Muxlim

Muxlim continues it's interesting "path of conquest" or at least "path of success" by grabbing a very prestigious award; the 2009 Internationalization Award. They just announced it today at around 3pm. This is significant noteworthy limelight for a startup; as this award has a history of over 40 years, and not that many startups have ever received it (you could argue that none of the previous winners were startups). In fact they usually go to well-known big corporations that have been international for quite a while. Muxlim now receives the exact same award as Nokia did back in 1999. It's a positive thing for the whole startup community to get recognition to one of its members.

Muxlim's CEO, Mr. M (Mohamed El-Fatatry) is going to attend President Obama's Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Wshington D.C. this spring as well. It looks like "presidential attention" on Muxlim is going to continue, even attention of the binational kind.

Finpro's CEO also comments: "The Internationalization Awards of the President of the Republic highlights concepts and business models as examples for other Finnish companies that are going international. This year, all the award-winners represent highly specialized expertise and the combination of expertise from many different industries. Furthermore, the international service industry has an important role in their businesses,” says Jorma Turunen, President and CEO of Finpro."

The official info continues: "Every year, Finpro looks for candidates for the Internationalization Awards and carries out their preliminary assessment. Based on the evaluation the Board of Directors of Finpro proposes a list of candidates to the President in collaboration with the Association for Finnish Work. The President of the Republic decides the winners of the Internationalization Award. Today’s award ceremony was the 42nd in the history of the award."

Nice to see that a startup has found its way up there ;) Finpro notes that Pictures of the Award winners are here at some point: http://finpro.materials.fi > Events

Now what does this mean to a startup then? Hopefully better recognition and a strong show of support to its legitimacy and right to exists. Startups often lack super-strong reference and concrete evidence to prove their value and usefulness. Recognition like this will certainly carry some weight and should help build trust towards customers, consumers, investors and partners alike. After all, they do check this stuff, make their DD and are careful about who to nominate for these kinds of awards. I am sure any startup would welcome equal fame and recognition with open arms, as any startup will need every advantage out there to pull through and eventually make it big. Looks like Muxlm is well on their way!

Congratulations! Great work Team Muxlim!

"There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction”
- Winston Churchill

I am in the middle doing a few changes in my professional life;

1) I will leave www.muxlim.com Board of Directors, and hand over my seat to a senior International figure in the online media world. His mission as the new board member is to help Muxlim become a world class online media advertisers can rely on in getting their messages across.

2) As of 1st of April I'll leave the CEO position in RunToShop and join the company's board of directors (Currently I'm not in the board). I will continue to be a part-time influence in RunToShop and focus on helping the team there to continue on the road to progress and results. RunToShop has had a good 2009 so far; getting more funding just before xmas has allowed the company to focus on execution and progress. Run is about to introduce a new product that will bring a "social layer" of recommendations, reviews and opinions to every webstore in a way that affects sales and awareness positively. This milestone simultaneously ends my CEO assignment, and the rest of the team takes charge.

This means that from April onwards I have ample time on my hands ;) and I am currently screening available opportunities to either start something new myself, or join a project/team/company in accomplishing something new and great.

If you would happen to have something in mind; let me know!

www.muxlim.com has won the Startup -category of the Grand One'09 competition!

Muxlim was up against www.eat.fi and www.tripsay.com in the finale.

The winners were announced in an awards ceremony that's still ongoing at the time when this entry went public. There's going to be a bit of a celebration party later on, I'm sure.

Muxlim's design is made by FWD Helsinki. And this is as much of a victory for them as it is for Muxlim.

Here's the competition entry page Muxlim has put up:

http://muxlim.com/grandone/

Great to see people recognize a good startup when they see one ;) And a big hand to everyone behind the hard work done for Muxlim's success!

www.muxlim.com the world's largest social media site for muslims has been selected to be one of the Red Herring 2008 global finalists.

I am on the board of directors, and one of the business angels funding the company.

You can find the full finalist list with 200 names on it from here:

http://www.herringevents.com/global08/redherring100.html

ActicStartup.com writes about it in here:

http://www.arcticstartup.com/red-herring-global-top-100-finalists-announ...

Additionally Muxlim has received a bunch of publicity lately. Just last week Muxlim did interviews for Abu Dhabi satellite TV, The National, BBC, Reuters, etc.

Blogs have written tons about Muxlim lately. In the last 10 days I have received 63 separate Google Blogs -alerts about new postings on Muxlim.

A blogserach.google.com search for "Muxlim" produces over 35 thousand results, here:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=muxlim&btnG=Sea...

Seems like the very interesting story is finally getting some traction after all.

I did an interview with Viktoria Trosien for Tiburon TV at the Slush Helsinki event. It just got posted online as a video that you can find from here:

http://www.tiburon-tv.com/2008/12/01/i-started-with-failing-serial-entre...

It's about how I "started with eventually failing" when Taika Technologies had to discontinue after a promising start (that's another war story then). And moves on to stuff that I have been involved in, my views and opinions about how Finland is as a place for startups and what's the local scene like etc.

I make a claim that Finland would be a forward-looking place where people are willing to abandon the old ways if they don't work. Is this really true or not, what do you think?