Nokia’s newly-appointed general manager of China, Erik Bertman, has plenty of experience in emerging markets, but it’s unclear if he’ll be able to reverse the Finnish company’s rapid loss of market share in the world’s largest smartphone market.

Bertman will takeover the position on June 1. He succeeds Gustavo Eichelmann, who is leaving Nokia and returning to the U.K. for personal reasons, according to the company. In a statement, Nokia said Bertman was appointed to lead operations in China because “he has achieved good results in a number of important markets” and has experience leading cross-cultural teams.

Originally from Sweden, Bertman previously served as the regional lead of Nokia Russia, where he oversaw sales and marketing. His experience with the company also includes a stint as financial officer in the sub-Saharan Africa region. Bertman arrived in China in 2009.

Despite his experience in emerging markets, Bertman has a lot of work to do if he wants to turn around Nokia’s fortunes in China. The company’s market share in that country underwent a dramatic decline in 2012 as it failed to weather competition from Samsung.

The Finnish company slipped to number seven in overall sales in 2012, with 3.7 percent market share, compared to the 29.9 percent chunk it held in 2011, according to Strategy Analytics. It’s rapid descent was mirrored by Samsung’s quick rise to the top–the Korean tech giant nearly tripled its China sales in 2012, selling 30.06 million smartphones, up from 10.9 million handsets a year earlier. Samsung now holds a 17.7 percent market share in China.

Furthermore, Nokia has had three people leading its China operations in as many years: Deng Yuan-yun, Liang Yu-mei and Eichelmann. The position’s rotating door may be a sign that the company is unsure of its strategy in that region.

A turnaround in emerging markets is crucial for Nokia’s survival because North America has been the company’s weakest market for sometime. Last month, Nokia reported $334 million in sales in Greater China, down 56 percent from a year ago, a figure that puts it just above North America in terms of market size for the company.

Nokia’s dramatic decline in China comes despite its efforts to hold on to its former dominance in the market with low-cost the launch of the Nokia Lumia 800C in March 2012. The device was the first CDMA Windows Phone in the country, but it failed to gain enough traction to compete against inexpensive Android handsets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Inventure-backed Froont has launched in public beta today with a web-based tool that aims to make it easy for designers to create, prototype and share responsive website designs, without the need to code. Using a visual, largely drag ‘n’ drop interface that creates responsive CSS/HTML on the fly, it aims to replace the somewhat arcane process where a designer hands off a Photoshop mockup for a developer to interpret. In fact, Froont offers the potential to leave developers out of the design (and even prototyping) process altogether, which in some cases may be a very good thing.

Responsive web design — where a single version of a site is designed to adapt in size and layout depending on the device that it’s being viewed on — is particularly in vogue right now. And with the proliferation of various types of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets etc.), alongside the traditional desktop, it’s easy to see why. A responsive approach to web design offers an attractive solution to reaching as wide an audience as possible without necessarily degrading their experience, even if it does make some compromises.

But the old way of designing websites, and the traditional division of labour, doesn’t necessarily scale well if you’re jumping on the responsive bandwagon. Trying to represent a responsive design in a series of static Photoshop mockups to show how a site will adapt when viewed on various screen sizes involves quite a lot of compromise. One solution is to have the non-coding designer work hand in hand with a front-end developer to prototype their Photoshop designs in HTML/CSS, thus making them viewable as is and to get a feel for how the responsive design will work in practice. This approach, however, can involve a lot of unnecessary back and forth as the design gets lost in translation.

Instead, Froont wants to hand control back to designers by letting them visually create working responsive designs that, because they are built using HTML/CSS and hosted in the cloud, can be viewed and shared instantly in a web browser, on any device being targeted. And when it’s time to hand off the design to a developer, instead of a static PNG file or something similar, in theory they’re given “nice, clean HTML/CSS or the ‘face’ of the website already made,” says the company.

The tool itself, though only in Beta, appears to be quite easy to get to grips with without being overly restrictive. It’s primarily WYSIWYG, employing a palette of tools and lots of drag ‘n’ drop, making it easy to add text, import graphics and tinker with typography and layout. Obviously, the aim here is to create a responsive design and in this respect Froont has some nice touches, such as a sliding ruler at the top of the page that adjusts the targeted screen size on the fly, instantly updating how your design changes as it responds. You’re also able to set “break points” to denote when the layout of your content shouldn’t simply reflow as the target device’s screen size differs but should change all together.

