The tickets for our next week’s ArcticEvening are now available for booking. Please find the sign-up form for registering to the event below. Note that if you are unable to make it to the event, please don’t sign up. We have a limited amount of space available and would like to get everyone on board. Likewise, if you need to cancel for any reason, please inform us at events(at)arcticstartup.com so that we can reallocate the ticket.

Expect a house filled with like-minded entrepreneurial people, and lots of networking. We will start off with a brief presentation from Jaycut and continue with an interesting panel discussion. See the Stockholm event page for details. If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, have a look at videos from our previous events.

So sign up below and come spice up our wonderful mix of people!

Venue

The event venue is Obaren (map).

The show will start at 6pm on 18th of November.
Our sponsor Microsoft BizSpark kindly offers a complimentary drink to all participants so be there on time!

Sign up

Event management with amiando

Agenda

We will kick off with Jaycut discussing briefly their recent development on the Moblin platform, why and how they did it and what they see as the business benefits of being on the platform. Then we will follow with a panel discussion on Mobile smartphone solutions and trends – how to strategically build business around the different native application platforms and mobile web. You are welcome to shoot questions at our panelists as well.

Our panelists are:

• Jack Melcher-Claësson, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, Traveas.
  Jack is an Internet loving entrepreneur, a proud family father, a football freak (soccer, that is) and the co-founder of Traveas. Traveas have developed a service called TravelPlanner that automatically provides a traveller with all relevant information about a journey as a personalized mobile itinerary, accessible on all mobile phones. Traveas was founded in 2007, went public last spring in and is now listed on AktieTorget.
  Before Traveas, Jack was the CEO of Torget.se, one of Sweden’s largest E-Commerce portals. After an exit he became Manager for the business area E-Commerce within the European Directories Swedish operation. Before that Jack was Online Sales Manager Nordic for MTV Europe for 5 years, and he has around 10 additional years within media and sales. Jack has also been the Chairman of the jury within TRIP (Travel Industry in Progress) for three years. See our coverage on Traveas.
• Viktor Björk, Spin Doctor and Strategic Partnerships, Cloudo.
  Viktor is the former CEO of The Chimney Pot in Stockholm, Moscow and Dubai. Today, he works at Cloudo with the title Spin Doctor and Strategic Partnerships. Viktor is also involved in the Swedish film camera manufacturer Ikonoskop. Cloudo is a free computer that lives on the Internet, right in your web browser. This means that you can access your documents, photos, music, and all other files no matter where you are, from any computer or mobile phone. See our coverage on Cloudo.
• Hjalmar Winbladh, Founder and Chairman, Rebtel.
  Hjalmar is a Swedish serial entrepreneur. Currently he acts as the Chairman of Rebtel, which he co-founded in 2006, and led as CEO until September 2009. Rebtel offers its users the chance to make low cost international mobile-to-mobile or mobile-to-landline calls. The company also just launched an iPhone application and are looking into other mobile platforms. Hjalmar’s previous venture was mobile Internet services pioneer Sendit AB, which he and co-founder Jonas Lindroth took public in 1997. Sendit was acquired in 1999 for $128 million by Microsoft where Winbladh served as general manager of Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Business Unit until 2002. Rebtel received Red Herring 100 Europe Award in 2007. See our coverage on Rebtel.

Sponsors

Our event is made possible by our Sponsors and because of them, we are able to provide the tickets free of charge. Do take time to get to know them – they are one of the most interesting organizations in the industry.

The Moblin™ – project

Moblin is an optimized Linux platform that provides a modern, engaging user experience for mobile devices, such as netbooks, MIDs, and IVI systems. Moblin has a common core of Application and User Interface services and APIs, which provide application developers a rich and consistent development environment across multiple device form factors.

www.moblin.org
www.moblinzone.com

Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a program which offers new software businesses and entrepreneurs access to Microsoft design, development, and production tools with no upfront costs for up to three years. Members can also connect with a nationwide community of Network Partners – investors, incubators, service providers, and entrepreneurial organizations – who are keen to help.

