Flattr – Øresund Startups

Flattr joins hand in hand with Adblock Plus

Ray Cao — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 20:12:32 +0000

Malmö based startup Flattr AB has been acquired 100% by Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus.

Flattr has been creating the world’s first micropayment system that works for all content online. By simply clicking the Flattr button, users can donate money to the content they like. It has worked with Eyeo (a Germany based company) already on some projects previously, and now they officially announce to join forces.

“Together we will be able to create an Internet which is fair to all, sustainable and safe.” says Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, co-founder of Flattr.

The new Flattr extension under the new partnership will allow users to fund content in a direct and sustainable way by simply browsing. Users can allocate a monthly payment to online publishers or content creators. The money is then distributed based on user’s engagement with different articles and sites. As the press release said, they will make “a new, fair for all, way to pay for content”.

“Flattr makes micropayments automatic and effortless, thus it will be the most user-friendly payment solution on the internet. Together, constructive ad blocking and Flattr complete Eyeo’s vision of putting users in control of an internet that is fair and still profitable,” says Till Faida, founder of Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus.

Flattr said that the core team will continue to work with all staff members from Malmö. Then the co-founder Linus Olsson will lead the operations and implementations while Peter Sunde becomes an visionary advisor. The financial terms of the deal has not been revealed.

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Y combinators ‘How to Start a Startup’ lectures at Lunds University

Karsten Deppert — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 14:09:30 +0000

Since their start, Y Combinators Sam Altmans lectures at Stanford have received a lot of praise. Now a couple of key people in the startup scene are helping out with entrepreneurship at Lunds University, Faculty of Engineering, using the lectures as a base and elaborating on them with local experience.

Giving insights

Most students eye the big companies as their future employer and a lot of the curriculum is to help students prepare for a life as an cubicle employee. How to start a startup is a series of lectures produced at Stanford (CS183B) in collaboration with the experts and founders from startups such as Facebook, Dropbox and AirBnB.

“The lectures are really great, and we combine that with our own experience, to give the students real life insights. And not just about how it is in the US, but how it is right here.” says Hampus Jakobsson

Hampus, being both a (very) busy business angel and serial entrepreneur, is one of the local entrepreneurs supporting it. Joel Larsson has been the person from the startup community that has been the most involved:

“We are happy that the university has been agreeing to host these events. We think it is a great way of getting more students into entrepreneurship” says Joel Larsson

The aim is to:

Get students and successful entrepreneurs to meet & grow their network
Learn how to come up with ideas, get customers, and raise money
Discuss startup ideas and get feedback

Once a week there will be lectures from the course, food and most importantly discussions about startup ideas with successful entrepreneurs from the region. Next week Philip from Unified Remote will be a guest, and talk about their experience from TC Disrupt. Other guests have been Linus Olsson from Flattr / Heml.is, and future guests include Alexandra Bylund from Newshubby / Foap and Sofia Franzén from Owegoo.

“Our aim is that students get a chance to meet successful entrepreneurs, broaden their network and get to know other with similar interests. It is also to get feedback and intros. This is similar to the Independence Day that we organised this spring, but this time as a series of lectures.” Joel continues.

ABOUT THE LECTURERS

Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, will be teaching the class How to Start a Startup (CS183B), along with guest lecturers like Marissa Mayer, Peter Thiel, and Ben Horowitz. They will be covering the fundamentals for startups: how to come up with ideas and evaluate them, how to acquire users and how to raise money.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Student Innovation Center, Lund University LTH and Malmö Startups will be organizing the sessions. Malmö Startups is organized by entrepreneurs who would like to improve the local Startup ecosystem. It’s a non-profit that helps Students meet the local Startup Scene. Amongst them are Hampus Jakobsson and Joel Larsson.

WHEN & HOW?

The sessions are on Wednesdays 17:30 at LTH (E-1406) during October and November.

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Øresund Startups: Top50 and state of the region

Karsten Deppert — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:59:17 +0000

Today I held a short lunch seminar on the subject of the most prominent startups in the region. The seminar was held because I was asked to do it, and when I thought about it I realized would be interesting to do. So I did, even if it was with a limited amount of preparations (which I can be accused of, but my main philosophy is: better to do then to don’t). So I did it.

It was held over lunch at CreativeLab, the creative event concept at the SHIP co-working space. Because we have a policy of livecasting whatever we do, you can watch the recording above (Our new Bambuser channel can be found here).

