The investment will enable the company to further accelerate growth and sales of its custom insole concept (see videos below). The solution is sold through Road Runner Sports in the US and Intersport International Corporation in Europe. Here’s a more in-depth take on the investment from Technopolis.

Footbalance’s solution is a 100% customized insole, which it creates through its computer-aided foot analysis and in-store production units. Footbalance’s concept is also a means for sports stores to increase their service level by helping the estimated 75% of all consumers who suffer from incorrect foot positions, such as overpronation and supination. Footbalance insoles support ideal foot and ankle alignment while preventing and correcting malpositions.

Here’s a horribly boring demo video and the real deal in action below that.

[Hat tip to Technopolis News]

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Numbers speak for traction as well. Voddler now has more than 400 000 members on board and showed more than 1 million movies. I know I’m willing to pay for this kind of service when there’s half a meter of snow outside and I’d be required to pay two trips to the video store.

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It also mentions that “all you need to do is flip on a webcam and you’re good to go”. Now this can be understood in several ways. Either the webcam is used for social purposes or actual video streaming, which however is unlikely as they are working in this close co-operation with YLE.

The monetisation of the concept is now easier to understand as well. Most likely, Sofanatics is offering the service as a paid value added service to media companies around the world. This would be a great way to capitalise and build traction to the concept as it would be free for consumers.

YLE also states that new features to the service will be showcased during the Ice Hockey world championships in May.

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Foodie.fm enables smart grocery shopping by allowing the user to browse different recipes and then add that meal to their shopping cart. It lets me see different meals and then breaks them down into the needed ingredients in just the right amounts and once I tab ‘Add to cart’ it ads it to my shopping list on my phone. Now, here’s the beauty. Foodie’s back end is connected to all the stores in a given chain (They just announced a partnership with S-Ryhmä in Finland) and the server technology learns from what I like to buy and starts to …wait for it… make recommendations to me when such ingredients or products are on sale in my local store (iPhone lets the service know where I live and recommends me to choose a store as my local shop). You can get the iPhone App here.

Foodie.fm is a Finnish startup and the company is formed from the old Navicore team which was acquired by the Swedish WayFinder in 2007. After Vodaphone bought Navicore,  its operations were run down in Finland. This is when the guys re-grouped their old team and started to build Foodie.fm about a year ago. Foodie.fm team includes Kalle Koutajoki, Samuli Marttila and Atte Kojo.

The company is aiming to create a platform that is media agnostic. For example, now they have the iPhone app out, but they are already working on Facebook and other media, however they can best reach the Finnish families that eat. Once Finland is conquered Foodie.fm is aiming to go international.

The company’s business model, plain and simple, is to provide a one-to-one marketing channel for the stores to push their products. Yet, in a way that adds value instead of pissing me off with offers I’m not interested in.

Now all I need is Foodie to give me the list of romantic recipes, optimize that to her interests in her Facebook profile and I’m set for a dinner date. When you think about it, this should not be that far out. Foodie’s magic is in the server technology or the infrastructure and in the relationships with the grocery stores. If they’d open their APIs later on the application I just described, that should not be hard to do. This, I believe, would also a spark a flood of all kinds of useful food and shopping related applications. Let’s hope they open the API before long so I can get on that date.

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The final program of the event has just been announced. Besides the classic MPA in Innovation live 3-minute pitches, this year there will be the winners of the other awards in collaboration with the Network Partners. Also just unveiled is the jury that will choose the winners among the 20 finalists startups.

For this year’s event, there’s also a special keynote: a presentation on the story of arguably the most successful startup in mobile history, Admob.

Russell Buckley, Vice President Global Alliances at AdMob will be sharing thoughts on how to start and grow a successful company in mobile, based on over 10 years experience in the industry, AdMob’s phenomenal success, as well as ZagMe, which wasn’t so lucky.