Hammarström Puhakka Partners

Hammarström Puhakka Partners, Attorneys Ltd is a law firm specialised in business law. The firm has a good corporate practice with experienced M&A advisers acting constantly for domestic and cross-border clients. Specialists provide M&A services to public and private companies relating to assignments concerning private equity and venture capital transactions. The firm is constantly involved with complex transactions in connection with private equity firms and experienced in advising private equity/venture capital investors in divesting their investments.

Amiando

Amiando is the worldwide software-as-a-service platform for event management and ticketing. Thei platform serves over 70.000 events worldwide with innovative products like amiando Eventsites, amiando ViralTickets, amiando EasyEntry or amiando EventSense®.

Amiando is the official online registration partner for ArcticEvening events.

The first thought that crossed my mind during the demo was the feeling of sligth anxiety that occurs when checking out the roaming costs on the phone bill. If not chockingly high, they’re usually more than expected. Even though you had checked out the costs in beforehand and were being sensible using your phone abroad.

How come? Because it’s the exact same feeling of uncertainty and confusion one often faces when dealing with streaming costs. It already starts with the business offer letter, usually three pages long with no mention of the actual final cost. And that after a meeting with a sales person who’s supposed to know your needs and demands by then. Need a video player, too? Call some more people.

23 Video is determined to kill that mumbo jumbo and all talk about difficulties surrounding online streaming and setting up ones own web-tv channel.

Tearing down the barriers to entry
When talking to Steffen Tiedemann Christensen and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, two of the co-founders, it was quite clear that the mission of 23 Video is to make it super easy to experiment with video by removing all the thinkable risks.

Thomas and Steffen, 23 Video

One can try out the service for free for 14 days without any commitments. 23 Video applies a fixed monthly price model costing DKK 3 500 (ex. VAT) per month (approx. USD 700). One pays for three months at a time, the price including 1 TB bandwidth, which corresponds to the playback of about 175 000 minutes of video (about 60 000 small video clips).

23 Video is a SaaS solution, so one doesn’t have to install any software. It all runs on 23’s server farm. It supports most video formats and the conversion is done automatically no matter which format or device is used on upload. One can embed video player into any publishing platform, and theres’s a built-in support for mobile devices. No editing features are available, though, so that should be cleared out of the way, e.g. JayCut, prior to uploading.

The service includes statistics fucntion which is possible to use together with ones own statistics software such as Google Analytics or Clicky. One can also easily distribute the content to Facebook and share throughout the social web (I really liked this instruction video on connecting to Facebook.)

On top of that, there’re no limits regarding users, number, or the lenght of the uploaded videos.

Aren’t there any downsides
Competition? For sure. With services like Vimeo, Blip and YouTube there’s plenty of platforms to chooce from to broadcast ones streaming content. But, each and one of them have both their pros and cons regarding size of the uploaded content, uploading speed and advertising, to mention some. That’s also where other facts and softer values become more business critical. 23 Video needs to be doing something different.

Besides from the clear pricing strategy and plug and play approach, what I find as the most competitive feature, is the effort the company puts in enabling customers to get started. For that purpose they’ve started both the support community, as well as the recommended partner program. Things get so easily stuck on the drawing board as soon as the time or competence needed is not found inhouse. Recommended partners can help out customers with both the concept, design and production of content.

When pointing out the obvious question about the company’s cost structure, both Steffen and Thomas sounded confident. I do hope that they’ve done their math well, as well as cut some good deals on the distribution costs.

The service is to be launched in English having at the moment 75, and counting, Danish sites up and running in just within 5 months. One can get a hint on how the service works in practice by tuning in The Danish Architecture Centre, DAC.

23 Video is one of the nominated companies at SIME awards this year.

In the second decade, you start to get it right. The entrepreneurs are doing it for the second or third time. The infrastructure has developed (lawyers, VCs, recruiters). And it is easier to get talented employees to do a startup. This is where Silicon Valley was from 1975 to 1985.

