financing

TechCrunch Europe just came out with the announcement from Xiha:

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/xiha-life-secures-1m-and-adds-jaikus-engestrom-to-board/

This is also the very first Vigo -deal, making it the pilot case and first fruit of the whole Vigo growth company financing and acceleration programme. As I mentioned in my last blog entry I have been in the Vigo steering group since last fall. Glad to see the programme working and in action.

With more proper funding Xiha is quite certainly hiring. So keep on eye on the job postings, especially if you are well versed in the art of PHP programming, statistics science and agile methodologies.

Cool stuff! Yet another good finnish startup gets a real chance at going out there and shining like the star they are!

Gratz to Jani + team for closing this at a very demanding time.

I have joined the board of directors of Balancion (www.balancion.com), a company on a mission to help you save money and organize your personal finances.. Actually I joined the board a while back, blogging about it now because it will soon be grand opening time for Balancion's service.

Probably the most famous startup in this space is Mint (www.mint.com), that has been very successful in attracting customers (they had 1.2 million users in June, according to their CEO as interviewed by PaidContent.org), Mint is focusing on the US markets. There are other players in this field as well, to name a few: www.wesabe.com, www.rudder.com, www.geezo.com, www.xero.com, and Expensr.. All of which are almost solely US-focused.

Balancion is not only bringing the same concept to the Finnish, Scandinavian and EU markets, but also looking to enhance it quite a bit in the process. Currently the company is looking for beta-testers into the Finnish test market launch (go sign up at www.balancion.com), which will be around October this year. Balancion also has a Facebook page with some additional info in there; http://www.facebook.com/balancion

Antti Akonniemi has some (finnish only, sorry) thoughts on Balancion in their "Binesmiehet" site, here.

ArcticStartup just recently wrote an article on Balancion.

Balancion is CEO'd by Mr. Jussi Muurikainen and implemented with the help of the good folks from Idean. The company is financed and BoD-governed by owners & executives from the footwear company Jalas.

The central idea is to offer a service that will automatically keep track of your finances and offer you plenty of help and guidance in how to sort it all out, save some money, and quite probably end up in a situation that is much more financially well off. Naturally its also about more intelligent spending; saving money and using it for the kinds of things that you really want/need; like a good holiday every once and while. "Automatically" in this context means that the service has the capability to read in your credit card, bank account etc statements automatically and build the analysis on those. The targeted use-case here is that after some initial info and registering the user needs only to spend money and the service will be able to sort it all out. Balancion is certainly well on its way in implementation towards this.

Ever heard some rich people say that it's not really in how much you earn, but rather in how little you spend? There's real wisdom in that thought and the evidence of it actually working is quite overwhelming.

The truth is that the personal finances of most people are out of control today. Somehow people have confused being in debt with actually owning something. Many who claim to own their own homes, businesses, cars etc, are in fact up to their ears in debt and the bank is never very far from de facto owning their possessions. People are brought up with this idea that credit and debt equals money from almost since birth. They enter the working life and society with all kinds of funny notions on this topic, and the results of that we see everywhere; bloated housing prices, everyone and their dog up their arses in debt, and you still wonder where the financial crisis did come from? It would do a world of good if people actually bothered to find out how money mechanics work, or even arse themselves to as little as googling what is a "Fiat Currency"....

People desperately need to start loaning less, saving more and living a financially sustainable life.

This would also be a better deal for the banks: financially stable people taking educated risks and well positioned to pay back everything they loan. And they still should loan; where it makes sense, and where they can pay it back, in a sustainable way.

How much debt I have? About a 1000 euros, and its all in my credit card. Why do I even have credit cards? Because I travel and they give you better exchange rates on foreign currencies than the rip-off bereau de change. Plus they have insurances and stuff..

OK enough for the rant there ;-)

Solutions like Balancion are in high demand, and I hope services like these would have some impact on society and people would start to think about financial sustainability, savings, debt, etc in a more educated and successful manner.

It's been a pleasure to be involved with developing another well-backed startup full of enthusiasm and great ideas. Consider joining the beta and checking it out - it's not like you wouldn't need to be more financially successful, right? ;)

Mashable just came out with an interesting story that I'm blogging about because it's worth a read, and it is relevant to what I have been posting here about Facebook previously. Also its relevant to what is happening in the economy and with the US dollar right now.

Go read it:

http://mashable.com/2009/02/12/facebook-valuation-3/

(in the post Mashable is quoting Associated Press and links a bunch of documents that indicate FB's valuation to be 3.7 billion USD or less)

Earlier in July 24 2008 the PEDataCenter blog posted some juicy info on Facebook valuations as well:

http://pedatacenter.com/pedc/blog/view/10

The latest entry in their post gives Facebook a valuation of 7.75 USD per share in February 26 2008. and now the Mashable post has it at 8.88 USD per share. Not that much positive growth in a years time, don't you think?

If fact if you look at data from the Federal Reserve:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/h3.htm

...they have been printing so much US dollars out of thin air, and granting so much loans lately that it is arguable that the US dollar has lost so much of its value that the valuation (or rather; true value) of FB is actually far less now than it was a year ago.

The FED just 2 days ago unveiled a 1 trillion dollar program to print more US dollars out of thin air and give them out as credit:

http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/10/news/companies/consumer_loans/index.htm

What happens to value of money when more money suddenly appears out of thin air? It dilutes like the entrepreneur who takes onboard 4 VCs at once..

Facebook being valued at 3.7 billion USD is perhaps secondary news to the fact that 3.7 billion USD isn't quite what it used to be, and with more money being printed out of nothing the trend is likely to continue towards perhaps even a total value collapse of the dollar. Which would certainly bode interesting times to us all, and to Facebook's survival as well.

.. I suggest that you stay on top of this and keep an eye on what happens with the dollar. It certainly doesn't look all that rosy right now, and there's a sense of huge looming risks in the air.

One e-newsletter on this that I can honestly endorse would be this one:

http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/gateway.asp

Subscribe to that, and especially read the latest issue from Feb 6.

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?

www.xihalife.com a finnish fast-growing startup with a bit of an unusual background has announced that they have closed a significant financing round with a chinese investor.

I am involved in Xiha as an advisor and a small owner.

Xiha is a multilingual social network that's available in over 40 languages and has more than 800 thousand (close to 1M) uniques a month from over 200 countries in the world. The company and the site is founded by finnish-chinese couple with an impressive background in the gaming industry.

With the investment Xiha is capable of hiring a few new entire teams to work on the service, and to open up offices in Zürich, the US and in China.

The big growth opportunity lies in multilingual people that are pretty much all over the map globally; in the US alone there's about 37 million people who are immigrants and know at least a second language. Many people are pretty fed up being forced to have their social networks in one language only. I personally have this problem in Facebook; mixing together english-only friends with my finnish-only friends doesn't quite work all that well, and Xiha hits the mark in this particular usecase with laser precision. In this blog post I talked about my first company Taika, and back in 2000 we solved a social networking presence/microblogging problem that the Facebooks of today have still not really solved; we came up with a simple usable and fast way to send different status messages and microblog entries to different contact groups simultaneously. Xiha totally solves this from the language point of view. Get in there, register and try it out for yourself.

CC Attribution: Vanessa Pike-Russel@Flickr

What's really impressive is that Xiha's rate of unique user growth is over 20% a month; with kind of unusual markets like Turkey, China, Brazil, and France. Xiha is expected to reach over 1M uniques by the end of the year, and keep on growing strong after that. The company was founded only last year - so it's gone from zero to 100 pretty quick.

Here's Xiha's founder on Xihalife.com. And this would be me in there as well.

I see Xiha as being fresh, unique and really in a speed-train-like growth towards possibly becoming a really well known success case. Xiha's primary revenue model is digital content; like casual games, etc. There's more than a 1000 PC and MAC games available.

Want to learn something about making successful social networks? Register to Xiha and go for the "gold member challenge", found here:
http://en.xihalife.com/gold/ -that's something that sort of reveals the gaming background of the founder. It's a challenge that motivates the user to go through a series of fun tasks (or "quests" as a World of Warcraft player would call them, right?) and the end reward is a gold member status. Works like a charm - go try it out and take notes.