As the last couple of times the Town Hall was held at KPH Volume – a rough and atmospheric venue. Even if very cold this particular day – the room was still packed and the audience listened vividly.

“Always be sober when talking to journalists”

Both keynotes held at the event contained a lot of stories and experiences. Especially Peter Holten Mühlmanns humorist but honest and insightful talk contained many gems, on everything from how Trustpilot got started, what value PR and being on the national front-page gives you, how to recruit smart and how to manage scaling a startup from 1 to 500+.

Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen from Balderton Capital shared his past, how it came he worked at Dropbox and Uber, and his outlook of the European and especially Danish startup scene from his current position with Balderton.

Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen talking on stage

Startups and community

As previously a part of the event was focused at highlighting startups that are of interest, as well as community events. The startups presenting on stage where:

• Linkfire – Ricki Mae Melchior
• Sponsta – Philip Bock
• Peakon – Kasper Hulthin (who also just announced a large early funding)
• Vivino – Theis Søndergaard

One the community side, the following initiatives / meetups / events got some time in the spotligt:

• Codher – A tech meetup aiming at getting more women to code
• Startup Weekend – was presented by Aleksander Bordvik
• Nordic Startup Award – Kim Balle talked about the upcoming awards
• Nordic Startup Conference – the conference is to return, and date and location announced
• Startup Europe Week – a lot of things happening the week of 1-5th february
• Singularity U Copenhagen & Danske Ideer – Henrik Føhns presented the upcoming session with Singularity University in Copenhagen

You can see further details on the videos below. Apart from these initiatives, there where also mini sessions afterwards where people could go to focus on certain topics. These were: AIESEC, Nordic Growth Hackers, Capital2Grow, LEO Ventures, CPH Coworking Council, Startup Weekend. This gave rise to a lot of discussions and people getting to know each other.

Overall a really great meetup. Great work by Christoffer and the dedicated team organising this high value event. Only drawback with the entire event was that it was kind of (very) cold – but as Nick Hawtin put it on twitter:

You gotta know your event rocks, if people are willing to sit wearing coats, hats, and mittens to hear your speakers #cphftw Town Hall.

— Nicholas Hawtin (@RiskContainment) January 21, 2016

Remaining videos

Startup session

Community session

The post A packed CPHFTW Town Hall appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Linkfire has now closed a large seed investment round of € 2.3 M. The investors are Northcap who invested $2.3M in combination with syndication loan from the Danish Growth Fund (Vækstfonden), and with the remainder coming from a group of business angels. Among the angels is Thomas Sehested, who in 2010 sold the antipiracy company DtecNet to the US trademark protection firm Mark Monitor.

Thomas Sehested brings extensive industry experience and has a solid understanding of the US market. He’ll also be joining the company as chairman of the board. Lars Ettrup, cofounder and CEO of Linkfire has no doubt that the new investors are key to even greater international success:

“We’ve got an outstanding team. In our dialogue with investors it was a criteria from the very beginning that they share our passion, chemistry and vision. Together with our team, Northcap’s internationalisation and business expertise and the industry specific knowledge of our chairman, Thomas Sehested, you have a pretty powerful combination!”

Linkfire solves some of the key challenges in the music industry

Music consumption has never been more fragmented with content distributed across multiple platforms, services and devices. For record labels dealing with artists and their global fan bases this consumption complexity can be a puzzle. For example, every time a record label or artist promotes an album by sending out an iTunes link, there is a Spotify, Apple Music or Google Play user that loses out. Being selective towards a specific platform can affect your marketing performance negatively by misdirecting consumers.

Linkfire solves this challenge by intelligently routing any consumer to their preferred music service, on their preferred device, in their preferred app. It provides a better experience for the consumer and ensures a higher marketing return on investment for the record label.
In general the entertainment market is transforming. Consumers are moving from ownership to access, downloads to streaming. Linkfire focuses on aiding businesses to solving their marketing pains that comes with these new consumption patterns. Linkfire’s ability to understand and adapt to these changes is something that has impressed the investors.
Jacob Bratting Pedersen, Partner in Northcap, explains why they chose to invest in Linkfire:

“Linkfire has rapidly adapted their technology to solve some growing pains for both record labels and consumers. Within the last year the startup has signed the three largest record labels in the world. It’s quite an achievement. Together with their talented and ambitious team we’ve already started executing our internationalisation plans both within music, but also in other verticals.”

Validated by the world’s largest record labels and rolled out in more than 60 countries
Linkfire decided in September 2014 to focus entirely on the music industry, and since then it has been a rollercoaster journey for the two founders, Lars Ettrup and Jeppe Faurfelt.

In just one year, Linkfire has closed contracts with the world’s largest record labels Universal Music Group, Warner Music and Sony Music. World renowned artists like Sam Smith, The Weeknd and Rolling Stones are now frequently promoted using Linkfire.

In spring 2015 Universal Music Group signed a global contract with Linkfire meaning that Linkfire is presently active in more than 60 countries. Cofounder and CCO Jeppe Faurfelt has no doubt why their strategy stands out:

“We take a very personal approach and co-create with all our clients. This ensures that client expectations and our business objectives are aligned and transferred into the product. But close relationships are difficult to build across time zones and great distances. That’s why we’re expanding to the US, the world’s largest entertainment market.”

New York office is just the beginning

October 2015 sees the opening of Linkfire’s first office outside Denmark in Williamsburg, New York. The startup is keen to capitalise on the momentum of new content consumption patterns in the US.

Linkfire and its investors are confident that their validated and ready-to-go product has a big advantage over US competitors. Thomas Sehested sees this as only the beginning of a major growth trajectory for Linkfire:

“Linkfire has a huge potential in the music industry, and there are great opportunities to expand the business to other verticals such as film & TV, books and games. Additionally Linkfire sits on a rapidly growing body of global entertainment consumption data. The value of the insights this data can provide could exceed the value of the rest of the business put together.”

The post Linkfire gets € 2.3 M investment after impressive growth in the music industry appeared first on Øresund Startups.

This followed a strategic alliance with the sports-oriented social network site. Sportlobster has benefited from this transaction by ensuring, via the use of a mobile app deep link, that all new users clicking Cristiano’s link from a mobile source were redirected to the app store to download the Sportlobster app, while all current users landed on Ronaldo’s profile page. In this way, Linkfire helped them convert as many of Ronaldo’s Twitter followers to Sportlobster followers and users as possible.

Meanwhile, the celebrity tweet has granted Linkfire themselves a lot of beneficial exposure. The link received an astounding 20,000 links in just 30 minutes, at peak time receiving 400-500 links per second: impressive stats.

Director of Link Fire, Jeppe Faurfelt welcomes this attention:

“This tweet is the first result of the strategic partnerships we have made with various key players.. . Through these partnerships, we can achieve goals that would otherwise be beyond our reach. “

Intelligent Links

Linkfire’s (free) services guide users to the best experience of content and campaigns, while it allows those sending out a link to adjust it; directing users to different locations as needed.

Exciting times are ahead for the company, with more strategic partnerships to be seen beyond the horizon. Their advice for fellow startups: think bigger and think globally.

Trendsonline also has a story covering more information on the subject.

The post Linkfire’s ‘Deep Linking App’ Starts Off Strong appeared first on Øresund Startups.