Posts Tagged ‘Jyri Engeström’

These five tech startups took a big step toward becoming self-sufficient, independent adults out in the real world. They transitioned from good, small companies to real grown up companies: StudiVZ, sevenload, Habbo Hotel, Jaiku and eBuddy.

Berlin-based StudiVZ is by far the largest social network in the German-speaking world, covering Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. StudiVZ’s 14 million users are on three social networks for different target groups: StudiVZ.net, SchuelerVZ.net and MeinVZ.net. StudiVZ was acquired by the German publishing group Georg von Holtzbrinck in 2008.

Sevenload is one of the world’s leading social media platforms for photos, videos and interactive shows. Among user generated content, sevenload is hosting over 1,000 web TV shows in their channels. The Web-2.0 media platform is currently available in twelve languages and offers localized country portals. Finnish Habbo Hotel is a social networking website aimed at teens from around the globe. By purchasing virtual furniture, users can design their own Hotel rooms and create a virtual hangout for themselves and their friends. The service has been created by Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrölä in 2000 and since then has been expanded to include 32 online communities.

Another grown up company from Finland is online microblogging service Jaiku: Founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku was purchased by Google in 2007.

Online messaging aggregator eBuddy offers a Web Based as well as a Mobile Messenger (click here for a free download from the Apple App Store). A new version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger has just been released.

Coming next Monday: "The Five Most Promising Mobile Startups". Click here for earlier "Top 5" episodes.

Petteri Koponen and Jyri Engeström launched Jaiku.com – a mobile focussed microblogging platform – in summer 2006 just about the time when Twitter has been launched, too. The two Finnish entrepreneurs wanted to create something people would use everyday and started to think about presence. They found status messages in IM systems pretty limited, so they built a more holistic view on one’s presence integrating things like location, what music you are listening to and what you are doing on different social networks. That’s how they invented „Lifestream“ – a stream of events that happen all around the web associated with you and integrated it with mobile phones. Petteri is „pretty proud that we – together with Twitter and one or two other companies – were the first to create that new space and people start to know what microblogging is. Jaiku is not as well known as Twitter, but we were the pioneers in that space. Microblogging is not a mass market service like social networking but I think eventually it will become.“ Regarding financing, Petteri and Jyri were looking for angel investors initially but instead found a strategic investor who was able to commit to a seed round very rapidly. They also attracted three excellent „angel advisors“ as Petteri calls them. In order to raise the first big financing round, they negotiated with UK and US based investors. But finally the Google acquisition alternative was more attractive: „Luckily, we managed to close it“ says Petteri and Jaiku is now a part of Google. Petteri finds „PR-wise, we should have gone to the US from day one since most of the PR opportunities are in Silicon Valley. We did it later quite successfully, but it’s still something you should do as early as possible if your application is similar to Jaiku - a Web 2.0 application meant for early adapters.“ He adds „if you do it in English and it’s global, you should do it in the US. If an application is inherently local, then you can do it in Germany, France, China or wherever you are. It may not be that interesting, but entrepreneurs who do it really well are making a lot of money.“ First and foremost, Petteri points out „whatever you do, get the best advisors from the beginning – they are really invaluable!“