Richard Wong, Partner Accel Partners, investors in AdMob, will talk about his experience as a VC with some of the key mobile startups in a presentation called  “The Inexorable Rise of Open Mobile”.

The event host will be Mark Palmer, Founder of Maverick Planet Ltd. Furthermore, Mike Butcher, Editor of TechCrunch Europe and Matthäus Krzykowski, Editor of VentureBeat to moderate the pitches in the MPA in Innovation.

The 2010 MPA best in Mobile Startup Innovation Finalists are:

• MobileMonday Austria – Mobilizy
• MobileMonday Barcelona – fonYou
• MobileMonday Berlin – spendino
• MobileMonday Bogota – RedSalvavidas
• MobileMonday Chennai – mobiSiteGalore
• MobileMonday Copenhagen – Cepa Mobility
• MobileMonday Edinburgh – Mobile Acuity
• MobileMonday Estonia – TaxiPal
• MobileMonday Lithuania – SendFlow
• MobileMonday London – Audioboo
• MobileMonday Milan – Soundtrckr
• MobileMonday Munich – Aloqa
• MobileMonday New Delhi – Voicetap Technologies
• MobileMonday New York – PercentMobile
• MobileMonday Oslo – Bipper Communication
• MobileMonday Rest of EMEA – Layar
• MobileMonday Silicon Valley – CloudMade
• MobileMonday Slovenia – Visionect
• MobileMonday Stockholm – MoSync
• MobileMonday Tel Aviv – waze

If you’re coming over to Barcelona, you can book your seat to the awards ceremony now!

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There’s certainly not too much celebration of entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and we are excited to see Plugg bringing together some of the best thinkers and startups on the continent. Our good friend and established writer at TechCrunch, Robin Wauters is at it again and is going to showcase the best that Europe has to offer. Plugg is a must for anyone who’s anybody in the European startup scene.

It’s Plugg’s third year running and just as before, they go on a quest to find the best European startups for an exciting pitching competition on stage, at the event, in front of the entire audience and a number of professional judges.

As of today, European startups can submit their company and team member profiles, after which the professional jury will decide which 20 of them are deemed worthy enough to compete, based on a set of fixed criteria and their own assessment.

Go and apply! The deadline for registration is 12 February 2010 (Friday next week). Good luck!

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Tori has set up the shop quickly and started strong. It’s modeled on the Swedish service Blocket. Monthly uniques for the month of January broke 300,000. That is an impressive number given the service had zero publicity and was only gearing up for the launch. The team, headed by the CEO Jussi Lystimäki, drove traffic to the site using Adwords and smart guerilla advertising tactics.

It looks like Schibsted is killing it and Sanoma and Alma Media are just waiting to get slaughtered. This is partly because of the efficient formula that Schibsted uses in every country it enters, partly Schibsted’s flawless execution, and partly due to the complete lack of effort in developing the current Finnish services further. Huuto.net hasn’t seen any development efforts to improve the site regardless of the horrid user experience that everybody is well aware of. Another big difference to Huuto.net is that you don’t need to register with Tori.fi and you’re not pulled into an auction, which further improves the ease of use.

The Norwegian media powerhouse has already played the same trick in Sweden, France and in Spain, and by doing so has become the #1 destination for products and services people love to swap. Altogether the Blocket-platform is in use in eight different countries.

So what’s next for Schibsted in Finland? Most likely it will be to create a Finnish Hitta.se. So whoever owns Etsi.fi can plan on cashing in pretty soon. It will be interesting to see how far the media company can go with its formulaic approach. Will the old continent’s old media hold the fort against these Vikings? Schibsted has clearly done something right and won big markets, but it has also taken hits, which can clearly be seen from its battered balance sheet that has suffered from the massive amount of traffic it has bought in from the markets the company has entered.

In France it took Schibsted three years to get the top spot in classifieds and market places with Leboincoin that uses the exact same platform as Tori. Let’s see long Finland will last?

