Tag Archives: sweden

Flickr CC: Daniel Greene

When Foursquare, the coolest lbs kid in town, favourite of approx. 3 million users with 200 million check-ins, was down earlier this week, the social web reacted with frustration, sad tweets, and hunt for alternative check-in services.

Apparently, the most dedicated Foursquare users hooked on rewards and badges even chose to stay at home , until they were able to collect rewards of their check-ins.

“We are hearing from many users (they want to remain anonymous) that they are staying at home until the service is restored. One user called us on our tips hotline noting that it just “isn’t worth going out if you can’t get a badge”.”

The concept of check-in also continues to heat up among businesses, especially fashion industry going gaga over the new ways location based services allow brands to interact with, as monetize their customers. Good example of how hot it is, Swedish retailer giant H&M just launched their first Foursquare campaign in Sweden, regardless the fact, that use of location based services is still fairly moderate in Sweden. Gowalla holds the pole position with 35 000 users against Foursquare’s 9 000 users. The buzz and eyeballs around the campaign evidently are worth as much.

Sharing location was seemingly hot concept already back in 2007, when Facebook filed for a patent on general sharing location mechanisms. The patent was granted this week, adding an extra twist on the already competitive space.

Map.pr Finds You Interesting Places With Help Of Groups

The one not afraid of patents and competition is Swedish Map.pr. Map.pr is all about location around groups and interests, based on the idea that your friends make the best maps. Map.pr uses places from Foursquare, building enhanced search on top to let you find cool places nearby recommended by your group members. No need to trust the “Giraffe sign”  I’ve been one of the beta testers, and since its release in July, the app has already had thousands of downloads.

When you check in with Map.pr, you still check-in with Foursquare, so you don’t miss out on any badges or mayorships. But what’s unique to Map.pr, with any check-in, one can also check-in with a group one belongs to. To give a sense of a venue’s popularity, unlike Foursquare, Map.pr iPhone app also shows how many individual and team check-ins a venue has. Anyone can create its own group, and the possibility to create and add venues via Map.pr is being added in the next coming update. Until now, it’s only been possible to check-in to already existing venues.

There’s no native Android app on the roadmap, instead an updated mobile web version with check-in functionality is round the corner. Check-ins with Facebook Places, which hasn’t reached Nordics yet, aren’t yet allowed by Facebook API, but instead Map.pr is about to integrate with new Facebook Groups, released earlier this week with both privacy blunders as upsides, to let you share check-ins within a group, private or open. As before, one can share check-ins to both Facebook and Twitter. Gowalla users have, for now, been left out of the service.

Map.pr White Label To Boost Businesses’ Customer Engagement

Cartomapic, the startup behind Map.pr, was founded early 2010 by a team with backgrounds in Google Maps and Spotify, surely qualifing regarding domain competence within location and app design. But, as all social check-in services, they’re about understanding and triggering human behaviour. Since grouping and categorizing venues as function isn’t considered a long term competitive advantage, Map.pr needs to do something else differently. One way is to monetize by competing with a more attractive price model on partnerships than its established competitors. It also plans to offer its solution as a white label, letting businesses create their own branded check-in services around events, releases etc. I find the idea of focusing on aggregating check-ins and information from several location based services, e.g. like Buzzd does with hottest venues nearby right now, compelling. By also aggregating check-in info into a comprehensive recommendation system for groups, I could see how Map.pr just might find its way to the end of the rainbow.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

Flickr cc: Tramidepain

Robert Polet, CEO Gucci, has famously said:

“We are not selling handbags or shoes. We are selling dreams. That market will always be there.”

While the statement still holds the truth, what’s hot and what’s not in the world of fashion is no longer decided by the few and privileged ones. The social web is changing the rules, by giving independent fashionistas the voice and the tools to get recognized for their own individual taste. As the web and commerce gets more social, so does every step of a decision making process.

Brands are starting to recognize the need of being part of the various stages of decision making process taking place in social networks. Facebook Like button has become the first step to connect with potential customers, and it was only last week Starbucks as the first brand reached more than 10 Million Facebook Likes, and became one of the top ten largest Facebook pages. When it comes to fashion brands, though, one needs to scroll down the list, finding only two fashion brands to make the top 100 list: Victoria’s Secret on place 44 with 5 Million Facebook fans, followed by Converse All Star on place 83 with 3.8 Million fans.

