Swedes say no to Google Apps for government use
A division of the Swedish government has prohibited government bodies from using Google Apps, giving more credence to privacy concerns around public-cloud services. Read more »
iZettle, Square’s European cousin, gets €5M infusion from Banco Santander
iZettle will start offering its credit card reader to its U.K. banking customers. That gives iZettle another key distribution point as it waits for Square and PayPal to challenge it in Europe. Read more »
Ericsson trials HetNet-friendly ‘City Site’: Would you like ads with your base station?
photo: Ericsson
The Swedish networking firm and China Mobile have launched a commercial trial of Ericsson’s City Site package. It provides a good hint of the sort of street furniture ‘network densification’ may require. Read more »
Big in India, Swedish phone directory service Truecaller hits 10M user milestone
Do phone directories still have a place in the age of the smartphone? It appears they might do when you’re trying to combat phone spam. Read more »
Volvo signs with Ericsson for cloud-based in-car apps, probably including Spotify
The deal is Ericsson’s first for its Connected Vehicle Cloud platform, which will provide Volvo drivers with infotainment apps and aftermarket services. It looks like Volvo will be keeping its platform mostly closed, though. Read more »
Minecraft creations meet the real world through augmented reality iOS app
Minecraft Reality, co-developed by ‘computer vision’ firm 13th Lab and Mojang, lets fans of the hugely successful game upload their creations into the real world for others to see. And this isn’t some floaty gimmick – we’re talking positioning with sub-centimeter accuracy. Read more »
App for turning iPhone pics into cash adds 10% commission
iPhones with 5- and 8-megapixel cameras are turning a lot of people into better and more prolific photographers. The Swedish company behind Foap, which lets anyone sell iPhone pictures through their app, has changed its quality standards and is offering a better incentive for users. Read more »
Magine aims to be a cloud pay TV service without the box
Tomorrow’s pay-TV box could be a handheld device or an in-TV app, if Magine, a new Swedish service using existing consumer gadgets and cloud distribution, gets its way. Read more at paidContent »
HowDo offers intriguing take on instructional storyboards
The startup, which has just announced seed funding from some impressive backers, combines photos with short sound clips to create a fresh take on the ‘how to’ video. It feels like a mechanism with many uses. Read more »
Life-logging for the masses? Memoto smashes Kickstarter goal on launch day
Would you record your life in a series of geotagged photos? Swedish startup Memoto is betting enough people will want digital memory assistance, and their first-day performance on Kickstarter backs them up. Read more »
TeliaSonera cuts 2,000 jobs as mobile market stagnates
TeliaSonera’s revenues and subscriber base aren’t budging, but the Nordic carrier claims its costs are skyrocketing. In an effort to realign its business with new mobile data realities, the carrier said it will lay off 7 percent of its workforce over two years. Read more »
Facebook has 220 billion of your photos to put on ice
photo: JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY
Facebook users love sharing photos, and the demands of that appetite are gargantuan. Infrastructure engineering VP Jay Parikh lifted the lid on Facebook’s seven-petabytes-per-month photo upload task, during GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference. Read more »
Instagram search engine Worldcam proves peril of platform dependence
photo: Orla via shutterstock
The service, which lets users search for Instagram photos by location, had a great start – for a day or so. With sudden popularity hitting the ceiling of API limits, it’s just as well Worldcam is a side-project. Read more »
Does Apple hate Swedes?
Sweden’s TeliaSonera was the first carrier in the world to launch LTE, but after nearly three years of waiting it finds its networks unsupported in the new 4G iPhone 5. In fact, most of Europe gets left out in the cold. Read more »
Anyfi raises $1.5M to build virtual hotspot networks
Sweden’s Anyfi wants to turn any Wi-Fi access point into a virtual extension of mobile networks. By breaking the bond between physical radio and the Wi-Fi network, the startup will make it easier for carriers to build expansive hybrid Wi-Fi grids to offload their data traffic. Read more »
Netflix chasing down Amazon’s Lovefilm to Scandinavia
Buoyed by better results than expected from its first European foray, Netflix will head north this winter – a move which means it now competes with Lovefilm in a majority of the Amazon brand’s markets. Read more at paidContent »
iZettle says it’s ‘confused’ by Visa blockade
Europe’s equivalent of Square has been going gangbusters in recent months, but after falling foul of Visa Europe, the company can no longer accept Visa cards in Denmark, Norway and Finland. What nobody is prepared to say is precisely why it’s happening now. Read more »
Huawei knocks off Ericsson as world’s biggest telecom vendor
Huawei reported 2012 half-year revenues today that make it the largest telecom infrastructure maker in the world — a title formerly belonging to Ericsson. The two, however, are neck and neck and a new contract or fluctuation in currency could see the two changing places once again. Read more »
Sweden’s Anyfi turns any Wi-Fi network into a small cell
Anyfi has developed a tunneling technology that allows ordinary access points and residential gateways to spawn virtual Wi-Fi networks anyone can log into. The Swedish startup is betting this is the answer operators are looking for to build huge ubiquitous Wi-Fi offload networks. Read more »
13th Lab raises $700,000 to build its ‘UI for reality’
Swedish startup 13th Lab has just raised $700,000 from Nordic investors Creandum to help build its augmented reality browser and developer tools for iOS. But forget about tacky versions of AR: this team is trying to build a real interface between the digital and the physical. Read more »
