Startups from Finland: VerticeTree Creates Business From of Social Networks
VerticeTree is a Finnish startup founded in October 2007 that offers “Research, technology and consulting for online and mobile social networks”.
Their offering is divided into three areas: Network analysis and visualization (Analyzing and visualizing your most valuable customers in social networks), Advertising experiments (pretesting of advertising -which is nothing new - and Facebook apps) and Social targeting of advertising which sounds somewhat similar what Facebook does with its Newsfeed and Beacon.
So far VerticeTree has created PlayFinland, which is a community (web site and a Facebook group) for the Finnish Game industry funded by Tekes and an interesting Facebook experiment on the network of one apps users. What VerticeTree is doing is very interesting and I’m really looking forward in hearing more from these guys in the future.
Startups from Finland: Zipipop Makes Life and Feedback More Fun
Zipipop’s mission is to share life and make feedback more fun. Whatever that means. So far they have released a couple of Facebook apps, but apparently their initial business idea had something to do with feedback - hence the logo that features Zipi the feedback fish.
I’ll have to cover Zipipop again when I’ll find out what they are really trying to accomplish.
Startups from Finland: Petsie - Social Networking for Pets
Petsie is social networking for pets. Dogs, cats, horses, rodents - you name it - even rubber ducks. The site doesn’t have that many networking features, just the the typical profiles with commenting and the possibility to have friends. A nice feature is the abilities of each pet - cleanliness (from sleazebag to clean), intelligence, speed etc. The pets’ owners also have their profiles.
Petsie was started in 2006 and so far there are more than 17k pets on the site. The service is available currently in three languages: English, Finnish and Swedish.
Startups from Finland: MuslimSpace is a MySpace Clone for Muslims
MuslimSpace is a social networking site for Muslims that’s based in Espoo, Finland. According to Alexa they reach 145k users per week. The users come from around the world. The top three countries are Malaysia (18.5%), United States (13.6%) and Serbia and Montenegro (12.3%).
MuslimSpace is very much a MySpace clone especially when looking at the profile pages which feature all the same elements as MySpace. Besides the usual networking features the site also has blogs, photo galleries, groups, polls and forums.
Read more…
Platform Wars Are Upon Us
The Season of Social Network Platforms is apparently here. All the major and smaller social networks are opening up their services. I believe the winners are not the social networks themselves, who will be forced to open their users’ social graphs, and thus their competitive advantage, but now smaller widget-like services that tap into the users’ social graphs across several, if not almost all, social networking sites.
The season for social network platforms is now, but the fight is just starting.
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