ModCloth, Bloglovin’ and Fashiolista harnessing Likes beyond Facebook

But, not all “liking” happens or is being harnessed on Facebook. ModCloth, San Francisco based indie fashion site featuring vintage-inspired clothing just recently raised $19.8 Million in funding to meet the growing demand of hot fashion items frequently being sold out. ModCloth was early on to recognize and create a marketplace for independent, up and coming designers, reporting $19 Million in sales last year. Influence ranks high among fashionistas, thus by engaging fashion bloggers and fashionistas to become virtual fashion buyers to help ModCloth choose which designs get created, it’s also able to predict the demand much earlier. Watch Eric and Susan Koger, the husband and wife founders of ModCloth, interviewed by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch TV.

To further interact with fashionistas, ModCloth ran a fashion campaign earlier this year together with Bloglovin’, Swedish blog aggregator startup with 96% female users and 5.5 Million monthly visits. Influential fashion bloggers were chosen by Bloglovin’ to promote fashion items in a transparent and trustworthy way, resulting 5 out 14 items to have been sold out within 24 hours.

Aiming to become the start page for fashion blogging, Bloglovin’ recently also launched a new start page, described as a visual Digg for fashion blogging. By introducing a voting system called “Like”, the most popular blog posts in fashion can now be featured. Bloglovin’ has been picking up steam among fashionistas world wide, overtaking both Style.com and Teenvogue.com with its 1.1 Million monthly unique visitors. Brands like DKNY and Roberto Cavalli have discovered Bloglovin’ to reach out to fashionistas, and H&M has been a frequent advertiser on the site. US fashion bloggers like Fashionchalet and fashiontoast have already created a larger following on Bloglovin’ than for example on Twitter, counting over tens of thousands of followers.

Fashiolista is another European fashion startup from Netherlands, where Likes and “Loves” are everything. It’s a fashion community with a handy bookmarklet tool that lets you collect, save and share all the fashion finds with the rest of the world. One can easily follow other Fashiolistas to get inspired of their fashion sense, as add items from nearly any online fashion shops, such as ModCloth, who has implemented Fashiolista’s bookmarklet. When it will be possible to start subscribing specific tags on Fashiolista, I can see the site getting seriously compelling. Henriette Weber, Danish social media avantgardista and fashionista herself, recently interviewed the founders of Fashiolista.

With help of services like Bloglovin’ and Fashiolista, the life of fashionistas gets easier, when being able to spot the fashion blogs that don’t suck, as to track down the perfect summer season items in the nude.

As for “safe” fashion discovery, I recommend first to head over to Mint Goals to set up your saving plan for all the fashion Likes and Loves. Happy Liking!

More Bub.blicio.us reading on Fashion

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

Photo Credit: Sean Percival

This week is the National Women’s Health Week empowering women to make their health a top priority. And it’s not only women’s health that we should be concerned about. Childhood obesity in United States has more than tripled in the past 30 years, and there are more than 1 billion overweight adults globally, of which at least 300 million are obese. Food industry is vowing to make processed food healthier, meanwhile studies showing how addictive fatty foods are, also suggesting that processed carbohydrates may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does.

Jamie Oliver’s new TV show Foodrevolution has a mission to fight childhood obesity and change the way America eat. His combined Facebook and Twitter community has passed 700 000 followers and the petition to improve school food has so far been signed by half a million people. It’s a great example of how to create awareness by engaging directly with the community, both online and offline. Watch this clip with Stephen Colbert (4min in) and the magnitude of the challenge the nation in whole is facing becomes evident.

So, what if you could bring a personal trainer, dietician and motivator with you all the time? In your pocket? Now you can. DailyBurn and Swedish ShapeUp Club are two easy to use online weight loss and fitness services, both with free iPhone apps. Yes, you can get started with your new life with zero cost (ShapeUp Club is soon to have an application available for Nokia). DailyBurn’s freemium model also offers a basic functionality free online, whereas with ShapeUp Club one can sign up starting at $3 per month to get added functionality, such as advanced nutrition tracking with charts, back-up and online community.