This is an accurate description of the scene here in the Nordic & Baltics, and makes it seem that we’re on the way to becoming a “dynamic ocean” of innovation. However, whether we really can “get to the mountaintop” here in Northern Europe and take a place as a leading center of startup energy in the 21st century is far from certain.

There are a healthy number of founders and CEOs at the moment that have experience from starting at least semi-successful companies in the past. The type of solid infrastructure Fred describes is also there, (even if funding levels and A-rounds in the region aren’t the same as in the valley).  Perhaps, most notably it has somehow become “kewl” to be an entrepreneur in the last few years.

The problem here is that we have no flag bearer, no champion. The biggest exit in the region’s history is widely viewed as a catastrophe. I would argue that until a company born in this region can successfully scale itself and, Thor forbid, go public, our corner of the world will be stuck with the “silent lake” label. And while there is no shame in developing well designed and technically advanced solutions that bigger companies love to buy up, don’t we owe it to our unborn to strive for something greater?

Clearly, Sulake is going for a new market segment after conquering such a big chunk of the teen market with Habbo Hotel. I’m just not sure if big people will jump on the virtual world in the same way as teenagers have. I’m already realizing I spend way too much time in Facebook for no reason. Compared to wasting time in Facebook, Bobba takes a lot more effort is you plan to waste time there as well and I honestly just don’t have any. After all, I have a Twitter to attend to.

Now, in all seriousness, I’m sure there are people who find Bobba to be for them, but I just don’t think the number will ever get even close to the ballpark where Habbo Hotel plays in. That said, it might just well be that Sulake is just experimenting without any more expectations than I do regarding Bobba Bar, and if I’d be Sulake I would probably try it out as well given the success of casual games among adults. Sulake also touts the possibility to data people in the virtual bar, but its bit of a stretch to go there just to hit girls. Also, not surprisingly, in the near future Sulake plans to provide virtual content purchases inside Bobba Bar, so the business model is clearly there as well.

Bobba Bar has taken off nicely with some 45,000 accounts created in four days, but I wonder how many people come back after creating an account. I know I won’t. I tried to service with Nokia E71 and the experience might be a whole lot different if you’re using Bobba Bar with iPhone or iPod Touch. If you happen to own one I recommend heading to App Store to try it out (here). Me? I’ll keep waiting until Apple works out the iPhone 3GS backlog and starts servicing its customers again in Finland by actually restocking its distributors.

ArcticStartup will be travelling to Tampere to tap into the entrpreneurial buzz there we’ve heard so much of. The evening will be an interesting one wrapped around the theme of Networking and Pitching. More specifically, we’ll be discussing the different ways entrepreneurs can take advantage networking to grow their business. We’ll have some very practical advice from industry heavy weights and local entrepreneurs.

If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, we suggest you take a look at videos from previous events.

Venue

Our event in Tampere will be held in the Demola premises. Demola is an innovative concept built around entrepreneurship and the capitalisation of ideas. The venue is at Väinö Linnan aukio 15, 3rd floor.

The show will kick off at 6pm on 17th of November.

Programme

The evening will follow its theme closely. The event will kick off with three company pitches. If you’re a startup and would want to pitch your company at the event, read the Pitching -part below this one. After the three pitches, we’ll move into the panel. On the panel, we’ll have industry heavy weights such as Jussi Harvela and local entrepreneurs. We’ll be announcing all the names here very soon.

Pitching

If you are a startup and would like to pitch in the event, contact Antti by e-mail. In the e-mail, describe your company and service or product shortly with a brief reason why you should be picked. Do this by Thursday 12th of November 12 o’clock and we’ll announce the three companies eligible for pitching on Friday the 13th.

Signing up

As space at the venue is limited, we’ll ask you to register to attend the event. The tickets, like always, will be free. However, we ask you to only register if you are coming – we want to have as many people attend the event, so don’t hog the ticket if you’re unable to participate.

