Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 26th November 2008
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Peter Robinett, Web Programmer and Founder of Lunch 2.0.nl
Continuing from my first post, I’d like to share my observations from the rest of the Slush Helsinki conference on Monday. The first speakers set a great tone for the day and talked openly about their successes and slipups. Subsequent speakers followed their lead, with Petteri Koponen winning the prize for funniest story: he told us how he was forced to ask his hairdresser for a ride because he was running late for a meeting with a top VC firm. Of course, the fact that a hairdresser was so enthusiastic that he drove Petteri to all his VC meetings across Silicon Valley didn’t go unnoticed, with once firm so impressed that they came out to the parking lot to meet up.
As much as the speakers were good, I especially enjoyed meeting local startups. I had a good chat with the people behind Zipiko (covered here before) and was particularly interested to how how the service has evolved. For instance, one of the popular uses of the personal activity announcement service is the management of deviations from regular schedules by recurring events. Thinking about this, this use makes sense, as a service built around SMS notifications makes passing along updates easy regardless of how late the changes happen. However, the Zipiko team also surprised me: during a panel Helene Auramo, their CEO, declared that she wasn’t worried about the current decline in advertising spending despite running an advertising-supported service. I guess time will tell whether she is right to be so sanguine. (more…)
Written on 24th November 2008
1 COMMENT
Peter Robinett, Web Programmer and Founder of Lunch 2.0.nl
Slush Helsinki has gotten off to a great start, with the heavy snow yesterday doing little to dampen people’s spirits. We started off with presentations from some of the heroes of the Finnish startup scene: Risto Siilasmaa of F-Secure, Monty Widenius of MySQL, and Ilkka Paananen of Digital Chocolate. After insightful and introductions, Matt Marshall of VentureBeat moderated a panel with all the entrepreneurs.
A common thread in the three entrepeneurs’ comments were the difficulty raising funding. While all three were successful raising money, it was getting money at the right time with the right conditions that was tricky. Paananen says his company, after successfully bootstrapping for several years, was forced to chose between selling the company, raising venture capital, or merging with another company. They chose the latter because Digital Chocolate complemented their business and already had Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins as investors. Likewise MySQL turned down a $15M investment only to take a $10M investment a year or two later. The difference? The former would have seen the founders loosing a controlling stake, while the latter let Widenius and his fellow co-founders keep their involvement. This commitment served them well and enabled them to profit hansomely this year with the billion dollar sale of MySQL to Sun. Since it was been challenging, at best, for them to raise money from Finnish investors, both Widenius and Siilasmaa are now devoting time and money to Finnish startups. Predictably this announcement sent local startups scrabbling to corner both men after the panel.
One question European startups often struggle with is whether to move to Silicon Valley. Widenius said MySQL only moved there because their CEO wanted to be there. Despite drawing laughs from the crowd, this view seems to be widespread. All the panelists are happy with the ability to develop great products from Finland but emphasized the minuscule size of the Finnish market and the importance of having a management and sales presence in the US. Risto Siilasmaa, despite starting F-Secure in Silicon Valley, would have actually preferred to have been in Boston or another city on the US East Coast, due to the time difference if nothing else.
To follow Slush as it happens, you can watch the live video feeds from the business and development tracks. The #slush Jaiku channel and #slush Twitter search results are also a great way to take the pulse of the Slush attendees. If you have any questions for me, I’m @pr1001 on Twitter and on Jaiku.
Written on 21st November 2008
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Peter Robinett, Web Programmer and Founder of Lunch 2.0.nl
The slush falling down this evening as I biked home from The Next Web offices must be a sign of things to come, as I will be representing The Next Web on Monday at Slush Helsinki. Slush is a one day startup conference showcasing the latest and greatest in the Finnish startup scene, including big success stories such as Jaiku and MySQL. I’m looking foward to meeting all these entrepeneurs and reporting back to you here at The Next Web about what we can expect next out of the icy north.
If you’re also in town, I’d love to meet up. Please email me (peter@bubblefoundry.com) or send me a message on Twitter (@pr1001).
Written on 2nd November 2008
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Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This is something new: yesterday I received an email from Frans Ekman, co-founder of PiX ‘n’ PaLs. He sent me a blog post about his company, which I could either copy/ paste or modify. That approach makes the blogger’s life easier.
