braking news

Today comes with a piece of personal news. Today I have agreed to a proposal about becoming a part of Wunderkraut. Wunderkraut is a great growth case and easily fullfills the criteria of a growth company: just a few years old and already at a 10M€ profitable growth mode with very high customer and employee satisfaction. Wunderkraut has also accomplished this without outside risk financing, just from organic growth and profit.

I will be investing into the company simultaneously while I join them. This time I won't disclose the details of the investment deal; sorry folks. I'll be appointed Managing Director of Wunderkraut Finland and the Baltics, part of the Wunderkraut Group. I will also become member of the Group Management Team and Board of Directors as well as one of the Group’s owners, naturally.

What is Wunderkraut then? Many people might know it by its former name: Mearra Finland Oy. Wunderkraut provides professional services for web-based publishing and content management systems. It has developed a wide range of services based on Drupal’s open source platform in different sectors for customers such as IKEA, Finnish Red Cross, German Foreign Office, Nokia Siemens Networks, National Land Survey of Finland, Suzuki Belgium, and a large number of media houses. We approach customer projects from a business perspective instead of technology first.

Wunderkraut Group operates across nine markets in Europe and employs 140 people. Wunderkraut’s customers - such as media and publishing houses, public sector authorities, and the trading sector - cater to the needs of large online user audiences. Wunderkraut’s web solutions host a broad range of rich media content including web TV and mobile video.

Wunderkraut is the largest provider of Drupal-based solutions in Europe. Drupal is a framework that offers fast time to market, extensive customisation and lower total cost of ownership. It is used to set up content management systems for all types of websites, from small sites to complex global enterprises. Drupal is supported by a global community of developers whose continual contribution ensures the platform’s robustness and innovativeness.

Since last summer I have worked with multiple startups. Namely with TLD Registry and Umbra Software, Sulava and some others. I haven't had a "main day job" for some months now. This is about to change and Wunderkraut is becoming my "day job" for years to come. I intend to continue the strong growth of the company & to accelerate it further. Open up new markets and be part of an excellent growth-hungry international team. Wunderkraut is agile, if not even "lean" (in a Lean Startup kind of way), so this is an excellent role for me to draw from my agile, lean and coaching experience. I tend to preach what I practice (and not the other way around) and this certainly offers me good chances to practice some 1st rate growth and internationalization - all while creating winning solutions for our customers to reach their business goals.

Highly motivated and soon to be "the new guy" (or FNG?) in Wunderkraut.

If you feel like there's something we should chat about, or we could do in the future, be in touch! I plan to meet a ton of people and utilize my network, as expected.

As far as I know nobody has yet made an analysis about the Facebook Finland network with precise data.

I managed to get my hands on some Facebook Finland network data, and as far as I know it is entirely accurate. Meaning that it should represent quite accurately what they have in the real database, and there are no intentional errors and corrupt entries in it.

The data also allows me to do some comparison to IRC-Galleria's current data and perhaps even draw a few conclusions.

All data is a snapshot from 19 january 2009 and should be accurate enough.

Facebook Finland Network data contains all accounts that claim to belong to the "Finland" regional network. However such a claim can be made by anyone. Also people can have multiple accounts. Bands have accounts. So do companies. And imaginary entities like characters from TV shows or cartoon figures. This means that not nearly all the users listed in the Finland Network are actual people. It is simply everyone who claims to belong to the network at all - with no filtering what so ever.

IRC-Galleria data is more "pure" in that sense; all of it has been either verified by a real cell-phone number or manually screened by an administrator person. There are still a few hundred known fakes in the data, and a probably a few hundred unknown ones.

Facebook data doesn't know all of its users' gender, which I guess is a result of inanimate objects and such being capable of having their own Facebook accounts. While IRC-Galleria data is gender-precise.

All data in both cases have been provided by the companies directly.