Event management with amiando

Sponsors

Our event is made possible by our Sponsors and because of them, we’re able to provide the tickets free of charge. Do take time to get to know them – they are one of the most interesting organisations in the industry. We hand pick our sponsors to bring value to the evenings – these guys are truly worth your time.

Demola

Demola is an open innovation environment where multidisciplinary student teams create demos based on ideas and guidance given by companies with real-life needs and business challenges.

DigiTampere

DigiTampere accelerates the development of innovative digital services, products, and business. DigiTampere is a part of the Finnish national Digibusiness cluster programme.

Hammarström Puhakka Partners

Hammarström Puhakka Partners, Attorneys Ltd is a law firm specialised in business law. The firm has a good corporate practice with experienced M&A advisers acting constantly for domestic and cross-border clients. Specialists provide M&A services to public and private companies relating to assignments concerning private equity and venture capital transactions. The firm is constantly involved with complex transactions in connection with private equity firms and experienced in advising private equity/venture capital investors in divesting their investments.

Amiando

Amiando is the worldwide software-as-a-service platform for event management and ticketing. Thei platform serves over 70.000 events worldwide with innovative products like amiando Eventsites, amiando ViralTickets, amiando EasyEntry or amiando EventSense®.

Amiando is the official online registration partner for ArcticEvening events.

The design is after this sent to production where it is knit to the item at hand. Therefore the end result is a fully customised item and not a cut-and-paste embroided version of it. Dmitri Tsekanov, one of the two founders behind the company told me that they are currently co-operating with Estonian knitting factories to produce the goods.

The venture has been financed by the two owners and at the moment there aren’t any other investors nor people behind it. Having said that, once the initial investment for the service and business have been put into place the system is able to run pretty much by itself. The knitting factories and producers download the files to their sewing machines to produce the goods and no extra effort from Scarfmaker is needed.

Scarfmaker is tackling an interesting space with its service. While there are many competitors in the mass customisation t-shirt and more common clothing market, not many have managed to create a service to help people living in more colder places design their clothes. One could therefore argue that geographic focus in this sense is also important, while I do realise that scarfs are not only used in cooler climates.

Our second ArcticEvening this year in Stockholm will be held on 18th of November 2009.

The theme of the evening will be Mobile smartphone solutions and trends – how to strategically build business around the different native application platforms and mobile web.

Discussion around delivering content and servics to Android, iPhone, Symbian, and different app stores is stirring up the mobile industry, and there are lots of different views on how to approach the smartphone market. In our evening’s panel discussion, we have representation from three firms: one that provides their service using mobile web browser and SMS solution (Traveas), another that uses a native application to complement otherwise “app-less” service (Rebtel), and third a cloud computing firm making it possible to access your documents and virtual computer on any device over-the-air (Cloudo).  Each of the firm will surely bring interesting viewpoints into the discussion.

The event venue is the as before, Obaren (map). The show starts at 6:00 pm.

Our panelists for the evening are:

• Jack Melcher-Claësson, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, Traveas.
  Jack is an Internet loving entrepreneur, a proud family father, a football freak (soccer, that is) and the co-founder of Traveas. Traveas have developed a service called TravelPlanner that automatically provides a traveller with all relevant information about a journey as a personalized mobile itinerary, accessible on all mobile phones. Traveas was founded in 2007, went public last spring in and is now listed on AktieTorget.
  Before Traveas, Jack was the CEO of Torget.se, one of Sweden’s largest E-Commerce portals. After an exit he became Manager for the business area E-Commerce within the European Directories Swedish operation. Before that Jack was Online Sales Manager Nordic for MTV Europe for 5 years, and he has around 10 additional years within media and sales. Jack has also been the Chairman of the jury within TRIP (Travel Industry in Progress) for three years. See our coverage on Traveas.
• Viktor Björk, Spin Doctor and Strategic Partnerships, Cloudo .
  Viktor is the former CEO of The Chimney Pot in Stockholm, Moscow and Dubai. Today, he works at Cloudo with the title Spin Doctor and Strategic Partnerships. Viktor is also involved in the Swedish film camera manufacturer Ikonoskop. Cloudo is a free computer that lives on the Internet, right in your web browser. This means that you can access your documents, photos, music, and all other files no matter where you are, from any computer or mobile phone. See our coverage on Cloudo.
• Hjalmar Winbladh, Founder and Chairman, Rebtel.
  Hjalmar is a Swedish serial entrepreneur. Currently he acts as the Chairman of Rebtel, which he co-founded in 2006, and led as CEO until September 2009. Rebtel offers its users the chance to make low cost international mobile-to-mobile or mobile-to-landline calls. The company also just launched an iPhone application and are looking into other mobile platforms. Hjalmar’s previous venture was mobile Internet services pioneer Sendit AB, which he and co-founder Jonas Lindroth took public in 1997. Sendit was acquired in 1999 for $128 million by Microsoft where Winbladh served as general manager of Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Business Unit until 2002. Rebtel received Red Herring 100 Europe Award in 2007. See our coverage on Rebtel.

How do you get in?
The tickets will become available for booking on our site on Wednesday the 11th of November at 12:00 Swedish time.  The event is free of charge, but due to limited space we require you to register in advance.

You can read more on the event at the event page. We’ll update it as the tickets become available.

Sponsors

Our event is made possible by our Sponsors and because of them, we’re able to provide the tickets free of charge. Please, do take some time to get to know them.

Hammarström Puhakka Partners

Hammarström Puhakka Partners, Attorneys Ltd is a law firm specialised in business law. The firm has a good corporate practice with experienced M&A advisers acting constantly for domestic and cross-border clients. Specialists provide M&A services to public and private companies relating to assignments concerning private equity and venture capital transactions. The firm is constantly involved with complex transactions in connection with private equity firms and experienced in advising private equity/venture capital investors in divesting their investments.

Amiando

Amiando is the worldwide software-as-a-service platform for event management and ticketing. Thei platform serves over 70.000 events worldwide with innovative products like amiando Eventsites, amiando ViralTickets, amiando EasyEntry or amiando EventSense®.

Amiando is the official online registration partner for ArcticEvening events.

A symptom of this is the social media consultants of all kinds that supposedly give advice the companies that have been hit to get their head around what the social Internet really means for them. Unfortunately very few of these social media experts advising the companies really understand what a more social Internet means, where it’s going and what’s its real promise for the whole civilization in the long run (more on this in the video below). There’s more to social Internet than creating Product pages for companies on Facebook, telling them they need to be on Twitter and hiring students to become community managers.

Now, in all honesty I wouldn’t be really that concerned if social media experts, PR people or advertising folks don’t understand where the web is going, since it really wouldn’t be the first time. What is significant though, is that developers and startups building on the various building blocks understand the implications and can make educated choices.

I sat down with Chris Messina, a prominent open web advocate, in San Francisco to talk about where he thinks the social web is currently at, what challenges he sees it is facing and where he would like it ultimately to progress. It’s a lengthy video, but worth a watch since the issues Chris talks about are only going to increase in importance for all of us. While you’re at it, see also the seminal piece Chris and Jyri Engeström wrote for ArcticStartup a while back.

The work that Chris started to do in the US starts getting traction also here in the Northern Europe. Probably not least due to the workshop that Chris and Jyri organized in Helsinki a while back. This Saturday (yes, that’s tomorrow!) Mike Bradshaw organizes an OpenWebCamp for all interested (sign up here). I hope we will see the smart people putting up similar events soon across the other Nordic and Baltic countries. Just as Chris says in the video below, ‘all the really good ideas and innovations need to be localized’ and its up to the rest of us to do it in the case of the social web. Finland is starting tomorrow with the workshop. I’m hoping to see similar events soon take place across the Northern Europe.