Setting up ones individual health program is quickly done in both services, whether one is looking for losing, keeping or gaining weigth. The iPhone apps make it really easy to record daily food and exercise, with metric system of ones choice, allowing one to create, add and favourite food items and meals. Both services sync all data with the online account. DailyBurn is a bit more fitness orientated with lots of various workout program and challenges, where one can find like minded people for support to achieve fitness goals.

I spent previously four years on developing the largest online weight loss service in Sweden (Viktklubb.se) in collaboration with an obesity unit, that also conducts research studies on weight loss online with help of the service. These are my learnigs and thoughts on why I think the two services have figured out the key success factors of weight loss, thereby already enjoying over 100 000 users in respective service.

1. The social aspects of weight control. Gaining and retaining motivation with the help of the community, day or night, is very important. To find and interact with other people in the same situation has shown to be crucial to many. Besides from the inbuilt communities, this is where social networks like Facebook and Twitter come to help to increase the interactivity, thus strengthening the core service. ShapeUp Club has been more focused on blogging than social networking so far, where I’m especially happy to see DailyBurn engaging with its users.

2. Easy registering of daily calories and activities. iPhone apps do just that! The most annoying thing users know is spending a lot of time to fill in the diary of daily calories and activities. It brings down the motivation and once one skips registering, it gets harder to stay on track. I think both services have done a great job even if I find it a bit easier with ShapeUp Club. On the other hand, DailyBurn offers a FoodScanner app for $0.99 to easier find foods by scanning UPC barcodes or typing in food names.

3. Visualization of the progress. This is the number one motivational factor. To see charts and diagrams over ones weight, waistline, body fat, to name a few, does wonders. DailyBurn is also connected to Withings, a WiFi scale linked to the Internet that automatically tracks weight and body fat directly to DailyBurn. Trust me, men like this one. Men has shown to be more competitive, also when it comes to fitness and weight loss, thus making the information publicly available a good motivator.

4. Watercheck/Water tracker. Grown ups should drink at least 2 liter (0,5 gallon) water per day. Registering and visualizing the daily water consumption is a great way to get a hang of how much water one actually drinks during one day. I’ve learned how easy it is to be mistaken of ones daily water consumption. I particularly like the neat implementation of watercheck in ShapeUp Club’s iPhone app.

As Andy Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of DailyBurn, said: “You manage what you measure”. (quote by Mark Suster). I couldn’t agree more.

Ps. Not to worry! For the occasional social drinks, stick with gin & tonic and wine. They’re the kindest when it comes to calories.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

Flickr CC: The Rocketeer

You think you can’t make your videos and photos look astonishing? Yes, You can.

Sweden is not only a playground for savvy online music innovators, but a place that also hearts for online creativity, making advanced online video and image editing super simple to use. In Flash. In the cloud. Bye bye heavy downloads and installations.

Jaycut, online video editor, and Pixlr, online image editor, are two Swedish startups bringing cutting egde video and image editing easily accessible to everyone with a browser and Internet connection. One is surprised how fast these editors load in the browser considering their feature rich libraries. Especially Pixlr has been dedicating to offer the fastest loading image editor. I have been testing, and it sure beats its online competitors FotoFlexer, Photoshop.com, Picnik, acquired by Google in March, and Sumo Paint. For those small image quick fixes, Pixlr also offers Pixlr Express, a light version of the editor.

Both Jaycut and Pixlr are B2B white label solutions, yet offering their respective editors free to individuals. Being super focused on delivering the best editing experience, they were early on to acknowledge the importance of fans and a user community for feedback. Pixlr has a very active user community with 60% recurring visitors, which also has helped translate the service to 23 different languages and create user tutorials. Working closely with its users, Pixlr’s has released many appreciated features such as image grabbers for various browsers and a recent neat social sharing feature immo.io.

Video editing and collaboration regardless place or device

With JayCut’s online video editor one can create a movie or a slideshow by adding text, sound effects and smooth transitions. Its newly relaunched community has also focused on the one click social sharing features. Besides from storing, collaborating, and sharing, all content is easily published to YouTube, blogs, or downloaded to iPhone (available in H.264/Mpeg-4, Avi and Flv formats). After having announced its support for Moblin-based ultra-portable devices like netbooks and mobile internet devices (MIDs) last fall, it has also just released an open API to work on.