IRC-Galleria data is publicly available here:
http://irc-galleria.net/dob.php
(as pointed out in the comments. Edited & added on Jan 20th)

Some stats from the Facebook data:

* Finland Network is about 927,530 users strong
* Males represent 363,120 users or 39.14%
* Females are the clear majority with 530,510 users and 57.19%
* There are 33,900 entities of unknown gender, or 3.65%
* Largest age-group for Facebook Finland is the 25 year olds with 54,100 accounts
* The ONLY age-groups with more men in them are the 64 and 65+ year olds
* Oddly enough there are 14.81% of users by the age of 63 with unknown gender
* and 16.13% of 61 year olds with unknown gender
* in 14 year old the unknowns only represent 0.63%
* The 25 year olds have most entities with unknown gender; 2180

Stats from the IRC-Galleria data:

* IRC-Galleria data only contains data for 12 to 40 year olds, not extending as high up as Facebook data does
* IRC-Galleria is 506,751 users strong
* About 7 thousand users are over 40 and thus not included in any of the following stats
* Females dominate again: there are 257,061 females to 242,025 males
* Largest user group is the 16 year olds with 47,705 users
* While the average age is still well above 20 at 20.41 years
* In all the younger age-groups females dominate, until at 21 years of age the tide turns and from thereon males form the majority
* The biggest difference is in 15 year olds with clear female dominance of 59.14%
* While after the tide turning 30 year old males form a majority of 68.57%

And here's the real beef, some charts that chew through the data.

Each image opens up to a higher resolution version for better examination of the data. All charts were made with Apple Numbers (which did beat the hell out of excel for this task):

Image: Facbook Finland Network by Volume, Age and Gender

Image: Facebook Finland Network by Gender distribution and Age

Image: IRC-Galleria by Volume, Age and Gender

Image: IRC-Galleria by Gender distribution and Age

And the Grande Finale:

Image: Facebook Finland Network vs IRC-Galleria on the same scale

I am not going to share the specific numeric data with you on this post. But if you do want to get it; feel free to contact me directly, or leave a comment.

..and then for some conclusions from all of this:

• IRC-Galleria is a service used by "young girls and old men" ;-)
• Facebook seems to have a whole lot of fakes and non-people profiles in the Finland network; if you compare some age group masses to the actual population structure, it doesn't quite add up.
• IRC-Galleria is clearly a youth service, where as Facebook is more used by folks that are generally 4-8 years older
• Finland seems to have an odd "business networking inside Facebook" effect that draws many senior professionals in there. (just a theory/idea)
• Facebook's data shows weird stuff about older males; they use it clearly more than females of the same age, wonder why is that? Grand daddys more adaptive to the Interwebz than grannies?
• The obvious: Social Media services are very much a Girlie Thing. The female dominance in the user figures is quite evident.
• Facebook has been way more successful in attracting females of all ages than IRC-Galleria has. This is quite obvious from looking at the both services in the same scale chart: the violet-color females are so much more "thick" and present in the Facebook demographics.
• Final interesting fact: according to my sources IRC-Galleria is about 6 times better than Facebook in monetizing its users. If Facebook would be equally good in monetization they would make over 2 billion EUR of annual revenue, which they certainly do not achieve quite yet.

I did this whole numbers play without really considering much about what facets in the data might be the most interesting.

How do you find all this, and is there anything useful or insightful in it?

Since this summer I have been actively developing www.runtoshop.com from scratch. Run is aiming to create a central mashup like hub for recommendation activity to boost sales of online stores. The idea is simple: interesting enthusiastic people expressing their strong opinions and recommendations about the stuff that they love leads to increased sales. Run is making this simple idea a reality through the existing social networks and services - acting like a mashed-up hub of social enthusiastic (and sometimes opinionated) recommendation activity that you can search, browse and use to discover cool new stuff.

We were building up speed during the summer, and started testing a service in the finnish language public beta here locally during the fall.

The company has just today signed and closed its most significant financing round yet. The round is lead by Veraventure. Additionally the company is being funded by a group of 8 prominent business angels.

WIth the active public beta test version the company has managed to sign about 410 (or so) online stores onboard as partners. They include big ones like Apple, iTunes, Amazon, Amex, Nike and such, as well as smaller local players: travel agencies, energy companies, online stores for cosmetics, sports, clothing and lifestyle products, etc.

With everything summed up this is my 10th round of financing that I'm involved in. Feels great to reach a milestone like this one!

Getting this round closed has been a lot of work, for the whole team here. And quite possibly the current economical climate isn't making it any easier for any of us. Closing this round is also partially the reason why I have blogged a bit less than say a month ago; getting the final details right and heading for full closure requires some energy and attention from the CEO.

With this round the company can plan all of next year and have a serious enough backing to go after the international markets - with a new and improved product version naturally.

And BTW: RunToShop as of today is currently very actively hiring. If you know competent programmers and web/concept designers, please tell them to be in touch ;-)

Now it's one milestone behind us - and many more to come. I guess this is precisely the time for the "get real or go home" part, right?