patented products to the leading players of mobile and media industries. Earlier today Zokem released an interesting report on how the various smartphones and operating systems perform in the US market. The gist of which clearly puts the likes of older Windows Mobile phones and the Symbian devices to have lost the battle in the US. Which isn’t surprising as users in the region have migrated quite quickly towards the iPhone, Android and the BlackBerry.
Zokem Builds Traction With Their New Business
Back in June we wrote about Zokem receiving a 2 million euro investment and the company pivoting towards a new area of business. A short while ago, I sat down with Hannu Verkasalo to talk about the progress they've achieved in the recent months after their pivot and to see whether it has been successful. In short - it has, and it has taken the company very rapidly in the new direction. There seems to be a lot of interest from market research companies in the data Zokem is able to gather to further understand consumer behaviour.
Zokem Receives A Whopping 2 Million Euros In Financing, Changes Direction
Zokem, a Finnish startup previously known to work with mobile location based mobile services (see our review here), has changed direction somewhat and closed a massive 2 million euro investment round from European venture capital investors, private investors as well as public funding. The new area Zokem will try to tackle is mobile analytics.
Sponsored: Zokem - Your Life. Share it. Automatically.
Note: this is our periodical blog sponsor message.
Zokem is a mobile communications and lifecasting startup that enables users to automatically share their daily activities to their friends’ mobile phones, to the Internet and to social networking services, such as Facebook and MySpace.
Mindtrek Launchpad Finalists Chosen
This year's Mindtrek Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The companies went through the detailed analysis of the pre-jury (disclosure: I was one of the pre-jury members voting for the finalists). The MindTrek Launchpad competition will award the most innovative Finnish digital media product, demo or concept – and the people behind it, who have the urge to make it big. Six finalists from the submitted The finalists, in alphabetical order, are:
Invest Tech Finland - From Wireless Power to Social Games
Espoo Otaniemi boomed of startups and investors when Invest Tech Finland was held for the first time on last Tuesday and Wednesday. There was a real mix of companies from all round consumer web, nano, medical and material tech.
We got some taste of new startups, more seasoned companies seeking growth and some familiar faces marching forward with their plans. There were quite a few interesting companies to write about, the full list can be found here - check these out. Note that most of companies presented at the event already had some prototypes, partnerships, customers or revenues. Here is some of my picks (not in any particular order):
Zokem Is The Ultimate Lifestream, Perhaps Even Too Much So
Zokem automates lifestreaming from mobile phones, sharing everything possible: status, location, calendar, calls made, calls received, sms sent, sms received, and other relevant information to all major web services (including Facebook, Friendster, Fire Eagle, Friendfeed, Last.fm and Twitter), and directly to friends’ mobile phones.
Zokem is able to find the user geo-location automatically (running on the background of the phone) based on GPS, cellular network and WiFi hotspot triangulation, and contextual tags such as Bluetooth devices. The concept has been in development since 2006, the service being currently in closed beta with a public beta launch within two months.
After installing Zokem, it automatically tracks locations, status, movements, communications, media consumption, travel, calendar appointments, and other activities from the user’s daily life. In addition, users can share photos and send blog entries with the application. The degree of data show to contacts can so far be set for two groups: The public Internet (e.g. Facebook) and Friends (that you have invited to Zokem), the group functionality is under development. Thus a more more granular segmentation is still waiting for itself. I believe this is a crucial feature in any social network let alone in one that shows every single call you make and to whom it's made.
According to Meri Kupiainen, Zokem COO, “Zokem is much more than just location sharing or micro-
blogging. Effectively it is one integrated application doing all this, generating and sharing your comprehensive life feed openly to all major web services and to your friends, securely and automatically". Nice, but is yet-another-lifestreaming-service necessary along with Jaiku (which goes open source), Bloggy.se, Twitter, Facebook lifestream and Loopt?
According to the founders the idea is not to create yet-another-lifestreaming-service. The user interface is still very rough and busy, except the iphone one, but as Kupiainen explained, the main idea of the service is not to get all the users spend their time under Zokem domain, but to push the information to other services.
Zokem wants it's application in mobile phones to automatically inform you of interesting facts regarding your social network, something the other services do not provide yet to the extent that Zokem aims to do it. For example, Zokem automatically pops up a message, when any of your friends appears in the neighborhood, or if your friends are commenting something. In addition, Zokem can provide, for example, automatic weather forecasts related to your current location, regular notifications regarding locations of children or seniors, and informative wikipedia articles when you travel to new locations abroad. Zokem reminds me of Nokia's vision that they came out with a good while ago with its emphasis on geo-data. This might not be such a bad strategy for Zokem if they're looking for an early exit.
If the founders are not aiming for an early exit, viable business models don't stop there. Selling user data or providing extremely targeted advertising based on the pipeful of information that the software collects from the users while it pipes it to the other services can be very valuable.
According to Kupiainen, Zokem’s team is already building the next version of the service, being able not only to share lifestreams in real-time, but also to predict near-future events and locations based on historical data (e.g. movement paths) or calendar information. This, while being rather scary if not properly managed and if the users are not properly educated on the possible implications, has a very big up side that many have talked about for years. This could be a big breakthrough as well as an enabler for other apps and services. Having said that, at the same time we're starting to approach the very problematic scenario that Adam Greenfield describes in his book Everyware, where he outlines the extreme complexity to which ubiquitous-computing deliverables will expose us, as users.
We have 50 beta invites for the first 50 who will send an email to customerservice-at-zokem-dot-com with and put 'ArcticStartup' in the subject line.