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Valimo has developed a two-channel, two-factor authentication based on Public Key Infrastructure, combining an over the air platform with a software client in the SIM to generate a legally binding electronic signature. What this jargon from the press release means is that Valimo enables mobile phone users to securely authenticate themselves, digitally sign documents and confirm legally binding transactions simply by entering a self-chosen passphrase or a PIN code. Voilà!

Valimo Mobile ID solution facilitates secure online banking, mobile payments, governmental services, electronic and mobile commerce, and identity and access rights management for enterprise applications. This fits nicely into Gemalto’s service portfolio.

Gemalto’s services range from the development of software applications through the design and production of secure personal devices such as smart cards, SIMs, e-passports and tokens, to the deployment of managed services. They are a global giant with revenues of €1.68 billion in 2008 and over 10,000 employees based in 40 countries.

Valimo has been a Gemalto partner for 5 years. In Turkey for example, a major mobile operator, with over 30 million subscribers, selected Valimo and Gemalto to deploy the largest mobile digital signature commercial roll-out to date. By linking up with 13 banks, this operator enables its customers to strongly authenticate themselves for online banking and to digitally sign bank transactions from their mobile phone. This partnership helped the partners to know each other and identify the clear fit they had between the services. Thus, a very natural path to acquisition.

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Jaak Laineste, CEO of Nutiteq, commented that the transaction was in fact a mixture of an investment round and a partial trade sale. With Mobi, Nutiteq hopes to find marketing and product development synergies to bring new products to market. Laineste mentioned that Mobi has strong development background and resources, whereas Nutiteq brings in global contact network and expertise in location-based technologies. Laineste revealed that the deal happened in quite laid-back atmosphere – there wasn’t need for lengthy processes as both firms are from the Estonian city Tartu, and the founders have known each other for years.

Nutiteq has been able to grab, and become one of the world leaders in, a tiny niche of customized and open mobile mapping components. The company has a little stronghold in Estonia and Baltics, with majority of the over 1000 developers using the company’s products coming from the US, Germany, Middle-East, and Asia. Notably the most popular service that uses Nutiteq’s technology has reportedly over 2 million end-users in the US.

Nevertheless, the market has also shown to impose many constraints and limitations, Laineste mentions, and that it is why they are now looking to build new killer applications with Mobi. Mobi also sees rapidly increasing demand for location-based mobile applications. Indeed, the mobile maps and navigation landscape has evolved a lot in the last few months, culminating in Google’s and Nokia’s announcements of free navigation (while neither solution is freely available to all handset models).

Mobi also has an interesting story behind. The firm was founded by a group of Estonian IT and business students in autumn 2000, and it became the pioneer of mobile advertising in Estonia. Evolving though SMS event services the company finally started offering its own SMS-gateway along mobile marketing and m-payments services, and has grown to over 30 people across 3 countries. Mobi is also the parent company of SMS payment solutions startup Fortumo (our coverage).

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Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon tells that when they talk to the users who sign up but then decide not to stay, they say they left, in part, because they had a hard time finding people to hang out with. Either their friends weren’t there, or they have a hard time meeting new ones inworld, or sometimes both. Now Avatars United should fix this. I haven’t looked at Second Life in a while, but if its anything like it has been before, I think Linden Lab needs much more than just Avatars United to make it work.

Avatars United was run and owned by a Swedish company Enemy Unknown before the acquisition. The size of the acquisition was not disclosed.

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What is going on in Europe? Are we going to see the existing VC model literally disappear? Just last week I came back from DLD conference in Munich, Germany where I talked numerous people influential in the industry from Israel, London, New York and Zurich about the situation on the ground and most concurred that what we used to know as A-round-sized-VC-firms are becoming fewer and fewer. The smart ones are either going towards smaller deals and much more hands-on model or gravitating towards private equity sized funds (not least because of the hefty management fees) …well, or moving to Boston.