Although there are lots of visual web design tools that target different stages of the process or a finished site entirely, in terms of tackling responsive design at the initial HTML/CSS stage, Adobe’s Reflow probably comes closest. The main difference, says Froont, is that its tool runs in the browser, which means that its output can be shared instantly with team members, clients or developers for feedback and testing. Also, however subtle a difference, Froont isn’t so much aiming at simplifying coding but providing better tools for design.

Froont’s team of six is spread across San Francisco, Finland and Latvia. The company is founded by Sandijs Ruluks (designer/CEO), Andris Silis (CTO), Anna Andersone (operations and marketing) and Eli Altman (PR), and originally graduated from the Finnish accelerator Startup Sauna, giving it an avenue to raise €100,000 from Finnish VC fund Inventure. Froont also appears to at least be a partial pivot. The same team is behind the content management system Berta, which although described as a side-project, is still operational and I’m told is profitable.

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Bitbar, the startup behind cloud-based mobile app testing platform Testdroid, has announced that it has closed a $3 million funding round. The round was led by Creathor Venture, DFJ Esprit, Finnvera Venture Capital, and, interestingly, mobile chipmaker Qualcomm via its venture arm, Qualcomm Ventures. Finland’s TEKES financing also participated.

The new funds will be used by the Finnish company to expand its mobile developer tools beyond Android, iOS and HTML5, as well as “beyond just testing”, though it isn’t elaborating any further for now. The company had previously raised an undisclosed seed round from unnamed angels and Finnvera Venture Capital.

Bitbar provides a range of mobile software development and testing solutions based on open standards aimed at app developers and enterprises to make it easier to ensure that their mobile apps work properly on the devices that they are targeting. Its flagship product is the cloud-based Android testing solution, Testdroid Cloud, which offers automated and real-time testing for mobile application developers via hosting and providing access to over 200 Android-powered smartphones and other devices.

As the Android ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragmented, along with the prolification of competing mobile platforms overall, app compatabiliy and testing is a big headache for developers. Getting an app to run smoothly across various configurations is both costly and time consuming, requiring many hours of manual testing as part of the QA process — presuming, of course, that you have access to each and every device and OS version being targeted. And that’s the killer. Offering access to a multitude of devices via the cloud, provided as a service and supported by automated tools and scripting, is obviously a far more efficient way of going about.

To that end, Testdroid Cloud, Bitbar offers Testdroid Recorder to automatically generate standards-based test scripts and Testdroid Server for companies to build in-house test labs.

Its customer list includes Ancestry.com, BMW, Critical Path, eBay (US and UK), Evernote, Facebook, Flipboard, Google, LivingSocial, Lookout, PayPal, Pinterest, Saffron Digital, SoundCloud, Swiftkey, Tesco, The Weather Channel, Top Free Games and Wooga.

Competitors to Bitbar include TestOject, and testCloud. The latter takes a slightly different approach to multi-device testing by employing the crowd instead of automation. Similarly, U.S.-based uTest also takes a manual approach with its crowd of 60,000 ‘professional’ testers, as does Bangalore’s 99tests.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jolla, the Finnish startup comprised of ex-Nokians who left to keep the MeeGo fire burning, has confirmed it will be showing off its first handset next month, and kicking off a “pre-sales” campaign to allow fans to register to buy the phone. Although Jolla has demoed its Sailfish UI in some detail before, it has generally been tight-lipped about its plans for the device’s hardware design — so next month will mean another big reveal.

Jolla had previously pegged the second half of this year for its debut device launch. Today it has confirmed to TechCrunch that this launch timeframe is not changing, despite its intention to show the phone next month. It provided the following emailed statement confirming the pre-sales campaign and noting that the shipping timeframe remains the same:

Jolla, the Finnish startup that carried the MeeGo torch out of Nokia in order to light a fire under its own smartphone OS: Sailfish, has taken the next step in its platform play, launching SDK installers to encourage developers to get building native Sailfish apps.

It’s offering graphical installers for Windows, OS X and Linux (in 32 bit and 64 bit flavours). The SDK itself was released back in February, during the Mobile World Congress tradeshow — where Jolla made a big sales pitch to carriers.

