VideoPlaza goes international with backing from Creandum, Torstensson and Hultman

Hot Stockholm startup and SIME friends VideoPlaza that supplies online video with an ad platform announced today that they have taken investment from VC firm Creandum and business angels Henrik Torstensson and Magnus Hultman.

VideoPlaza provides tools for advertising around online video. Kanal 5, their first customer, turned their web tv service profitable very quickly using the VidePlaza ad platform. VideoPlaza says they will use the money to focus on scaling and moving to markets outside Sweden.

Some interesting news from the SIME-sphere

Dopplr launches public profiles. If you want to share your trips with people, and get to know about those coincidences when you happen to be near good friends, Dopplr is the place to go. Dopplr CEO Lisa Sounio did an appreciated talk at SIME 07, and with her team she has now launched public profiles on Dopplr, so that trips can be shared with people outside Dopplr as well. The feature would have been announced at the Reboot conference, but due to illness it was released on the Dopplr blog instead.

Location social network service Plazes has been acquired by Nokia and previews new release of their web service. Nokia seems to be on a shopping spree, with recent decision to buy all of Symbian as well.

David Sifry, Technorati founder and SIME 08 speaker, has launched a new company: Offbeat Guides that will offer personalized printed travel guide books. The service is in invite only beta, but you can request an invite at offbeatguides.com.

Augmented mobile phonebook stars Zyb are hiring. They were recently acquired by Vodafone, and at the Reboot conference there were several people in Zyb t-shirts with a recruitment message, and postcards with a slogan about working in a startup environment but with the backing of a big organization. If you wan’t to work with Zyb, now’s the time to send your application.

Interview and Invites – SoundCloud is growing into a music platform

SoundCloud is a tool for sending and receiving music, with features tailored specifically to the needs of people who want to share and discuss tracks. Tracks are shown with a sound waveform, and comments can be placed on any spot in the track timeline. SoundCloud tries to take the hassle out of working with music online, and is focused on music professionals rather than the general music listener. You can take a tour of the features here. SoundCloud was part of SIME07: the service was used for collaboration when Le Choix made the SIME theme.

With the latest release, SoundCloud is maturing into a music platform and useful tool for producers, labels and anyone making, discussing or sending music. The release brings two features that makes Soundcloud a real participant in the music ecosystem even though the service is still in invite-only beta mode. (We have invites for the SIME crowd, check the bottom of this post!)

The DropBox is an upload page or embeddable upload widget that can be used to receive tracks, that get added to the Soundcloud dashboard and can be played and discussed immediately without the hassle of downloading from some ftp-server or file-sharing page. Labels and music bloggers are already using this tool, and the second big feature of the latest release: the embeddable music player. Soundcloud is going from being a walled garden during the first beta phase, to spreading public Soundcloud tracks all over the web in a customizable player that displays both the track wave form and the timed comments in it. As an example, I have embedded the SIME 07 soundtrack produced by Le Choix below:

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I also had the chance to talk a bit with Eric Wahlforss, one of the founders of SoundCloud, and ask him a few questions about the SoundCloud service and the company.

Andie: Behind the scenes, you are developing a solid API for SoundCloud. Why is this important, and what kind of services do you hope people will build on top of the API?

Eric: The API is actually launched already, and there are a ton of cool stuff that could be built on top it. Just imagine direct integration with music/audio production software, so that artists could create tracks and share them with friends or collaborate right from within the environment they are familiar with. All sort of audio upload/publishing/sharing tools could also be possible, e.g. record sounds on an iPhone and push them directly to SoundCloud. We already have a sort of real-time social network mashup radio app running internally, it’s pretty awesome…

Andie: SoundCloud has managed to draw some high profile names to the service. Tell us who these people are and how they use the service.

Eric: We have people like Richie Hawtin, Dimitri from Paris and Louie Vega on the site. Some of the big names, like Howie B, are really active users. They mostly use SoundCloud to stay up to date with their network of producers and to send and share unreleased material with their circles.

Andie: Do you get a lot of feedback from your users, and how do you handle that feedback internally?

Eric: We get a lot of feedback every day, and we always try to talk back, and generally be very transparent in our development process. Every now and then we sit down with users and ask them what they want from the platform. The hard part is to synthesize the plethora of requirements into “smart compromises” that will do the job without getting in the way of users.

Andie: What does it mean for SoundCloud to be located in Berlin? Is it a good startup environment?

Eric: Berlin is a fantastic city! It’s one of the most important musical hubs in the world and quality of life is great. Rent and food are really cheap, so we save huge amounts of cash too. It’s almost like outsourcing to east europe, and yet we stay in the west really close to most other metropols in Europe. The only thing that kind of sucks is the German tax law, but we get partly around that by being a UK Ltd.

Andie: You have a couple of invites to SoundCloud for the SIME crowd. Who should take a chance to check it out, and why?

Eric: SoundCloud is simply the best service for sending and receiving music. If you’re dealing with that a lot, then you *need* an invite, it will ease your pain.