I’m not saying all of them will die. Index Ventures is clearly not doing that bad. For one, Mickos will focus on seeking out new investment opportunities within the European technology market, helping to identify and evaluate companies on behalf of the VC firm. But in all honesty, there’s only so many deals that Danny Rimer or Saul Klein can manage and Fred Dustin has his address already set out in Boston.

This is happening because the venture capital returns are just not there. According to the FT, ‘By the end of 2010 the 10-year VC return figure will almost certainly turn negative for the first time ever (the current 9-year figure is -6 per cent.) At that point there is a good chance it will sink below the return on the Nasdaq.’ That’s heavy news and even heavier reality for the VC trying to raise new funds! Before we see the IPO market come back the institutional investors won’t touch venture capital and they shouldn’t. It’s bad business if they can get a similar return from Nasdaq with a lot less risk.

What this means for entrepreneurs is that if it was hard to close a round before, now its really really hard. I don’t want to suggest entrepreneurship has stopped to be the best job in the world. It hasn’t. You just need to have the right mindset going in.

It’s 2010 and to build a great company you don’t need venture capital. It might clearly help in some situations, but its not the requisite. That’s partly the reason why we are seeing so many seed funds sprung up: The capital needed to get something off the ground is a lot less (except with some capital intensive fields like biomed or cleantech). If the Consumer Web is your game aim small burn, use public transportation, share an office and take a loan or go for a angel or seed round with couple of seasoned entrepreneurs-cum-investors. I argue you’ll be better off running a tight ship with small burn than having a lot of money and a Wall Street type on your Board that owns half of your company. On top of that, it’s a lot more fun. And if you really have gold in your hands that implodes and you need capital to scale, the money will never be a problem.

And for those living in a country with a open handed social democratic political structure with a state agency giving money out to help ‘the right projects’ to go international, make sure you don’t confuse that with entrepreneurship. It’s two very different things going to a state agency asking money to start a company and going to get a job if you don’t get it VERSUS going to ask them if they want to be part of the success story that you will bootstrap off the ground with or without them, whatever the cost. It’s called having skin in the game and real entrepreneurs have skin in the game regardless of where European VC firms decide to relocate.

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I personally believe that Nokia has lots to gain from taking advantage of the open source community in a totally different manner to Apple. While Google is perhaps still further with Android and their open source movement, Nokia has a lot of potential in its hands if it truly decides to go down this track with all its might and will.

Below is the video of the N900 starting up the OSX.

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I cannot, but wonder why the banks in Finland have not taken the same path as the banks elsewhere in the world. Keeping huge walled gardens when there is clear demand for third party applications building value for the banks’ customers is just nonsense. They have never managed to create so much value for so little effort – why not allow this?

Problems like these pretty much relate back to the incompetence and ability to truly understand the value in how new economies such as the online environment work. I hope other banks see this as an opportunity to improve their services to their customers.

(Hat tip to Markus Ossi)

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In other news, Better Place, the company which is working on creating the infrastructure for your EV with switchable batteries, announced that they secured USD 350m in a series B round, and have now HSBC, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Lazard Asset Management among their investors. That gives Better Place a value of USD 1,25 billion, which should give them the funds to develop and roll out their technology. They aim to have their solution ready for 2011 in Denmark, so we can be sure to see some of that money flow to the country on the Jutland peninsula.

Tesla on the other hand secured a USD 465m government loan to produce the Model S. When it is ready – 2012, mark it in you calendars and start putting money on the side – we can be sure to see their market share in Denmark and Norway surpass the 10% and climb to new heights. The money will likely be used to build a manufacturing plant in California, and if you want to be among the first ones to drive in this 7 seater, go here to enter your reservation.

The Fisker Karma will finally start production in May, after securing a whooping USD 528m loan from the US government. Some of that money will flow to Valmet Automotive which manufactures the Karma, who, rumours say, is being tested at the moment on Finnish roads to see how it gets along with our arctic climate.