Jolla’s plans for Sailfish include licensing the OS to other device makers and creating customised, branded versions of the software for third parties. But it also intends to create its own Jolla-branded phone hardware running Sailfish. Although Sailfish will support Android, Qt and HTML5 apps, Jolla wants native apps to be part of the mix — to fully take advantage of the Sailfish UI features and properly bring the platform to life as it seeks to build a fully fledged ecosystem.

The Sailfish UI was demoed at the Slush startup event in Finland last November. The software has a big focus is on usability, with pulling and pushing gestures used to navigate and select/view content, allowing a lot to be achieved with one-handed interaction. The platform also supports true multitasking — to allow currently running apps to appear as interactive tiles on the homescreen. These tiles then support app interactions — giving developers scope to customise how users can interact with their apps when they are sitting as tiles on the Sailfish homescreen.

The first Jolla-branded Sailfish handset is due in the second half of this year — likely in time to capture the Christmas market. Jolla CEO Marc Dillon wouldn’t be drawn into predictions of how many native Sailfish apps the OS will have when the first Jolla device launches when TechCrunch spoke to him back in February, saying only that: “We’re getting a lot of interest from developers.”

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Samsung Electronics topped China’s smartphone market for the first time in 2012, according to data from Strategy Analytics (reported by Yonhap News Agency). The Korean tech behemoth nearly tripled its sales in the world’s largest market for smartphones: in 2012, it sold 30.06 million smartphones in China, up from 10.9 million handsets a year earlier. According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung now holds a 17.7 percent market share–an astonishingly rapid climb considering that the company only started selling mobile devices in China in 2009.

Chinese company Lenovo took the second spot with market share of 13.2 percent, up four percent from 2011, while Apple came in third with an 11 percent market share, followed by China’s own Huawei Technologies with 9.9 percent and Coolpad with 9.7 percent. Samsung’s fast ascent mirrors Nokia’s quick plummet–the Finnish company is now number seven in China, with 3.7 market share, compared to 29.9 percent in 2011.

Despite Samsung’s dominance in China and its current position as the world’s top smartphone maker, it’s still too early for the company to rest on its laurels. Data from Strategy Analytics showed that Samsung’s fourth-quarter sales lagged behind Apple due to stronger demand for the iPhone 5. In Q4 2012, Samsung Electronics took 28.7 percent of the global smartphone market, much less than Apple’s 42.7 percent–but it’s important to note that a direct sales comparison is difficult because the iPhone 5 launched in September, allowing it to take advantage of the holiday buzz, while Samsung’s Galaxy SIII debuted back in May and sales may be dwindling because users are waiting for their first look at the Galaxy SIV on March 14.

In China, however, Samsung will have to ward off ambitious competitors like Xiaomi, which is busy building up its brand cachet and plans to sell 15 million smartphones this year and Lenovo, which recently declared that it’s their “aspiration” to overtake Samsung as China’s top smartphone maker.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It isn’t necessarily easy to attract international visitors to the cold reaches of Northern Finland. But despite any geographical challenges, members of Oulu’s Starttaamo hub have managed to attract more than €10 million in angel and VC investment over the past two years — from Finnish and international investors.

Add in government support, subsidies and initial capital, and the total funding stands between €20 million and €25 million, says Teemu Polo, one of the not-for-profit hub’s founders and members of the board.

The organisation has not disclosed which (or how many) of its members account for the €20m to €25m — so it’s a little hard to quantify how well its startups are doing — but it does say it has around 50 members at present (individuals can also sign up as members to get a reduced membership rate). Among Starttaamo’s current roster of members are Bitbar, Brightsign, Fantastec, InterestID, Soljuva, Valkee, WeTell Networks and W-Secure, to name a few.

For some context on the Finnish investment landscape, Polo says the Finnish VC Association puts the official figure for Finnish VC investments at €59.5 million in 2011, and €34.8 million for the first half of 2012. So €20m to €25m for one startup hub ain’t bad.

Starttaamo, which translates from the Finnish as ‘a place to start up’, was founded in 2011 by Polo and some fellow startup “activists”, Polo having ran a “discussion club for startup and Internet services people” prior to that. Members get to use/hang out in a shared co-working space, though not all its members are based there all the time. The hub also organizes events and networking opportunities, and offers a mentoring program.