If you want to download the slides, I have made them available on slideshare but there are quite low resolution there, so can be found as pdf here as well.

I am probably describing some of the startups a little bit wrong (sorry for that), and I missed some things in the presentation (corrected in the downloadable versions). But I hope it creates some value for you as the viewer anyway.

Update 1: Some have asked why so many people are walking around and the background noice – the location where the presentation was held is the auditorium in the CreativeLab, called “trappan”, and is just that: the main stairs between the first and second floor. It is designed to be in the middle of the entire place, so that any presentations held there can have drop-in / drop-out flow. A somewhat special enviroment, but I love it, often with a lot of student from Lunds University sitting around in the open areas, and the business and entrepreneurs on the stairs themselves…

Update 2: I should of course list the top 50 startups mentioned as well! Here they are (in the order presented, i.e. in alphabetical order after category):

Series A + B

B2C

Billetto
Miinto
Vivino
WatAGame (GoSupermodel)
Zmags

B2B

Seed level

B2C

B2B

Other prominent startups

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Funding goal reached in a day: Get ready for Heml.is private messaging service

Kristina — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 10:28:51 +0000

Yesterday Arctic Startups announced that folks from Flattr are working on Heml.is – a completely private and secure messaging platform.

Payments through Paypal and Bitcoin have reached $114,103, or 114% of their goal, funded by 7561 backers in less than two days. The fund will be used for development of the apps, plus setup and running the infrastructure needed. The app will be free, and provide the same sort of basic messaging, as alternatives like SMS, Whatsapp, and Kik; with paid features allowing image sending, and other bonus uses. The difference is privacy.

They’re building a user experience, providing the most secure system possible. Hemlis means “Secret” in Swedish. And .is is the top level domain of Iceland, since Icelanders are famous for data protection. They say it’s one of few top level domains that has proven that they do not cave in to pressure easily.

Founders Peter Sunde, Leif Högberg and Linus Olsson say message content will be completely secure – even they will not be able to access messages.

This is a quick response to privacy concerns raised recently in the NSA debate. There are a couple of challenges; making private who is talking to who – the same sort of “metadata” tracking that caused the NSA debate, and also independent verification of the security claims. Something to watch for, at least Arctic Startups suggest, it’s hard to believe the founders of the Pirate Bay would skimp on security.

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Flattr enables paying by Bitcoin!

Karsten Deppert — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 20:13:35 +0000

Today Flattr announced that they will be supporting Bitcoin. The service, that allows you to “put your money where your likes are” allows users to donate, “flattr” users by doing certain actions on social networks, or by pressing the Flattr button on blogg or websites. But given the nature of the service and the team behind it, which includes Pirate Bay spoke-person Peter Sunde, adding Bitcoin seems like a natural thing, and was something users requested already when the latest version of Flattr was released.

With a service like this Bitcoin gets more and more areas of use. By flattring it is now actually possible to pay others that don’t have Bitcoin, using Bitcoins. A great service for the Bitcoin community as well as Flattr! Also interesting for us in this region: the Bitcoin payments are handled by Copenhagen startup BIPS.

We had some some questions and answers with Linus Olsson, CEO of Flattr:

Why did you choose to support bitcoin?

“Because people nagged us about it for long. But on a more serious note we of course love Bitcoins and the implications of disruption. So it felt logical to add support for it.”

Can you tell us something about how it is going for you? How many websites use the Flattr button on their site at the moment?

“We actually don’t know. Users are free to add the button to their website without us logging it, for privacy reasons. So until it got flattred it’s not added to our database. But exact numbers are not public, so I cannot reveal more.”

Flattr was mentioned and featured multiple times in the TPB-AFK movie, where Peter Sunde, your co-founder, was a key person. Did you see much attention after the movie was released?

“Sure, at least enough to be clearly visible in the statistics. Peter is still involved in Flattr, as a founder your creations will always be important for you. He is kind of an advisor but not active on a regular basis.”

You earlier had support for flattring on Twitter, by favoriting a tweet, but that is not supported anymore at the moment. What happened?

“Twitter forced us to remove it. Twitter contacted us and told us that we are violating their API terms. However, the term Twitter called to is a term about advertisment that states that we can not be compensated. So we suggested to forgo our 10%, to not be compensated as a service. This would mean that the Flattr donation go from supporter to creator in it’s entirety. That did not help.”