So why is this good information for the Nordic countries? For one, Better Place wants to use renewable energy sources to power their service, and with a lot of innovative cleantech energy companies coming from the Baltic & Scandinavia, this means demand in their technologies will increase and they need to ramp up production to meet that demand. The wind, solar and wave companies will need to secure further funds to get their technologies market-ready and installed, producing all that renewable energy we’ll need to power our new EVs – because there is no sense in driving an EV when the energy powering it comes from coal & oil.

Secondly, Valmet Automotive is producing the Fisker Karma and the THINK City. The company is planning to establish itself as a major player in the EV manufacturing business, and that also means that innovation in that area will hopefully start to sprout in the area around it. With the millions of Dollars flowing to Uusikaupunki you can be sure to see some of that money going to start-ups which serve the EV market with innovative solutions, be it batteries, solar panels for car roofs, or operating systems for the high tech cars. If you are an investor, and have no cleantech start-up in your portfolio just yet, I’d recommend you to scout around and see if you find an start-up which you can support with knowledge and money, because 2010 is going to be the year cleantech is going to be big.

Photos courtesy of Better Place and Tesla Motors.

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Cleantech Scandinavia recently attempted to analyze Nordic cleantech patent application levels. The European Patent Office and OECD’s environmental directorate did a similar attempt analyzing cleantech patent application levels worldwide.

OECD carried out statistical analysis for basically all energy generation technologies showing a marked increase in wind, solar and hydro after the Kyoto agreement was signed. Their analysis also found that cleantech patent activity was dominated by Japan, US, Germany, Korea, Great Britain and France. (87% of solar photovoltaic patents were for instance handed in by Japan, US, Germany, Korea and France).

At Cleantech Scandinavia we looked at Nordic cleantech related patents, using basically the same methodology. This revealed a number of things that we found interesting:

Solar shows remarkable patent growth over the last ten years. Over the same period, numerous new solar companies have been formed in the Nordics.

LED lighting patents are also on the rise. The first wave already a few years ago but now experiencing a second growth stage, likely fueled by energy efficency demand and upcoming legislation banning light bulbs in the EU.

The heat pump industry showed for us an unexpected development. Seen from a Nordic perspective, this industry comes off as a fairly mature. From an international perspective however, the potential for heat pump technologies is clearly both existing and growing. As an example, heat pump company Thermia sales were up with 100% last period, stating new legislation in Spain as a main reason. The potential to make heat pump technologies more energy efficient has clearly stimulated innovation in the heat pump industry as patent applications where clearly up the last years.

Recycling solutions tend to operate on policy driven markets. This was also reflected in patent levels, with applications rising strongly in the period when a lot of new recycling regulations where put in place (extended producers responsibility for packaging, car scrapping schemes and so on). Application levels remain high, probably driven probably also by increased resource efficiency and increasing raw material prices over the monitored period.

To highlight later stage growth companies in the Nordics we asked a couple of questions to 81 Swedish and 23 Finnish cleantech growth companies. One of them was on policy dependency. 74 % of the Swedish and 70% of the Finnish companies answered that policy benefited their market/solution.

Does any of this mean anything? I think it does. I think it means that in many cases and on many markets, policy has been crucial for cleantech innovation to happen. The oil crisis in the 70’s set off a surge in insulation related patents but that just clarifies the point further. Clear price signals are needed for innovations to happen.

Of course, it can be argued that what I am talking about is in the past. It doesn’t mean it has to be like this in the future. Perhaps we have now reached a level of oil and raw material prices that, coupled with increased environmental awareness, means we don’t need the policy makers to guide markets any longer. I wish, but I don’t think so. China’s oil demand has increased ten-fold the last decade, water is increasingly becoming a scarce resource and waste is literally piling up in many parts of the world. We are just not creating, and more importantly deploying, solutions quickly enough.

I hope that we will see increased activity from policy makers to guide markets and consequently innovations into the low carbon and low pollution levels where we need to go. So stay awake policymakers, cleantech still needs you!

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