If you want to ease your pain, sign up for Soundcloud through the special SIME guestlist here:

http://soundcloud.com/guestlist/sime

[Disclaimer: I was part of the Soundcloud team for a short spell when the project was started in Stockholm in spring 2007, before I moved on to a game producer role at the company P.]

SIME and Internet World Cooperate on Exciting Plans for SIME08 and Topp 100

At Breakfast for the Brain, a breakfast seminar at IDG in Stockholm, SIME’s Ola Ahlvarsson and Internet World’s Magnus Höij tell us bout the future of SIME and about how Internet World’s Topp 100-event will be organized in direct conjunction with SIME08. SIME will do a Kungsgatan take-over this year and host the event at Rigoletto and Ambassador.

Ola also talks about how SIME is broadening its knowledge efforts. SIME now offers themed SIME events for your organization, an example of this is SIME Innovation Day where Google, Telenor and Ericsson wanted to meet exciting startups.

Take a look at just under 7 minutes of talk about the future of SIME and the cooperation with Internet World (in Swedish). Video by Björn Falkevik of Lidne Inc and Stockholm Social Club.

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More clips from the breakfast seminar will be posted to this blog soon, expect some trendspotting by Ola and Magnus and interesting experiences and numbers from India, China and Brazil.

Stardoll CEO Mattias Mischke and girls who use Stardoll at Google Zeitgeist

Mattias talked to the SIME visitors last year about the fame, fashion and friends of Stardoll, the virtual paper doll community for girls. At Google Zeitgeist he talks about Stardoll and how users have really taken to the possibility to create their own clothes for the dolls and the first Stardollar millionaire. The most interesting part is interviews with Stardoll users where young girls talk about how they use Stardoll and why.

Jump to 06.50 in the video for Danny Rimer and his introduction and talk with Mattias.

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All videos from Google Zeitgeist Europe 08

SIME Innovation Day Award Winners Zyb acquired by Vodafone

The news broke today that Zyb, the Danish mobile phone backup and social network company that won one of the three awards at SIME Innovation Day last year, has been acquired by Vodafone for €31,5 million.

Congratulations to the Zyb team and founders from SIME!

Reboot 10 is about Free

Copenhagen community made conference reboot is launching its 10th installment.

reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us…

2 days a year. 500 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.

Applied towards us as individuals, citizens, teachers, culture workers, entrepreneurs, creators and change makers.

This years subject for exploration by all of us is “free” – as in free to flow, no only the price point free.

German Interaction Design company mprov has a page with notes and collected presentations from reboot9 if you want to get a feel for what kind of event it is.

Some images from last year:

Innovation Award Winner Zyb Wants To Be Your Social Phonebook

Danish company Zyb, one of three SIME Innovation Award Winners at the SIME Innovation Day in February, has aquired another Danish company in the mobile phone sector – Imity, who makes a social network for mobile phones based on bluetooth proximity. Imity functionality will be integrated in the new social phonebook application Zyb is releasing soon.
We are still waiting for a truly successful mobile social network. Basing it on the actual numbers in the phone is probably the strongest proposition so far, and it will be very interesting to follow Zyb and their release of a social phonebook.

Innovation Day Follow up: VideoPlaza

VideoPlaza was one of the companies invited to SIME Innovation Day. VideoPlaza offers an ad platform for overlay ads in online video.

The three person company just moved into their new office space in Stockholm, after a succesful rollout of their ads on the online videos of swedish tv channel Kanal 5.

Sorosh Tavakoli, Alfred Ruth and Dante Buhay have spent a week getting the new space in order. I spoke to co-founder Sorosh Tavakoli about the future of the company and what they thought of SIME Innovation Day:

Andie: What did you find most exciting about SIME Innovation Day?

Sorosh: I really liked meeting Google, and learn more about their new Google Adsense for videos. It’s also nice to meet the real people behind the corporation. The table talks were very interesting, since you got to hear about some valuable experiences from other entrepreneurs.

Andie: What’s happening with VideoPlaza right now?

Sorosh: We are working hard on making sure our ad platform scales. We are learning a lot from the data coming in from the real world usage on the Kanal 5 videos. We develop our product based on these experiences, and we’re looking for the next round of customers interested in this new form of video ads.

We also have some speaking engagements coming up, at the Disruptive Media conference and Stockholm Media Week along with some heavy names from the Swedish media industry.

We’re wishing VideoPlaza all the best. If you have questions for the VideoPlaza founders or comments about their business, please leave a reply to this post, and we’ll do more follow ups about them.

SIME Friends nominated for an International Emmy

The company P, creative advisor to SIME07, is nominated for and International Emmy. The participatory drama The Truth About Marika, a co-production with Swedish Television SVT, is nominated in the category “Best Interactive TV Service” by The International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The company P created a pervasive experience across many platforms. During almost a year over 100,000 participants tried to find the truth about Marika’s disappearance. Following fictious homepages, satellite maps and coded symbols accessed through mobile applications, the audience went deeper into the drama.

This is a great example of what the future of television could look like. The success of the production shows that the audience wants to participate, to break down the borders between life and screen.

Congratulations to the whole team!

Read more: http://www.thecompanyp.com/