Anyhow, I’ve chosen a different approach. Mainly because I have some critical remarks on PiX ‘n’ PaLS. The idea is pretty good, as I can imagine my family and friends using it:
The core idea is to document your life together with your friends in a collaborative way. Your life, or “The Story of Your Life”, consists of events that you have participated in. An event can be for example a wedding, a party, a vacation or any important happening in your life. Any user can create a new event and invite the people who participated, so that everyone can post their photos and memories to the same place.
You can also publish your “life story” on any blog or social network. Good idea. Nice alternative for the outdated phenomenon known as a photo album. Yet I don’t feel like subscribing.., again.
I don’t want to go through all the hassle of inviting friends and family, building another profile and transferring all the photos I already have on Flickr and Facebook to PiX ‘n’ PaLs.
Connect different social networks
Instead, I’d love to integrate the idea of PiX ‘n’ PaLs in existing friends and family networks like Facebook or sites like MyHeritage. Maybe in the form of a Facebook app or some sort of aggregator which also slurps up my existing contacts and users.
The idea behind the Finnish bootstrapping project of Frans Ekman and Jarl Törnroos is worth another look. Building a whole new social network based on photo sharing is not the way to go. People are used to the superb UI and experience of networks like LinkedIn and (until recently) Facebook and there’s no way you can compete with that – unless you’re a extremely talented designer. Instead, I’d gladly accept the challenge of finding ways to connect existing social networks to make life documentation possible.
Written on 7th October 2008
19 COMMENTS
Timo Paloheimo, Next Web Finland Webtipr
Ever since I started blogging about Finnish startups about a year ago, I’ve wanted to get my hands on a list of all of them. That obviously didn’t exist, so I had to compile it myself. I’ve compiled the list from various sources, mainly my own blog and Arctic Startup. At this point the list should contain most of the Finnish web startups, but I must have missed a few. Should you know a company missing from the list, please let me know in the comments.
It was quite hard to categorize all of the startups as many seem to fall into several categories. As you can see from the list, there are a lot of startups in the Social media, gaming and mobile categories. There is a nice variety in the startups and it’s great that they have managed to find some unique ideas.
The List of Finnish Web Startups
Social Networking
Social Networking, Travel
- Dopplr – Share your business travel plans
- Tripsay -Travel information organizer
Social recommendation services
Creating and sharing media
- Comex.com -Create & share funny picture messages in web or using your mobile phone
- Floobs -Build you own online tv-channel
- Innofile -Online file transfer service
- Mahshelf -YouTube for comics/books
- Moogo -Easy creation of web sites. By Ideakone
- MySites -Online desktop for multimedia
E-commmerce
- Fruugo -Trusted 3rd party of E-Business
- Leads House -Sales leads community
- MyCashFlow -Easy to use web shop software
- Norfello -E-invoicing (laskulle.fi) and web-based sending of letters (postita.fi)
- Timalaya -Social shopping space. By Gemilo
Gaming
Mobile
- Blyk -free mobile phone network
- HappyWakeUp -Smart alarm clock on mobile phone
- JoikuSpot -Turns your phone to a mobile WLAN HotSpot
- Kuneri -Mobile software based on Flash Lite
- Senseg -Touch interface technology
- Whatamap -Mobilize your maps
Personal tools
- NewsToScreen -News and ads delivered via a screensaver
- One did it -Test your consumption of natural resources, share the results and reduce it with simple, easy actions
- Scred -Community-oriented cost balancing tool
- SoftColor -Online image processing
- WOT -Free web security browser add-on
Business tools
- Lumo Flow -Social Workspaces
- Numcore -Online monitoring and controlling instruments for the process industry
- Oindex -Public listing of web sites’ analytics data
- Rate Cards -Helps online and print publishers and advertisers find each other
Development services
- HammerKit -Web-based development platform
- nCore -Embedded localisation and user interface products
- VerticeTree -Innovative platforms and applications for the internet and mobile devices
- Zipipop -Develops web-based services for making everyday life easier.
