We had a brief chat with Philip Bergqvist, company’s co-founder and CEO, to find out more about Unified Remote and the people behind it.

Core team

Both Philip and Jakob, the company’s co-founder and CTO, have a background in hobby software development and engineering. Philip has a Master’s Degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University of Bristol in England, and Jakob is currently completing his last year of his Master’s Degree in Computer Science at Lund University. The co-founding team first met 8 years ago during their internship at Qlik, where based on common interests in software development they started working together on a few projects, Unified Remote being the most successful of them.

“We started out when Android was brand new, which helped build our brand early on in the Android eco-system,” explains Philip.

The product

Unified Remote is an app targeted towards consumers, addressing their need of controlling computer programs (like Spotify, VLC, Power Point, etc). remotely, without a mouse or keyboard. When talking about unique values that the app delivers to its users, Philip points out:

• Convenience

“We make it super easy for users to control many different things (you just need one app instead of many).”

• Personal

“We’ve always believed that remote control experience should be personal. We put a lot of effort into customization and extensibility features.”

• Aid

“We hear from many users that have suffered from an injury or other disabilities that our app helps them work or to use a computer in a better way.”

Business model and user acquisition

Since the time of its creation, Unified Remote has achieved some impressive results and 2014 has been particularly productive. This year the app surpassed 3 million downloads and currently has 100,000+ customers, with freemium as its business model.

“So far our strategy has only been to build a product that we love and keep making it better. It worked pretty well for us so far. Today we have 3 million downloads worldwide, yet being just 2 founders with no external investment,” shares Philip.

Among other interesting developments is platform expansion. Unified Remote has moved from supporting only Android and Windows, to also supporting all major platforms such as: Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you want to learn more about Linux, then you may visit the Linode homepage for more information.

And on top of things, Unified Remote has also strengthened its presence on the international arena with Philip and Jakob invited to Google Headquarters in Silicon Valley and featured on their Google Developers YouTube channel.

Future and challenges

Being at the stage where they are, the Unified Remote team is challenged with two questions: how to grow and what areas to explore next.

“Should we grow organically or find investors, and if so, what type of investment: angel, VC, accelerator? There are also many interesting areas where we could apply our technology (e.g. gaming, smart homes, home automation, accessibility etc.) But which one will it be?” says Philip.

Meanwhile, Unified Remote is up for the next challenge. The company was selected among 300 applicatns to participate in a startup competition Next Step Challenge in partnership with Accelerace. In this startup competition Unified Remote team will compete with 7 startups from the US, 2 from United Kingdom and startups from Israel and Germany for the largest entrepreneurial prize in Europe of 250,000 Euro.

We wish the team best of luck!

*This article was originally published on the Nordic Startup Bits website

The post Unified Remote: an app that can control your computer. Interview with Philip Bergqvist appeared first on Øresund Startups.

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.

Register here and join the Facebook group to keep up to date with the latest news and discussion.

The post Y combinators ‘How to Start a Startup’ lectures at Lunds University appeared first on Øresund Startups.

After reaching over 2.2 million downloads in early February for the Android app, the next step was to make the software avaliable to a broader rage of platforms. Previously only available to Android users, they now support Windows, Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi, and Arudino Yún, to name a few. The app has been downloaded a near 3 million times from Google Play and has over 100,000 paying users worldwide.

What’s next for Unified Remote?

The developers are constantly looking for ways to broaden their reach and hope to support even more platforms in the future.

“Unified Remote is really more than just an app; it’s a platform for controlling connected things. You can already create your own remotes, but we plan to release a complete developer kit in the near future for those who want to leverage the Unified Remote platform” Philip Bergqvist, Co-founder Unified Intents.

The post Unified Remote Releases iOS App appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“It started out as a free app. After a while we got so much positive feedback and downloads, so we decided to make a payed version as well. The free version has fewer remotes to choose from, and the payed version has support for widgets and voice commands [on android]” co-founder Philip Bergqvist said.

Unified Remote started already in 2010. The at that time 21 year-old Philip Bergqvist and his 19 year-old co-founder Jacob Berglund created the first version.

“In the beginning it was mostly a problem we wanted to solve for ourselves. I wanted to lie on the couch and control my media player with my mobile.” Philip Bergqvist says to InternetWorld.

A non-free, full version of the app was introduced in 2011. Philip says that roughly 5%, over 100 000, of the users have downloaded the full version so far, at $ 4.

“Most of our users tell us that the app ‘just works’. That is what makes our app great”.

With the success of the Android app and the revenue, Philip has now gone into working full time with the project, and making it a real business. With that came the plan to launch on iOS as well.

“An iOS launch is approaching. Most of the app is finished, and we are currently accepting Beta applications. Our plan right now is to release iOS app in late February / early March. We want to ensure that the app is as good as it can be and bug-free before we release it. We also have some other things in the pipe-line that need time to be completed, such as explainer video and media as well as marketing.” Philip says.

“Next step will be to get the software on all platforms. More then just to be on the iPhone and iPad, we are also looking at Linux and even for things like Raspberry Pi.”

We wish the team good luck, and hope they can grow the project into a thriving business in the future. Thoughts about working towards a global standard for remotes where mentioned on Hacker Nytt TV interview as well, something that has a large potential besides a single app.

The post Unified Remote in beta for iOS after more then 2 million downloads on Android appeared first on Øresund Startups.