Do you know how much energy a data centre uses per year? No? Well, let me tell you that a data centre can use up to 40 times more energy than a conventional office building, thus most data centres start to automatically look for ways to cut down on energy costs. To look for renewable energy sources would be a first, smart step for any data centre to cut down on energy-related emissions and become greener. However, today most data centers which claim to be “green” do not actually use renewable energy to run their servers, they do purchase so-called carbon credits. Its a cheap way to claim to be green while not actually doing anything to improve your environmental performance.

Verne Global will differ in a number of ways. For example they plan to use the abundant hydro and geothermal power of Iceland to power their wholesale data center facility. Iceland also offers plenty of free cooling, which the facility will utilize to cool its server halls. They’re building it on a former Nato base, which is relatively save from earthquakes and other natural disasters. The building is being constructed to meet the Golden and Platinum LEED standard, and the company is a member of The Green Grid so all-in-all a thought out concept.

Verne Global wasn’t too open about their clients, but hinted that they will be found in the Fortune 200. Two minority investors, Novator and General Catalyst have invested in the venture, and they’re not looking for further ones at the moment. For those who need to know what Tier the facility will be, it is Tier 3 so if you have very high security needs you need to look somewhere else.

I like the idea of a truly green data center. Iceland seems like a good location with its abundant hydro and geothermal power sources, and the use of natural cooling. While they might be the first truly green wholesale data center facility, there are already a number of truly green web hosts out there. What’s positive is that Verne Global will be able to offer power pricing stability of up to 20 years, and that they can deliver the environmental benefits of the center to their customers at a lower cost than traditional data centers located in cities like for example New York, Berlin, and London. They were also open and told me that currently they only source 20% from geothermal sources, but look to increase that number over time. The facility will go online in 2010, so if you’re looking for a new home for your servers give Verne Global a ring.

Record labels bought a big chunk of Spotify last October for 100 000 Swedish Crowns, which is less than 10 000 euros. This has thought to be the reason why Spotify has been able to sign so many deals with the major record labels, in the end creating a large enough library of music to interest consumers.

While Jonathan from Spotify keeps on stating that “everyone loves music”, it seems that if the bands aren’t able to create a better source of revenue there won’t be much music to listen to in the future.

I talked to Tero Salonen of Dazzboard (see our earlier story on Dazzboard here) and he told me how he first entered the US market and got the first contact there through Finnpro (the Finnish Export Association) and Plug and Play Tech Center, what resources he used and what are the next steps for Dazzboard in getting established in the US market. Not only that, Tero actually broke it down how much it cost him to do all of this. Tero wanted to emphasize to us that even though he happens to be a Finn, there are plenty of startups from other Nordic and Baltic countries at the Plug and Play Tech Center. See the video below.

Even though you could argue that is has taken way too long for the founder Tina Aspiala to monetize the site, it might have been worth the wait. Eat.fi is one of the only Finnish sites that I use regularly when checking out new restaurants and especially while making lunch and dinner meetings. To get an idea of the popularity of the site, Eat.fi iPhone app topped the Finnish App Store and boasts currently about 12,000 downloads (and 2,000 Ovi Store downloads).

I believe that the advertising business model will work great for the advertisers as well as the company itself. The only question that remains is will it scale to make Eat.fi a significant business.

As soon as the company has nailed the business model, its time to raise some capital and expand the restaurant site abroad. Given the strong foothold that for example Yelp has in US, Eat.fi needs to consider markets closer to home. The Nordic countries a likely target for expansion, even though there are emerging some restaurant search and review sites like Ted Valentin’s Restaurangkartan in Sweden (although even that is still in the making).

I can also see Eat.fi to be an ideal acquisition for a bigger media house, since it has one of the most loyal high quality communities that I have seen a site to have. Tina has made extra efforts to make the site extra easy to use and clean all the comments from the reviews that don’t add any value for users. This goes a long way to explain, why no big commercial player can’t just create their own site to compete with Eat.fi. They just don’t have the patience or know how to put skin in the game in building a great online community. You can get an idea of how much such love and care that has gone into Eat.fi’s user interface and overall user experience matter by looking at the graph (on the right) that shows how the number of reviews shot up after the team realized their new User Interface at the end of the 2008.