Crowdsrourcing
Written on 10th September 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Asmo Halinen from Playray, a social minigames community from Helsinki, Finland. People from sixteen different countries can log in to the site and enjoy games in their own language, while staying in touch with their gaming buddy’s. 
The service raised €1.75 million from Estonia-based venture capital fund Martinson Trigon Venture Partners about a year ago. That’s not the last part of company history that you’ll readm, as Asmo told us quite a lot about how Playray started.
How did you come up with the idea of Playray?
“Actually we started as a B2B service company, producing sites, web commercials and other stuff like that. But since all the three founders (Pasi Laaksonen, Janne Matilainen and me) had some background on online gaming, we started building our own online casual gaming service during 2002. At the beginning it was only a hobby, but as that side in our company grew, we later (in 2004) split the original company in two: I recruited a new CEO for the B2B side and all we three founders continued in the “new” gaming company.
Since that we’ve focused 100% on the development and internationalization of our Playray service. During the early days it was only about browser based online games; nowadays it’s much more about the active player community around the casual gaming experience.” (more…)
Written on 30th June 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Ok, sorry for the abbreviations in the headline. Let me rephrase that: Sulake’s Habbo Hotel will probably take over World of Warcraft as the number one massive multiplayer online game. Yes, you’ve read that right. I know, I know, it’s like Pepsi becoming the most popular coke. 
But it’s most likely that it will happen. The Finnish game has logged its 100 millionth registered avatar and “attracts close to 10 million monthly visitors to its services worldwide”, reports Wagner James Au on GigaOm.
The last numbers WoW’s mother company, Blizzard Entertainment, has released date from January 22th. In an euphoric message, the Wow PR officers announced that the game had reached a “new milestone of 10 million subscribers”. Still quite a lot, but will the numbers remain high enough to keep Habbo away from the MMO throne?
Habbo Executive Vice President Teemu Huuhtanen told GigaOm that they’re expecting to reach the 10 million milestone in thirty days, thanks to a redesign, new content and teen celebrity avatars. The ‘hotel hangout for teens’ allegedly generates a huge amount of cash by selling virtual objects. It operates in 31 markets globally.
Written on 25th June 2008
4 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
TripSay, the recently unveiled social travel networking service, has added a ‘groups’ feature at the request of its beta users.
TripSay nicely caters to its community with a slew of social features, and the Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube integration works seamlessly. With the introduction of groups, users can now form mini communities within TripSay around any topic (e.g. Golf, Iron Maiden World Tour 2008, Hiking, etc.) and choose to do so publicly or privately between friends. According to the company, this also removes part of the irritation with anonymous reviews and recommendations, since it allows you to share your opinion with people you know and trust.
TripSay, which operates out of Finland, says it intends to move from invite-only to public beta this Summer. The business model will evidently consist of highly-targeted travel-related ads and affiliate fees to travel booking sites. TripSay faces competition from an emerging group of social travel sites, such as Driftr, HereOrThere, YowTrip, Rummble and others.
Would you like to be part of the thousands of beta users who are exploring TripSay today? The first 100 readers who send an e-mail to info [at] tripsay [dot] com with “nextweb” in the subject line get an invite.
(TripSay founders Leo Koivulehto and Juha Huttunen, photo credit Elliottng @Flickr)
Written on 12th May 2008
4 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
They say moving house is in the top ten of the most stressful things in life. Moving your Internet connection along with it is definitely in the social media addict’s top three. There are tons of horror stories from people disconnected for weeks after moving house, so I thought I would prepare well. I notified my Internet Service Provider (ISP) three weeks in advance and was horrified when I noticed that I had no TV or internet right after I moved in. I didn’t mind the fact so much that I didn’t have gas or warm water either, because Internet is my primary living condition.
One phonecall to my ISP told me that they never registered the fact that I moved house, so I had to run through the moving process by phone again. They said they were very sorry and promised me I would be back online in three working days. While three days is better than three weeks, it makes your evenings (that also include no television) quite an uncommon experience. I still had a pile of unread Wired Magazines but after reading for a few hours, I really wanted to check my e-mail.
There were no unprotected wireless networks in my new neighborhood, so I checked my e-mail on my Nokia N95. I have a fairly cheap (but slow) unlimited access plan but browsing the web and keeping up with your feeds and replying to e-mail is still something I would rather do on my laptop than on my phone. Enter the solution from Finland: Joikuspot.