Wanna get paid $5 for iPhone photos? Foap makes it easy
Foap is a Swedish company started by travel industry veterans disappointed in the availability of stock photo art. Their elegant and easy app lets anyone upload and sell iPhone photos. It also lets stock art shoppers request specific photos through a concept called “missions.” Read more »
The Pirate Bay co-founders file appeal with EU court
The Pirate Bay’s co-founders Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij mounted a last-ditch effort to overturn a prison sentence against them Wednesday, appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. The step comes after the duo exhausted all legal remedies within Sweden. Read more »
Now Wrapp goes head to head with Samwers in Germany
After the CEO of social gifting company Wrapp said he wanted to take on Germany’s notorious Samwer brothers, the business is finally delivering by launching in Germany and taking on the copycat kings on their home territory. Read more »
Groupon shareholder Kinnevik heads for the door
photo: Getty Images / Scott Olson
Swedish investment group Kinnevik has cut its ties with Groupon, selling up its remaining stake in the daily deals company for $81.5 million — a shareholding that was valued at almost $200 million when the company went public in November. Read more »
iZettle banks $31m to become the global Square
Since coming out of beta last year, Swedish payments service iZettle has been very careful about how it has grown. The company — which, like Square, lets people take card payments through their iPhone — first launched in its home market, then the rest of the […] Read more »
Meet the Q&A site where people pay $150 for answers
Forget Quora: Swedish startup Mancx is trying to put a twist on question and answer sites by getting people to pay real money for the information they receive — and it’s just raised another $1.65m to expand. Read more »
How big data predicted Eurovision — and offended Malta
When a data scientist crunched enough numbers to predict that Sweden would win this weekend’s Eurovision Song Contest, he felt fairly confident. But he didn’t expect that the biggest noise would be the inaccurate prediction that Malta would do well — something he’s now apologized for. Read more »
iZettle, Europe’s rival to Square, hits the UK
Swedish payments startup iZettle, which hopes to become the European equivalent of Square, is launching its first pilot in Britain. The move is the company’s largest rollout — and its biggest test — so far. Read more »
Apple drops iPad ’4G’ marketing — but not everywhere
Under pressure because the new iPad’s 4G connectivity does not work outside North America, the company has started dropping its claims in some international markets — like the UK and Australia — but not in others. Read more »
Thinglink buys Pixboom for ‘tricky’ fashion play
The acq-hire gives image tagging startup ThingLink a solid foothold in the lucrative fashion blogging sector, but the Finnish firm also has another defensive move up its sleeve, according to CEO Ulla Engeström. Read more »
How Germany’s Pirate Party is hacking politics
Founded on an agenda of copyfighting and radical transparency, Pirate parties are making political ground across Europe. Now its possible that the German offshoot could become the third party in the nation’s politics. So what do the pirates really want? Read more »
Interview: Ericsson CEO on the rise of the HetNet
The heterogeneous network, or HetNet, will turn today’s big-tower cellular systems into dense, multi-layered and tremendously high capacity networks. Given the complexity of such systems, it’s easy to imagine HetNet as a technology of the future, but Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg says you would be wrong. Read more »
Scandinavia’s hottest digital startups: payments firms
photo: Shutterstock / Jens Ottoson
Payments are big up north. A Square competitor and an online payments facilitator are named the Nordic region’s most promising digital outfits. Read more at paidContent »
Spotify dips a toe in web waters, but isn’t yet swimming
photo: Spotify
Spotify has moved a step toward embracing the web by introducing a new embeddable widget – but the launch highlights perhaps one of the biggest anomalies of the music service. Read more at paidContent »
Wrapp races to outpace DropGifts with German launch
In what is starting to look like an e-commerce version of Risk, Wrapp is retaliating against clone-artists Rocket Internet by launching on their home turf and detailing ambitious expansion plans Read more »
Tripbirds is gorgeous, but can social travel fly?
Swedish startup Tripbirds wants to bring its stylish approach to bear on the social travel market. But with so many services around, and so few obvious winners, is there even a market worth competing for? Read more »
Social gift app Wrapp steams ahead with UK launch
Wrapp, the mobile app that lets you send gifts to your Facebook friends, is pressing ahead with its expansion by launching in the UK with partners including Asos and Pizza Express. Read more »
Exclusive: Wrapp CEO goes toe to toe with Samwer bros.
Social gifts startup Wrapp says it is massively speeding up its expansion plans as a direct response to a copycat funded by the notorious German Samwer brothers — and the company’s CEO is warning retailers that doing business with the clone could prove costly. Read more »
iZettle launches across Nordics — next stop U.K.
Despite being known as Europe’s answer to Square, the payments service iZettle has only officially been available in Sweden since launching last year. Now that’s changing, with news of a rollout across Norway, Denmark and Finland, and the first step toward a British service too. Read more »
Samwers clone Wrapp: Have they gone too far this time?
Europe’s most notorious cloners have built their reputation by copying big American companies. But now they appear to be readying a new rival to small Swedish startup Wrapp — a change of tactics that has ‘surprised’ Wrapp CEO Hjalmar Winbladh. Read more »
