“With Bonnier Publications experience, unique content and resources, we can improve our services and our product development. We look forward to deepening our cooperation as part of the Bonnier family,” says Martin Walfisz, founder.

Martin Walfisz started Planeto after leaving Massive Entertainment, which he build from 3 guys in a garage to one of the worlds leading game development studio. With Planeto the focus was on smaller games instead of triple A titles. Started in 2009 initially with webbased and later mobile based games were developed by the team. A strong facus has been on quizes and games that tested users knowledge and expertise.

Teaming up with Bonnier in 2012, which later also invested in the company, turned out to be a good way to reach users.

“The success of Quiz Battle has shown how much our readers appreciate the opportunity to test their knowledge with other readers and players. By integrating Planetos design- and development capability, we can make better use of the content that we create for our 50 different magazines.” says Jens Henneberg from Bonnier

As part of the acquisition, Planeto’s CEO, Morten Grauballe, will step down. Martin Walfisz will take the role as CEO again.

No details regarding the amount of the acquisition or other terms have emerged. Planeto has as far as we know raised less then €2M in total.

The post Bonnier acquires Planeto appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

1000+ people in Christiania

The setting was something uniquely Copenhagenesque – the venue was inside the free town of Christiania, in ‘Den Grå Hall’. Having to describe the way there with a message like this below shows the idea of pushing the concept – this was probably as far from boring corporate events as it is possible to get.

Cphftw townhall t- 140 minutes. The Grey Hall (head towards pusher street and turn left) #cphftw

A photo posted by @mygdal on Nov 11, 2014 at 6:41am PST

The iconic sitzkartongs where there, altho the atmosphere was much more like a concert – with most people standing up. Which might have to do with it being the sitzkartongs fourth even – they might not be that stable anymore…

High action, high quality

This Town Hall felt a lot more condensed and intense then previous ones. On stage there where some of the highest achievers from the Copenhagen startup scene, giving insights and their view on what it is like to run a startup. The line-up included Thorvald Stigsen from Momondo, David Helgason from Unity, Peter Michael Oxholm Zigler from Autobutler, Theis Søndergaard from Vivino – and a many more.

The keynotes where Thorvald from Momondo and David from Unity, opening and closing the evening. Throvald focused on the startup journey and the harch reality that most fail, and why. David gave a lot of insights into how they build Unity as a company, and challenges along the way.

“During the transition phase, get some stamina, find your voice and build your audience.”

– was one of Thorvald’s advices.

“One wonderful thing of raising money: it lets you lift your eyes to the horizon.”

– was one of David’s insights.

In between the keynotes there where a lot of announcements, highlights from startups and their successes, and community events. This included short presentations by the Danish Crowdfunding Association, the Copenhagen Cocoa meet-ups, TechBBQs plans and also MINC from Malmö about their incubator. On the startup sector Planetos Morten Grauballe was talking about their success and new plans, as well as 23s new office and housewarming – The 23 House.

Wine and news from Vivino

As previously with the Town Hall meet-ups, one of the startups helps out with the bar. This time it was Vivinos staff who manned the bars, handling out not just beers, but of course also lots of wine.

Vivino also announced major news on stage – their new service to scan not just bottles of wine, but now also to scan complete wine lists at restaurants!

Good talks and sharing knowledge

One of the key highlights for many was not just the keynotes, but also the mingling session – which was divided into different roles where everyone could choose what fitted them the best. Represented by a key player in the region taking the lead in each group, the sessions included: Angel, CTO, COO, CMO, VC as well as many more. These small group sessions brought a lot of value as well introducing different people to each other. A great detail, and much better then normal mingling!

“It feels great that to see that #cphftw is helping to bring the startup scene together, and to see experienced serial entrepreneur give advice to those involved their first startup. Just as it makes me happy to see employees from startups connect more with like-minded people, talking about anything from marketing, tech to operation challenges.”

– was Jasenko Hadzic’s, main organiser, comment on it all.

A lot going on

Overall a great evening, that I think gave everyone a great feeling of the energy in the scene. If you missed it, then you can experience parts of it: 23 was there as well, filming and broadcasting it all. You can also see more of what happened over at Conferize event page.

We are already looking forward to the next Town Hall!

The post #cphftw Town Hall 4 – A Great Event! appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

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

• Codesealers
• Falcon Social
• FlatFrog Laboratories
• iMotions
• Neo technology (Neo4J)
• Octoshape
• Opbeat
• Serstech
• SimpleSite (123hjemmeside)
• Tradeshift
• Trustpilot
• Unity
• Vopium

Seed level

B2C

• Bownty
• Click-A-Taxi
• Coolstuff
• Flattr
• Foap
• Tasspass
• Retevo (Roliga Prylar / Alphageek)

B2B

• Anyfi
• Atosho
• Conferize
• Crunchfish
• Deskwolf
• Dexplora (GetSalesDone and brisk.io)
• Firmafon
• GameAnalytics
• Graduateland
• InRiver
• Insurance Business Applications
• OneRecruit
• Sepior
• The Eye Tribe
• Wallmob
• Zaplox

Other prominent startups

• 23
• Echo.it
• Kvittar
• MovieStarPlanet
• Momondo
• Planeto
• Riidr
• Zendesk

The post Øresund Startups: Top50 and state of the region appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

We met at their small office – the team is no more than 10 people at this time, located in central Malmö. Unsure if on purpose or not, the office has straight views across a park to Massive’s – massive 6 storied red brick building – headquarters.