JoikuSpot is a free and secure mobile software solution that turns Nokia Smartphones to WLAN HotSpots.
With JoikuSpot, you can connect your laptops and iPods to the internet easily and securely using your mobile phone’s 3G internet connection. You can carry the internet in your pocket, and will always have a secured personal Wi-Fi HotSpot on-the-go!
The company is on a mission:
The Joiku-vision is to liberate mobile internet everywhere on this planet through Mobile Wi-Fi HotSpots.
JoikuSpot currently only works with Symbian S60v3 hardware like the popular Nokia N95 and only supports the HTTP and HTTPs protocols. This is the main drawback from Joikuspot because it means you cannot check your (desktop) e-mail, which relies on the IMAP or SMTP protocol. You can check your webmail which (hopefully) uses the supported secure HTTPs protocol, but you may have to configure your browser to support automatic proxy detection. Everything is documented really well in the help PDF on their website, so setting up Joikuspot shouldn’t be a problem.
Within five minutes my MacBook was connected again, however the connection is not always stable. Sometimes it dies after a few minutes and loading pages is painfully slow. This is very likely due to my cheap and low bandwidth dataplan with my telephone provider, and I should probably go looking for a new text based browser to use in this setting.
Joikuspot definitely helped me endure my offline moving experience by providing me with the necessary online access to look up phone numbers of do-it-yourself stores, plan Google Maps trips to the nearest good restaurants, and stay in touch with inquiring friends and family as to how everything went.
Joikuspot seems to be planning to support more protocols in the future and I think the application would really benefit from it.
Written on 1st May 2008
9 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Update: Leo wants you to test TripSay. The first 100 readers to send an e-mail to info [at] tripsay [dot] com with “nextweb” in the subject will get a beta invite.
As I’ve promised on Sunday, it’s all about the Finnish start-ups on the Next Web this week. They thank that to a successful invasion at Web 2.0 Expo. Today I cover TripSay, a social travel service. I’ve met these guys at the Next Web Conference as well as last week. They got Techcrunched after the Next Web, now it’s time for me to ask them some questions.
Let’s start where TC’s Erick Schonfeld ended his post. He said social travel sites like Driftr, HereOrThere, YowTrip, and TripSay will face the challenge of creating a knowledgeable community. To attract a crowd like this, a travel service will need a little something extra. So I asked founder Leo Koivulehto how they will differentiate from their competitors.
Jyri Engeström (Jaiku), yours truly & Leo Koivulehto
Koivulehto: “Our service is unique as the information you see is personalized according to your interests and profile. The more time you spend on the site and more places you rate, the more it learns from you. A college graduate and grandpa Jones will see differently biased content and recommendations. Which means you don’t have to spend time going through things that are of no interest to you. We help to find what you are really looking for.”
TripSay also partnered up with some large Finnish travel agencies. TripSay provides them with their content, in return they receive a chunk of the travel agencies’ traffic. Nice move, but Koivulehto will have to make sure that TripSay also teams up with agencies from other countries. Otherwise, TripSay will offers its visitors just a Finnish view on the world of tourism.
Before launching their start-up, Koivulehto and his team used to be active travelers. Now they just stroll conferences: “We would never take a package trip, but want to plan the trip ourselves. For that we needed to crawl the web for information, ask all our friends where they had been and how did they like it . This was really time consuming and there was simply too much stuff on the web to find anything sensible and relevant to our interests.”
“We wanted to create a service where you can easily access travel information that has been crawled from the web, aggregated, organized and made easily searchable. We also wanted to have ratings and tips from your friends integrated, so you could see where your friends have been and easily spot the places that have been liked the best and get the insider tips and ideas for your next trip. Our databank now consists of info from over 260000 destinations, places and sights.”
What I like about TripSay, is the integration of Flickr and YouTube content. Koivulehto said they’re also working on Facebook integration and will pay attention to the wishes of their users. I think that the key to extra traffic lays there. Integrating content from other services – maybe Dopplr as well? – makes TripSay more interesting, nobody wants an isolated social platform anymore.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