“Oulu city wants to be the capital of Northern Scandinavia… and Starttaamo has sort of copied the same idea: we want to be the startup hub of the Northern Scandinavia,” Polo tells TechCrunch. ”It has proven fairly difficult for the government authorities to invite VCs here… It has been maybe a lot easier for us to convince the guys to come over.”

“There’s some good cities [in the region] and of course there’s good thoughts. It’s not anything that only big cities or vibrant ecosystems would have bright people. There’s bright people all around and they might have all good ideas but it’s the connections in the end that matter — how you can get feedback from VCs, from accelerators, from coaches and so forth. And you need the ecosystem and you need the mass to attract those opinion leaders here and that’s what we try to fill in,” he adds.

Oulu has its fair share of mobility-related and gaming startups, says Polo. Health and wellness is another focus for the area, which also has expertise in mass production. “Printed electronics is something that is being heavily invested in by the local city,” he says.

Oulu was in the news earlier this week when Nokia divested itself of another Finnish asset – selling its Peltola campus in the city to a domestic business space provider, with an agreement to lease back around half the space, leaving space for local startups to colonise.

Despite its own present difficulties, Nokia’s influence is never far from the Finnish startup scene. Multiple Starttaamo members have a Nokia background, says Polo — himself a 12-year Nokia veteran who left the company when it was still riding (relatively) high, back in 2009, to pursue startup ambitions. Many of those leaving Nokia’s fold to set up a business have benefited from grants via the Nokia Bridge program — which gives grants of up to €150,000, and can also help with follow on loans.

But Nokia is evidently giving back more to Finland’s startup ecosystem than merely money: namely talent, experience, connections and expertise. Part of what makes Oulu a good base for startups is its proximity to former Nokia talent, says Polo. “We do have a lot of this mobile background and a lot of good specialists from Nokia and the good thing about these guys is they are accustomed to do big things,” says Polo.

“What’s unique about Nokia — there’s a lot of guys who have done international business in large scale, in different cultures and so forth thanks to Nokia. And also there’s a lot of nice connections that people have — for example telecom operators, OEMs, these sort of businesses… Now we just have to take those resources into use,” he adds.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Applifier, a Helsinki-based mobile gaming network, wants to see your game face. Their product Everyplay, which records players at their best (or worst) moments inside mobile games, is launching a new feature today that uses the iPhone’s front-facing camera to record your reactions.

Yes, the videos are maybe a little awkward. See the one above. There’s probably a viral video montage in here someday.

The new feature, called “FaceCam,” is in beta and a public launch is expected in March. 

Everyplay is a bit of a pivot for Applifier, which was born out of game developer Jussi Laakkonen’s frustration in attraction users into his social games. The company then built up a large cross-promotion network on the Facebook platform for independent game developers. It grew to 150 million monthly active users.

But the industry changed as players migrated toward smartphones and tablets. They created Everyplay as a way for mobile games to grow virally as players share videos of themselves with friends.

It’s still early with about eight games on the platform after 45 days. But Laakkonen says that initial statistics are promising. He pointed to a game called Stair Dismount, where video replays were shared more than 10,000 times in 30 days. Players shared these videos to Facebook, where an average of 15 friends would watch every replay with a clickthrough rate of about 12 percent to get the game from the app store.

“Once you’re into a game, you want to start bragging, sharing tips and tricks,” Laakkonen said (pictured right using his own software). ”Now you can actually show off how good you are.”

That said, other forerunners in building mobile-social gaming platforms have struggled. GREE shut down OpenFeint after acquiring it for $104 million back in 2011. Laakkonen says that Apple’s GameCenter pretty much covers base use cases, and that you have to really offer something differentiated to attract developers.

Applifier is backed by Lifeline Ventures, MHS Capital, PROfounders Capital, Tekes, Webb Investment Network and angel investors, and has offices in Helsinki, Finland and in San Francisco. The company recently closed a $4 million second venture round from Lifeline, which is an early-stage accelerator from one of the Jaiku co-founders and the CEO of Supercell that specializes in the Finnish market.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The assets sale at Nokia, the world’s former number one mobile maker, continues. After selling and leasing back its headquarters in December — injecting $230 million (€170 million) into its coffers —  the company has now sold its Peltola campus in Oulu to domestic business space provider Technopolis for €30.5 million (Technopolis’ total investment is €31.7 million).

