The project name Futuuns is coming to an end as we have launched the new name for our service – AudioDraft! You can continue to follow us on the following places
http://audiodraft.com
http://facebook.com/audiodraft
http://twitter.com/audiodraft
Futuuns will take part to the Aaltoes Fair held tomorrow in Design Factory starting at 18:00. We will have a stand where we’ll be demoing our product for the first time publicly! We’ll also be officially announcing our products new name. Don’t miss the opportunity to get a peak at what we’ve been working on. See you at the Fair!
Futuuns was one of the five winners of the Venture Cup idea phase. The finals were held on Wednesday between 12 finalists. The result leaves Futuuns in top 5 of the total number of 227 participants! We are already working on the business plan phase of the competition and we’ll surely be ready to deliver our best on 10th of March next year.
Here some of the media coverage Futuuns got with the win this far:
Venture cup
Aaltoes
Kauppalehti
It-viikko
Futuuns is one of the twelve business ideas that are up for a prize in the Venture Cup Business plan competition. Futuuns got chosen to the top 12 from a total number of 227 participants! Five ideas will be rewarded on 16.12. after the teams have had a chance to pitch their ideas to the referees. The judges concentrate on innovativeness, growth potential and realistic implementation. The idea phase of the competition is followed by a business plan phase early next year.
All twelve prize nominees (in Finnish)
Futuuns has secured another round of Tuli funding! Tuli program is a Tekes funded program aimed to support the development and commercialization of new and innovative business ideas. The funding round is the third and final one for Futuuns. The funding covers consulting fees as well as salaries for the entire production team. With the help of the funding Futuuns team has now the ability to work full time on the project.
We have now intensive months of development ahead of us as we will soon be moving in to user driven development by the launch of our private beta. We are motivated, full of energy and can’t wait to get our hands dirty!
Futuuns team took part to the Slush Helsinki event on the 3rd and 4th of November. We participated to the Slush Seven competition and to the IPB (International Business Program) clinic. In both of these there was seven minutes of time to present the concept.
There were seven finalists competing with their concepts in Slush Seven. These seven were chosen from over 40 applicants and already a spot in the finals was a huge success for Futuuns. Tommi did our pitch which went really well and we ended up receiving a lot of compliments for it. Great job Tommi! We didn’t get the first prize but all the finalists were awarded with a custom designed workshop to help to push the project forward. Great news for Futuuns!
In the IPB clinic we did our pitch to a panel of industry experts such as Burton Lee and Taneli Tikka to name a few. We got lot of valuable feedback concerning the pitch and our concept. Another great experience for Futuuns in Slush!
Futuuns even got a bit of media presence with the other Slush participants as the event got covered in a local newspaper:
Ilta-Sanomat 04.11.2009
Over all Slush was a great success for Futuuns!
Ten days in the Valley went past fast and the trip back home has already started. We had an intensive schedule during our stay and we got to see and learn a lot. I believe we got a little taste of the actual life of an entrepreneur in the Valley. During the day time you really had to run from a meeting to another and try to make as many new contacts as possible. Evenings you used writing follow up mails and working your project forward. The pace of life in the Valley is fast and the days are long.
We were really priviledged to travel as a part of the Aaltoes group. The group was full of bright and enthusiastic young entrepreneurs and we made a lot of new valuable contacts. Aaltoes had organized some great events and we got to see places and meet people you normally might have a hard time seeing and meeting. There is just so much going on in the Valley all the time that you really have to make choices on where to be and hope you’re in the right place with the right people. From this perspective our trip was a huge success. We got to meet just the right people for our project and really made some great new contacts for the future.
The culture in the Valley was really supportive to entrepreneurship. The attitude we faced everywhere was to just go for it and the success will follow. Failing was seen as a really valuable learning experience and most of the success stories had come from years of trying. One of the main messages we take home and start implementing straight away is simple: Be fast, be efficient and be flexible.
Our tight schedule will continue as we head out to Slush as soon as we arrive Helsinki. We’ll get you a report on that later. See you there!
Wow! Two days of intensive networking! We started yesterday at former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos place where we went for cocktails with the Aaltoes group. Good to see that there are such talented and inspired people in Aaltoes. Some successful enterpreneus from Finland also joined us for the cocktails. Wise words from experienced people. Great stuff!
Today we started the day with a brief tour at the Microsoft Campus. Then we ran off to San Francisco to meet with Jason Aiken from 99designs. We had a long talk about how they made it and got exellent tips for our service as well. The main message was that the service must be outstanding to get people using it. If the users love it, they’ll market it to their friends without asking.
In the evening we went to Musica Tecnomica which is an invite only monthly get together for the people in the audio industry. Thanks for Brian Zisk for hooking us up with the event organizer David Katznelson and thanks for David for inviting us to this great event! David himself is a former Vice President at Warner Bros Records. We got a change to talk to other great people in the audio industry as well. There were startup founders, label executives, entertainment lawyers, Emmy award winners, etc. What a honor to participate.
We made great new contacts and met a lot of interesting people!
We spent the whole Tuesday in a conference called Failcon in San Francisco. The conference focused on the trials and tribulations of successful entrepreneurs. The speakers included the founders of some of the leading social web and VC firms in the bay area such as for example Sandy Jen and Seth Sternberg; co-founders of Meebo and Mark Pincus; CEO of Zynga just to name a few. We heard different kinds of stories about failure and how to recover from it. One message got repeated over and over again: don’t be afraid of failing! For each of these succesfull entrepreneurs failure had worked as a catalyst for future success. They had learned their greatest lessons from their failures. We got to hear some truly inspirational speeches! Here are some other wise words we heard on some specific topics: (more…)
Meanwhile Arto, Kimmo and Teemu are exploring the Silicon Valley, I spent the whole weekend at Alternative Party in Helsinki. It’s one of the largest annual digital media events in Finland. It’s not an ordinary fair event, but a demoscene event that gathers all the computer enthusiasts and experts to compete in coding and multimedia competitions. The party also had a theme: Cyberpunk.
So what did I do there? I played live electronic music with DStruction on the main stage of the event, reached 2nd place in the music competition and saw a lot of interesting competitions, bands, art performances, old computers, lectures, and cyberpunk costumes. There are actually too many interesting things to mention here, but I must say say that now I have played the classic game Pong against a mechanical arm that is controlled by an artificial intelligence.
I’ll definitely go to the Alternative Party again next year and take the whole Futuuns team with me.
