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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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’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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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’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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Swedish iOS studio Toca Boca has become a hit with parents and kids around the world, thanks to its smart suite of simple, open games. Now it plans to open a U.S. office and target the American market in 2012. Read more »
Peter Sunde, one of the Pirate Bay founders convicted of aiding copyright infringement, has told GigaOM that the group could go to the European court, after Sweden’s top judges refused to hear their appeal against a guilty verdict handed down in 2009. Read more »
