Archive for the ‘Finland’ Category
Written on June 30, 2008 – 12:01 pm
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.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 25, 2008 – 2:31 pm
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 May 12, 2008 – 6:43 pm
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 May 1, 2008 – 12:00 pm
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.
Written on April 27, 2008 – 11:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
San Francisco was flooded by Finnish companies last week. They’ve teamed up to organize a meeting at the uber-hip restaurant Foreign Cinema to meet with well-known web professionals as Loic le Meur, Scott Rafer and Howard Rheingold. Boris and me were there and really enjoyed meeting all these ambitious entrepreneurs who prove that Finland’s technology industry consists of more than just Nokia. This week I’ll highlight some of the companies, starting with XIHA Life. This is the world’s first multilingual social network, targeted at people living outside their home country.
Howard Rheingold speeching during Finnish meet-up
Juhani Polkko, VP Business Development, told me users can select not only their native language, but as many languages as they understand or want to learn, and the content on the site is filtered based on the preferences. So imagine that you’re an English-speaking person from Germany and have a friend in France. When you check out his profile, you’ll only see the English content on his site. The French comments and messages have been filtered out.
I like the idea of their service, as learning other languages or keeping up with the ones you speak a bit are valuable assets. Moreover, the numbers of languages they offer is impressive (see below). Though I’m slightly disappointed Polkko and his team have built another social network. Why didn’t they create an overlay service on top of existing social networks?
Polkko: “We are initially building a niche social network and target the people who have the natural need to use multiple languages in their everyday life, like expatriates and exchange students. The next step is to create mash-ups for content from other social media websites and apply our language recognition and filtering algorithms. This is somewhat limited because you would need to build the algorithms inside other networks such as Facebook, but they can be applied to all the content which is available through open APIs and XML-feeds, or other content which the users own the rights to.”
So whether you like XIHA or not, these Finnish guys do offer us a glimpse of the possibilities when social networks adopt open standards. We could filter out content we don’t understand and use every network in our own language - without excluding other people. Let’s hope it’s not an utopia.
Written on April 19, 2008 – 11:33 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As we reported last week, France is on the verge of adopting a law against “incitement to anorexia” that is mainly focused on the web. It wouldn’t be the last Internet-related law this week, since the European Union announced some tight laws against “incitement to terrorism” on the Internet. By doing this, the EU wants to fight militant groups who amongst other things recruit and mobilize young people.
A statement by the ministers said that the existing Framework Decision of 13 June 2002 will be expanded by introducing three new offenses: “public provocation to commit a terrorist offense, recruitment and training for terrorism.”
Reuters reports that countries like Spain and Italy already punish public provocation to terrorism, but others, like Scandinavian countries will have to change their laws. Spain’s secretary of state for justice, Julio Perez Hernandez, told the press agency that “The battle to anticipate terrorist acts is crucial for Spain. One should not wait for smoke to know there is terrorism.”
Although the statement says that it’s “well-balanced in terms of its effects on freedom of speech and general respect for human rights”, civil action groups will probably ring the alarm bells. Though I’m not sure whether the public will actually care. Europeans have seen so many anti-terrorism laws that limit their freedom already, that they might have become numb for amendments like these.
Written on April 8, 2008 – 5:56 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In a discussion on TechCrunch about where Europe’s own Silicon Valley would emerge, some interesting suggestions were made (warning: many links to specific comments follow). From Moscow to Lisbon and from Estonia to London.
The latter was the most mentioned location, followed by Finland and Switzerland. Finland has an USP that is their biggest pro and con at the same time: Nokia. On the one hand, it’s THE European tech company, on the other: it sucks up all the talent.
Switzerland would be a fair option, since it’s an innovative country and home of some important venture capitalists like Index Ventures. Yet a new development makes the question even more complicated: Nokia has just announced that it would establish a research center in Lausanne. It will be a joint lab with two Swiss federal institutes of technology. It will open its doors in June.
According to All About Symbian, the research agenda will focus on persuasive communications:
- Exploring new interaction experiences and technologies utilizing all the human senses;
- Services and applications based on the user’s context, such as location, and personal preferences, e.g.,
information provided by sensors within a mobile device or in the surrounding world;
- Internet services and technologies - enriching the Internet experience on mobile devices.
Nokia’s Chief Technology Officer Bob Iannucci said to Reuters that Nokia ’sees the fusing of the digital and physical worlds as a key objective in mobility.’
So, will this cause some sort of local brain drain? Kai Lemmetty from Floobs told me during The Next Conference that this is the case in Finland. Nokia just picks out the talent and makes them an offer they can’t refuse. As you can imagine, this is deadly for local start-up action. And a good start-up atmosphere is one of the most important conditions for a Silicon Valley-like area. So all you European start-up experts, please lend me your thought on this matter.
Written on March 25, 2008 – 9:50 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
As I’ve promised you last week, I will interview the start-ups who participated in the start-up rally of PLUGG 2008. This time I’m interviewing Joonas Pekkanen from Floobs. That’s a Finnish start-up which enables anyone to setup their own live internet and mobile TV Channel. The advantage of this streaming video service, compared to competitors like Qik, is that it’s Java-based. So theoretically, the Java client is easily exported to a large number of mobile devices. Our WebTipr from Finland, Timo Paloheimo, has written a good overview of this promising start-up. Here’s their own story.
How did you come up with the idea of Floobs?
“We had been discussing different ideas with my co-founder Kai Lemmetty since the end of summer 2006. By winter we found ourselves discussing more and more often on the subject of live video and its possibilities. One evening we just suddenly realized that everyone will be carrying a video production tools in their pockets in the form of smart phones very soon. In the end of January we set-up the company and started working on the first draft of the business plan, recruiting key people and looking for seed funding. Our idea is to allow anyone to set-up their own live mobile Internet TV channels – streaming live content from mobile phones, web cams, DV cameras and mixing that with pre-recorded content.” (more…)
Blizzard, finland, Habbo Hotel, Massively multiplayer online game, MMO, online game, World of Warcraft
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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 of, the future of the Web. (