We eagerly wait to see how Eat.fi fares when it will expand abroad with its new model. That is, if someone won’t acquire the nifty site first.

Fredrik Stenbeck, Founder and CEO Silverbakk

Fredrik Stenbeck, founder and CEO Silverbakk, had given me an early demo of Silverbakk Briefing Room to be, and when launching now it has kept all its promises.

The interface is clear with simple graphs, so as soon as one’s done with choosing the keywords and filtering options, i.e. the important stuff, it didn’t take much longer than a minute before being up and running.

Fredrik has several years of experience in consulting companies within strategy and communication, the skills he’s now brought into his own product. Silverbakk has a clear offering with an explicit pricing plan, easy to understand demo and feature section. To test the product one can set up a 14-day free trial monitoring period for one project. Just the transparent company approach that is both embraced by social media, and necessary in building trust in the new media landscape. While browsing through a list of market actors and competitors, I came across only one other company, Scout Labs, presenting a pricing plan. Maybe not so surprising, yet disappointing.

Competitive offering on a competitive market

“The Impfactor ranking, language independence and easy to read graphs are the biggest differentiator for Silverbakk Briefing Room”

Silverbakk has done its market research by offering both unlimited users and workspaces, real time alerts, as well as being language independent. Each project can have up to five keywords, Gold level containing 10 keywords, with possibility to add free amount of filters to exclude sources or certain words, or phrases, from the project.

“It is your data so it is all up to you what you want to do with it.” All the data will be available for export at any time, and all Gold customers will have access to an API to easily integrate the data into other products or webpages.

The magic sauce in the dish is called The Impfactor, a secret indexing algorithm consisting of more than 50 parameters, calculating how much social activity and engagement there is related to the information monitored.

The big plan for Silverbakk is to go global. With the above mentioned Scout Labs just raising $4 million in a round of funding, and Microsoft recently revealing its proof-of-concept prototype “Looking Glass”, a social media product letting marketers aggregate and monitor social media platforms in real-time, the Silverbakk’s magic sauce certainly needs to taste both sugar and spice.

The game is now available on Steam for $19,95 and the very early reviews of the game are positive. I had a look at the game trailers myself and I have to say it looks good. Nevertheless, a very interesting time for Futuremark for sure.

Listhings.com is a new Estonian “eco-friendly” online web tool for storing sticky notes about anything from To-Do lists to grocery lists and phone numbers.

The man behind the project is Martin Tajur, also Creative Director and co-founder of United Dogs and Cats (see our previous coverage). Martin has also worked as a graphical and user experience designer at Skype.

Martin told us that the service has gathered a bit over thousand registered users since the beginning of the public sign-up period in mid-September 2009, in about one and a half months. He also continued that the amount of registered users seems to double in about a month’s time, or even faster. It is also possible to use the service without signing up, and apparently many do. Just this week Listhings passed 100,000 saved notes.

According to Martin, the service started from a hobby project. He has been developing the service gradually, responding also to user feedback. Martin also emphasizes that Listhings is hosted in a 100% carbon neutral way, meaning that for all energy consumed to keep Listhings’ servers running, Emission Reduction Credits are purchased. Thus the tagline “store notes, save trees”.

The look and feel of the service is really nice. One can start creating notes right away and writing, resizing, changing color, and moving the notes around all work smoothly. It is also possible to create multiple canvases to get more space and add categorization for your notes. There aren’t too many features for now, but just enough to efficiently do the trick.

There is a lot of potential in the service, and Listhings could a be great tool for creating and keeping track of notes at daily work, also on multiple computers.  But to really unleash its potential and to consider giving up a physical notebook, a mobile app or access is clearly needed. Luckily, Martin has already indicated that an iPhone synchronization app is on the way and available soon.