Digital Platforms

In the last couple of decades, videos have become the de-facto preferred mode of product marketing. Physical product innovators or makers showcase their products as a 3D animation to represent the product design exactly as it or to show the functional utility of their design. The Danish startup Pinksquare is addressing a couple of major pain points in the technical …

While content might be king, the choice not to choose it yourself has proven to be just as popular. For the founders of Neverthink, the need for a background companion has turned a simple idea into a global success. By Elisa Häggström In an era of video on demand, where favorite series and movies are never more than a few …

At the end of this month at the Slush conference in Helsinki, the Danish startup Valuer.ai will be launching its new platform. Their new matchmaking tool will connect corporations and investors to the startups that best match their needs and interests. Valuer was founded in February this year by Daniel Laursen, previously founder of Trendsonline, Dennis Poulsen, former co-founder of …

In these Trump-times it seems more important than ever to discuss discrimination and how we solve it. As the sharing economy grows it brings to light societal issues of bias and discrimination; but new approaches to data and business models offer hope that bias can one day be a thing of the past. By Pernille Spang Lyndegaard Uncovering racial bias …

We spend more time messaging on our phones than ever before.  What would the most amazing visual messaging service look like?  That was the question Norwegian company DeeMe, founded in 2014, started from. “This question became the DeeMe project, and today our vision is still the same.  The world of social media is in constant change, and we keep on …

Earlier this month, a #nordicmade delegation of 30 Nordic startups attended the LAUNCH Festival in San Francisco.  The tour, organized by STARTNordic, was part of an initiative that promotes the Nordic startup scene by connecting it to other startup ecosystems around the globe.  Juraj Pal of Sure gives a recap of the festival. Juraj Pal is a founder of Sure, …

Last week, Danish news channel DR1 insinuated that Trustpilot was involved in the extortion of small shopkeepers and cheating in user reviews.   The Trustpilot team has now responded to the criticism. Trustpilot was put under the microscope last week in a news story about a beauty salon with poor user reviews.  The salon’s owner, Camilla Rude, who has a …

Norwegian startup Haxi has been given the green light to continue operations.  The court has ruled that the startup is not breaking the law, and can therefore continue to run their shared transport service. Haxi has won an appeals trial in the Norwegian Court of Appeals, following a police complaint on the “pirate” taxi company in 2014.  Three of Haxi’s …

A new era is arriving to Oslo.  Equity crowdfunding has been booming, with an explosion of new platforms and regulations. In 2016, crowdfunding is expected to surpass VC investment. With new legislation such as the passage of the JOBS act in the USA, the funding scene is undergoing a sea-change.  While equity crowdfunding is an exciting new funding solution, regulatory …

As the economy created by alternative finance expands, services like Capdesk will become an essential tool for investors.  Capdesk is a shareholder platform that improves the experience for shareholders of unlisted companies by gathering all investor activities in one place. Although currently only a small percentage of people buy shares in unlisted companies (companies not listed on the stock exchange), …

Nowadays, the apps on your smartphone today are far more likely to be created in Stockholm or Sweden than in Silicon Valley. If asked most people would assume these businesses are American or British creations, but they’d be wrong.While they may have now moved the bulk of their staff to those countries, these businesses are flag bearers of the Nordic …

Finnish ed-tech startup Funzi starts with a premise you may be familiar with – learning on a mobile phone. But their unique focus on emerging markets has people around the world sitting up and taking notice. Funzi is reinventing how learning is delivered – not in terms of content, but in terms of the delivery of learning to the individual. …

The real-time publishing platform Socius captures and curates content shared on the social web to create unique and engaging stories. Socius just closed their seed round after 2,5 years of development that includes an accelerated 3 months in Axel Springer’s accelerator in Berlin. There investors include 500 Startups and Raw Invest (Bergen based firm). Their final sum of 1.300.000 Nok …

The two-day tech conference Next, which happened in the middle of the four-day Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg, was an introduction to the new technologies that will shape of how we will live and work in the future.  But what about the ethics behind these technologies? It all comes down to the kind of legacy we are leaving and what we …

One of the main themes at NEXT15 , the two-day tech conference that occurred concurrently with Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg, was mobility. The conference attempted to answer the question “How will we move?” with all the opportunities and challenges that it implies. But zooming out and looking at the question in the context of the entire conference – with discussions …

Ultrahack took place from 6- 8th November in Helsinki in anticipation of the massive startup conference Slush, and is one of the biggest hackathons in Europe. Hackers from around Europe (and even some from the US) developed their ideas over one long weekend, before presenting them to investors in hopes of getting them off the ground, or in some cases, …

With a mission to create new frontiers for the expanding digital economy, Strawpay has developed a new open payment network: Stroem. It all started with a discussion club in Stockholm several years back, where the founders discussed their common interest in bitcoin. They hit upon an idea: to create a new open payment system that builds on advanced features of …

Take your event to the next level. That is what EventEye offers their customers. Working as a freelance app developer Fredrik Hoel, CEO and co-founder of EventEye discovered that he kept doing the same thing over and over again. He started to question why he had to ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time he made an app for an event. He came up with …

The grand prize at Ultrahack 2015 went to the Butterfly Effect Project, who participated in the Civic Tech Track sponsored by Forum Virium. The project aims to enhance the way cities handle urban planning, by creating a platform for citizen involvement. The team, led by Natalia Remee, an architect by training from Northern Mexico, came from diverse backgrounds and nationalities:  …

A way of making safe purchases on the second hand-market is finally here. Swiftcourt is launching an unique service that gives you the possibility of securing your deal. By signing a sales contract using Swiftcourt, a dissatisfied buyer gets the right to dispute the purchase in case something goes wrong. Losing a few hundred euros or more to a seller …