If you want to learn more about the service and start using it, visit Flattr’s website. We support the service, so feel free to flattr us if you want to as well! If you want to know more about Bitcoin, this is great place to start.

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Flattr on the list of Swedens 24 “hotest entrepreneurs”

Karsten Deppert — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:06:11 +0000

Veckans Affärer released their list of the 24 hotest entrepreneurs and startups in Sweden. From our region only Malmö-based Flattr made the list.

“Flattr offers not just the ability to press ‘thumbs up’, it also enables you to press the flattr button and give a small amount to the creator of the content. At the end of the month Flattr divides the amount you have specified, making it possible to offer microtransactions without high transaction fees or advanced logins. Flattr got started 2010 and has revieced $2M (€1.5M) investments from Passion Capital and Federico Pirzio-Biroli. This year the service is in for a breakthrough, having enabled flattr in other social media services and not just on the creators sites.” reads their motivation.

You can view the other startups and entrepreneurs on their site (requires some clicking, one nominee on each page).

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Flattr CEO Linus Olsson talks to Internet Startup Show

Kristina — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:40:37 +0000

Watch this interview with Linus Olsson talking about Flattr philosophy, where they’ve come from and what’s coming up ahead in the world of social microdonations. Interesting answers about multiple topics:

– Talking about their funding and that they are not yet profitable, but have a low burn rate and a long runway (at the 21:20 minute mark)
– Their view on supporting bitcoin as a payment method, and that they plan to do add support for bitcoin later (at the 23:00 minut mark)
– That one of their main problems is convincing content creators that others want to give them money for what they are doing (!) (at 28:30 minute mark)
– The connection to The Pirate Bay and the media businesses in genereal (at 55:10 minute mark)

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Flattr releases new and improved “add money to your likes” concept

Karsten Deppert — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:37:38 +0000

Flattr, an service co-founded by Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay fame, has just released an updated version of it’s site and service. Flattr is still about being able to make micropayments to bloggs and sites, but it has now expanded to a concept it calls “add money to your likes”. The idea is simple – with a special button on services and homepages, you can like a page an at the same time make a microtransaction to the owner and creator. The new Flattr now supports “liking” and similar acts on amongst other: Instagram, Twitter (favorite an tweet and flattr it), Flickr and Soundcloud. As well as their own Flattr bottun for websites and bloggs.

Flattr recently got alot of new attention because of the popular TBP AFK documentary, where Peter Sunde is a prominent person and his work with Flattr is mentioned multiple times.

They also made this easy infographic for showing how Flattr works!

If you want to get started it is easy to just register and get going.

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Finalists Nordic startup awards!

Ischa — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 21:17:18 +0000

The finalists of the Nordic Startup Awards are announced and we are glad to hear that 16 of the startups are based in the Øresund region (5 in Sweden and 11 in Denmark). The Nordic Startup Awards is a series of events throughout the Nordics with the aim of lifting the new generation startups to a new level and to show the world the competences of the startup scene in the Nordic region. The winners will be announced on the final event in Copenhagen on December the 7th.

In the best newcomer category (operating less than 12 months) we find the Swedish startup Applika, the Danish Admazely and The Eye Tribe

The Danish Click a Taxi, Riidr, IconFinder and the Swedish Flattr are nominated as best funded startup. This group represents firms which have received professional funding from a VC or professional angel.

In the international category (must have started operations in the Nordics) we find Endomondo, Zendesk and Tradeshift, Zaplox and Kvittar.

Only one startup from our region is nominated as bootstrapper of the year Splitter (received no professional funding), and also the peoples choice award is only represented by Tunaspot, a firm which plays into new developments in the music industry by providing a location based music platform.

Most honorably, Podio and Miinto were nominated for the prestigious Startup of the Year award!

Founders House, Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship and The Copenhagen Nokia Bridge Incubator are nominated as the best service provider, well deserving the recognition for their help and services to the startup industry. YEoS is also nominated, an organisation for young entrepreneurs which has a strong presence on the Swedish side.

Join the final event on December 7th in Copenhagen to hear the winner announcement, network and to see that the Nordic scene is a leading centre for innovation.

Update 4 nov 10:28 – We missed some companies! Updated with the new information!

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