The one thing I’m currently missing on both JayCut and Pixlr, is the ability to access and upload my content from other services, for example like Animoto does with SmugMug. Pixlr, although, allows image upload directly from URL, making editing my Flickr pictures easy.

Editing as a tool to increase user engagement

Online video is a powerful tool for creating user engagement, and not just in terms of consuming video content. As JayCut’s editor is being used in various brand campaigns (e.g. by Procter & Gamble), it has been able to gather statistics regarding user engagement. On average, a user spends 5 minutes on creating and editing a video. That is a very high number compared to the time spent on regular banner ads, campaign or landing pages. Of course, there’s no magic sauce to create user engagement, but encouraging people’s creativity and allowing them to interact with one’s brand can be very fruitful in building brand awareness and relationships.

So, if you just wish to plug and play, yet have an itch to express your creativity, go and polish up your holidays pictures on Pixlr, upload together with your videos to Jaycut, give your story its own voice – and share it with the rest of the world.

Warning: Don’t try this on your iPad

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

Foto: Chris Heuer

Social + Cash was the theme of the sixth edition of Swedish social media conference held last week by Annika Lidne, CEO of Disruptive Media. She has been organizing social media conferences in Sweden since 2007, attracting international guests and keynote speakers like Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, Stowe Boyd, Steve Rubel, Natasha Friis Saxberg, Henriette Weber, Jyri Engeström, Neville Hobson, and Peter Parkes. (See videos from all six conferenses and read Brian’s thoughts on his previous visit).

The one day conference has from the start been streamed live free of charge, having twice as many simultanious online viewers as the 200 attendees on site. The conversations on the live video chat and on Twitter have become the natural ingredient and trademark of the conference.

To quote the keynote speaker Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club:

“I really love Sweden and a big part of it is the experience I have at Annika’s conferences. There is just a different energy there, you can tell she really gets it, and wants to help others understand why this media is disruptive, too.”

Swedish State Of The Internet

A few figures from the state of the Internet in Sweden might be interesting to put the conference in context. 62% of the population of 9,3 M uses the Internet on daily bases, and according to recent report, the number of sold Iphones “in the home of Sony Ericsson” reaches up to 500 000. 5 % of the people blog, 27% read blogs, nearly 40% have a Facebook account, and Sweden is holding the 19th place on the list of unique Twitter users in the world. Sweden also holds the top position in the Nordics with highest number of blogs among listed corporations (17,9% Nov -08), thus higher than among Fortune 500 companies (15.8% Dec -09).

There’re also good efforts being made to identify and measure corporate social media, particularly Twitter, usage in Sweden.

So, how does the social capital that individuals and brands earn by engaging on the social web convert to ROI, return on investment? Does it, and if so, can it be measured?

Chris Heuer opened up the conference by urging us to move the lence of focus to delivering the promise of social media by changing from management to leadership, as by finding new success stories like clubs on Sunset Strip instead of the good old Dell story. Since free is not free, it costs time, money and attention, and the time being our most valuable resource, there should be a balance between what one gives and takes. Chris warned us from being selfish cookie monsters. Everybody needs to get paid, as one can’t live of Whuffie alone. He also talked about consious capitalism, where in the light of social media transparency, only individuals and companies who want to do good and make good products, without exploitative profit plans, will survive, thus profiting from social media. Watch the entire keynote and presentation on Slideshare.

The day offered many good examples of ROI, e.g. how an author, by releasing her book for free on the Pirate Bay, instead made money through donations, or how by engaging influential fashion bloggers in a transparent and trustworthy way with help of Bloglovin’ (Browser based blog reader with 96% female users and 5,5 M visits/month), Modcloth sold out clothes within 24 hours, or how the satisfied bank customers are the ones doing all the selling by discussing and commenting on the CEO’s blog. (All presentations in Swedish.)

To my liking, the day also highlighted the importance of ambassadors, how there simply is no universal social media strategy to be implemented, and how creating relationships and trust takes as long time online as it takes offline.

Catch up the whole conference in English and in just 53 min! with key takeaways summed up directly from stage by Chris Heuer, Annika Lidne and myself, moderated by Joakim Nyström, host of the Sweet Sunday Web Crunch, Swedish weekly live podcast show with everything Internet.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com