Speaking about the start of Planeto, and how it got going, Martin tells us that he and Magnus Robertsson started the startup in 2009. This was directly after Martin had left Massive Entertainment: he had had a really great time but felt he was ready to move on.

“Me and Magnus are good friends from when we studied together in Blekinge. He was eager to get going, and this was just after Massive had been acquired by Ubisoft and I felt it was time to move on.”

“We started the company in May 2009. The first 6-8 months, almost all of 2009, was mostly spent raising money. We raised 5-6 Msek in the start, from multiple small investors, and got going.”

“In total we have raised 15-16 Msek, still seed money and from multiple small investors, both private investors, public funds and larger companies. Bonnier is one of the bigger external owners now since 2012, after our successful cooperation with Quiz Battle”

Planeto’s product has not been the same from the start. Martin tells that the main concept is quiz games, and building a “knowledge graph”. But their first product was a web based quiz game:

“Our first version had the vision of World of Warcraft meets quiz game. This might sounds strange, but there are a lot of elements from that game that could be transferred to a knowledge game. During 2010 and 2011 we were 10-12 people working on this, and got a great product.”

However, in 2011 they changes focus. When asked why, Martin says:

“The web based game was great, had active users and got good feedback. But we were missing an engine of growth, it had no strong viral components and no clear monetization plan. So we needed to move on.”

“We had by now seen Wordfeud, and we thought something similar would fit our idea perfectly. A game that you can play minutes at a time, with friends.”

“The decision to change focus was not that hard, even if it meant that the team got smaller. Our main concern was that we had no iOS developer in-house, so that took us some months to figure out. We thought making our first iOS product would take us 3 months, it turned out to be rather 6-7 months…”

For anyone who has followed the Lean Startup movement this sounds like a classical pivot.

Martins thoughts on Lean Startup:

“We have loosely followed the Lean Startup concepts since we started. Already my time at Massive was very lean, we set up an agile work organization way back in 2002. I guess it is a style that has suited me well.”

Their app, now called Illustrerad Vetenskap Quiz Battle and Quizboard (the same product but one of them under the Illustrerad Vetenskap brand by media giant Bonnier), has made it to #1 in the app store in all Nordic countries.

“Almost 25% of the Danish population have downloaded our app. That is just a crazy number! I think the success is because our collaboration with Bonnier helped us get through the noise in the market, and our product was good enough to reach viral growth with that help.”

“Currently we have over 2.7 million downloads. We have had over 500 000 daily active users. This is great, and we have so far only launched big in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands”

When speaking about the future, he allures of big plans:

“We have recently hired a very experienced Sales & Marketing manager who is establishing contacts in the US. We had some interesting meetings in the US during E3 and afterwards. I cannot say too much yet, but we can say that we have been getting really good attention from potential partners there.”

As the first iteration of the product had only one monetization method, we asked how it is going now – making a game and giving it away for free takes some effort to turn into a good revenue stream.

“Until a couple of weeks ago our only monetization method was that users could upgrade the app to a premium version, that got rid of the ads and gave access to extra game boards. But now we just recently released a new version, where we have some in-app purchases as well, such as question packs, and soon ‘life-lines’.”

“However, monetization will always need a lot of consideration. Because we are a knowledge game, we cannot just give the person willing to spend the most money the best advantage. So for that reason we are careful how and what kind of in-app purchases we introduce. Right now there are question packs that can be purchased, as well as some benefits in the game – but when you buy any of the benefits your opponent gets the same. The one with the money can initiate what benefits are used, but the in-game advantages will be similar to both players.”

Speaking about their vision and what they want to achieve in the future:

“Our vision is to create the ‘personal knowledge graph’, a place where you can see what people know on different subjects. We believe that by answering questions it is possible to actually map areas a person is knowledgeable about. We want to expand that, as an opt-in in our games of course, because we think being able to tell if someone is an expert or not is something that is missing from the internet today. Currently the people best at expressing themselves or that are the most active are the ones that get recognition on the internet – we want people to be able to enter a new conversation and get credit for what they know instead of having to build up a reputation from scratch. We believe this is will make the internet a better place”

As a final point we talked about the gaming scene in the region. Because Martins past with and his entrepreneurial spirit he has a lot of interesting connections in the gaming community

“The gaming community here is great. However, it is still quite informal and not very structured. I have talked to some other developers and we have some ideas, doing some more structured activities and gatherings. Both to share experience with one another, as well as putting this region on the map as a center for great game development”.

Of course we will keep our eyes on that and report when we know more.
Thanks to Martin for sharing some of his past experiences with us.

The post Interview with Martin Walfisz – serial entrepreneur with an eye for games appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Their latest game, Science Illustrated Quiz Battle, managed last week to make it into the app store spot #1 (in Sweden, it has already been on that spot in Denmark since earlier). This is of course a great achievement, given the extensive volume boost being ranked on the top in the app store usually means.

Planeto is currently claiming over 2 million downloads, an impressive feat considering that it only is aviable in the Nordics (and Holland) so far! The success is especially good in Denmark, where over 20% of the population have downloaded the game!

If you haven’t tried the game yet, do so, you can find them both for the iPhone or Android.

The post Planeto’s Quiz Battle #1 in the app store and impressive numbers appeared first on Øresund Startup News.