Asset sales are one way Nokia has been bolstering its net cash. Announcing its Q4 earnings last month, it reported a rise in net cash — adding €800 million over the quarter to a total of $5.9 billion (€4.4 billion) net cash. Over the last year Nokia’s net cash position has become a subject of scrutiny, as device sales and profits disappointed and credit agencies worried the company would have to dig into reserves to meet business obligations.

The latest Nokia campus sale was detailed in a filing with the Finnish Stock Exchange, spotted by TNW. The rentable space of the campus totals approximately 37,600 sqm and includes a parking garage with 800 parking spaces, according to the filing. Nokia is not vacating the campus entirely — but will lease just under half of the space (17,400 sqm) from Technopolis under a long-term lease. It’s not clear which Nokia functions will remain at the Oulu campus. At the time of writing the company had not responding to requests for clarification. Update: Nokia has confirmed its operations at the Oulu campus will remain the same, post-sale. A spokesman said: “Nokia will lease from Technopolis the same space that we currently use, 17,400 square metres, so our occupancy in Oulu is not affected by the sale and our operations will also continue there as today.”

The campus is “suitable as a multi-user environment”, and its properties are described as ”modern” and “flexible”, according to Technopolis, which said the campus will complement another 27,000 sqm campus it also owns in the area. It noted that more than 100 organizations in ICT, biosciences, health and well-being operate in the area already, and the city of Oulu is aiming to create 700 new jobs there by 2016.

To proponents of ‘creative destruction’ economic theory, Nokia’s decline may very look like the European startup ecosystem’s gain — with both campus space and talent being freed up to work for smaller entities. Nokia has laid off nearly 16,000 people in its devices and location business since it began its move away from the Symbian platform to using Microsoft’s Windows Phone for smartphones.

One such Oulu-based startup we covered last year – which also has ex-Nokia founders – is Valkee, a company that makes a device that shines lights onto your brain cells through your ear canals to treat seasonal affective disorder. Another local example, Finnish gaming startup Supercell, moved into an old Nokia research center after the once mighty Finn began downsizing.

While, slighter further afield in Europe, is Leikr, a Danish Kickstarter-funded sports watch, whose team includes ex-Nokia staff who were freed up to work on their own projects after the closure of a Nokia research facility in Copenhagen.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Rovio’s Angry Birds is a brand we all recognize, but the Finnish gaming company is finally moving past games and merchandise to push short animated cartoons to the masses.

Rovio’s CEO Mikael Hed said in an interview in Helsinki that Rovio will launch a series of short, cartoon-style episodes featuring everyone’s favorite destructive birds (and probably a few piggies) in the spring.

It was originally reported last year that Rovio would have these ultra-short cartoons ready to go by fall of 2012. Clearly that didn’t happen, but perhaps it was because Rovio is thinking outside the box where distribution is concerned.

“The content itself is the channel,” said Mr. Hed. “We have become the channel.”

Metaphysics aside, he has a great point. Rovio enjoys 260 million users as of January, with the Angry Birds brand filtering into countries all over the world on a number of various platforms, including iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Mac, Windows 8, and Windows Phone.

Knowing the breadth of the user base and Rovio’s background as a gaming company (as opposed to a television network), Mr. Hed clarified that the distribution of this new animated series will be a bit unorthodox. “Previously content creators were reliant on others who had the channel,” he explained.

Hed suggested that this reliance wouldn’t be the case with Rovio. That essentially rules out a broadcast network, which would hurt Rovio’s outstanding margins. Of course, the company could go through YouTube or some other internet channel, but they wouldn’t be able to leverage their user base to watch all these animations.

Instead, Hed’s comments suggest that the animations will be pushed through Rovio’s own channel, which he said himself is “the content.” This leads us to believe that Rovio may even be planning on distributing its animations through the apps themselves, pushing them to both smartphones and smart TVs.

Rovio has been making headway in the animation business since its 2011 acquisition of Kombo Animation, and the WSJ reports that it’s animation team has tripled since then to 70 people.

You can get a feel for Rovio’s animation style here, where the company has a handfull of various cinematic trailers for games like Bad Piggies and Angry Birds Star Wars.

Further down the line, Rovio has plans for a full-length Angry Birds feature film.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch