success story

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!

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 realized that I haven't yet blogged about ye olde story on how Star Wreck was distributed and spread all over the world.

Image: Tiina Routamaa, Lt Whip, the Helmswoman of C.P.P. Kickstart.
(from: www.starwreck.com)

It was around the autumn of 2005, I was the CEO of Magenta, a specialized hosting/infrastructure company that owned and operated networks, data centers and server farms in different cities globally. After talking with Timo Vuorensola and Samuli Torssonen (the dudes behind Star Wreck) we made a bunch of calculations on how much it would cost us to organize a world wide download of the film. Magenta was a stable publicly listed company with enough financial backing and very broad data lines so it didn't turn out to be too much; so we decided to jump in and help distribute the up-and-coming cult legend to worldwide audiences.

This was 2005 and there had not really been any large-scale global legally done distributions of a motion picture. So we were braking new ground here. Eventually Star Wreck turned out to be the most viewed Finnish film to date, with over 8 million downloads and the online distribution itself was the largest of its kind in the history of cinema.

You can still find some old articles about it online here (finnish), and here (finnish).

We started distributing the film as a direct download and as a torrent-file from something like 12 servers globally. New York and London being the primary hotspots. We also set up a torrent to seed the movie files with infrastructure provider -level bandwidth. Needless to say the eager fans managed to cap even our allocated bandwidth ;) the situation eased off when the P2P feed through torrents kicked in.

There's an old archive page here from 2005 that shows the original download content:

http://www.archive.org/details/StarWreckInThePirkining

It even displays a Magenta -add in the beginning of the clip, saying "download provided by Magenta".

The version with remade effects is amazing, so if you haven't seen the film yet (shame on you) go get the Imperial Edition from here, and enjoy.

Julia Dietze as Renate Richter (from Iron Sky Propaganda department)

What have the guys been up to lately?

www.ironsky.net

Besides a really cool new movie (what could be better than Space Nazis invading the earth?) the guys have also been building up www.wreckamovie.com

Wreckamovie is a platform for collaborative film production. They already have few thousand users and close to 100 different-sized film productions ongoing. One of them is their own Iron Sky, a science fiction comedy about bunch of Nazi invaders that return from their hideout from the Far Side of the Moon to Earth in 2018.

The idea with Wreckamovie is quite simple: a filmmaker can come over the website and set up his or hers film production, and start gathering a community around it. Filmmakers throw "tasks" to the community, and the community gives "shots" in return to them, thus helping the filmmaker to realize his or hers vision.

The advantages are two-folded: first, you get people to help you to realize your film production. And then, you create a very tight, active and close community of advocates for your film, in much more effective ways than most of the film marketing nowadays is done.

Often you hear people dreaming and thinking about creating a strong positive buzz for their upcoming production before it's released for everybody to view; well Wreckamovie seems to hit precisely that spot by providing a valuable tool for just that.

Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring originally invoked a similar strategy. Gordon Paddison, a senior vice president of New Line Cinema together with Peter Jackson and other filmmakers made a very smart decision to systematically include about 400 known online communities, sites and fanclubs of Tolkien and his books to the pre-production. They invited all of them to join their own similar Wreckamovie-like platform (they build it in www.lordoftherings.net) and gave them a sneak-peak behind the scenes; into wardrobe design, set design, some early storyboards etc. Peter Jackson himself personally spent a great deal of time talking to these fanclubs, making video calls (over Apple iTalk) and involving them in a dialogue about making the film as compatible as possible with the vision Tolkien had and the fans of his work had. The movie went on to win 11 Oscars and become one of the most profitable film series of all time. This famous case TOTALLY proved the Wreckamovie model and case. Wreckamovie guys have just kindly created the platform for you and got the ball rolling quite nicely on that. Lord of the rings had an existing fanbase of millions; so that naturally helped them. However the same tools and same models can be applied even to a fanbase of zero. Who would not want to participate in envisioning Space Nazis? :)

Wreckamovie guys just started quite an interesting new production, completely collaboratively produced Internet TV-series about crimes committed over the Internet - cybercrimes - called Project WORM - and are looking for collaborators to help them get the production flying. Go and discover what's that about, and get involved!

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!

Xiha Life (www.xihalife.com) is a multi-lingual social network enjoying 1M+ monthly unique visitors and expanding rapidly.

XIha has been making revenue by selling casual games from their website (amongst other models). Recently they slashed their game pricing;

http://en.xihalife.com/b/webmaster/blog/new-game-pricing/

..to half or less than half of what it used to be (from 20 EUR to 7-10 EUR)

www.arcticstartup.com wrote about it here:

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2009/02/06/xiha-life-drops-prices-to-attrac...

..saying that "If you look at pricing on a larger scale - it doesn’t make much sense to try and sell casual games at 20-30 dollars"

And Xiha's case would seem to prove this; since making the change the average revenue Xiha gets from this source has gone above the average. Which can only mean that lower prices actually broaden the "market" and more consumers than ever before are buying the products.

It is just about as classical pricing strategy dilemma as anything could be; figuring out your optimal volume versus your optimal price tag is rarely a cakewalk. Questions like; would you business need 10K transactions at 10 EUR each? or 100K transactions at 1.2 EUR each? are really hard to work out in practice.

Consumer Internet services and online communities however offer an ideal experimental ground in this regard; they either love what you are doing, or hate it. Sometimes the response is lukewarm and you can't tell. What ever the case there is usually an immediate reaction to everything you do; the results being instantly visible in your business and key metrics.

Ilja Laurs (http://www.mobileattitudes.org/) the CEO GetJar in our Slush panel (http://tane.li/2008/panel-slush) really stressed the importance of having good metrics and KPI's in place from the beginning when you are building your online business. Very much agree with that; figuring out your KPIs early and building a culture of daily check on them is important and can help you make smarter decisions in situations where the visibility otherwise is near zero (which it almost always is with Startups).

Way to go Xiha Life!