Sunday Swedish Startup News – Bitcoin, Foap and the Wall Street Journal – 17 November
Each Sunday, we bring you Swedish technology companies who’ve been written about, or mentioned by larger international press. This week, a Swedish bitcoin-hardware company made $3 M in four days, Foap talked about community as a critical component of their marketplace, and the Wall Street Journal piled more praise on the Swedish startup ecosystem.
Technology Firm Makes $3 Million in Four Days Selling Bitcoin Mining Hardware, Currently Sold-Out
“As the desire to mine the physically intangible currency has gone viral, a firm in Sweden named KnCMiner has claimed to have brought in $3 million in revenue in just four days from selling its bitcoin mining machines, according to an article published today by the website theregister.co.uk”.
Foap Founder: Community Is Key to the Mobile Stock Photo Business
“Unlike our competitors, we are strongly focused on building our community. Our community is helping us solve the daunting problem of filtering photos so that we can maintain a great quality in the Foap Market. As a result, we have millions of pre-vetted user-generated photos from all over the world uploaded. Additionally, the way in which we handle licensing of images is also a point of difference. For $10 per photo, the buyer gets an unlimited, global license, and we split the revenue with the photographer on a 50/50 basis. A lot of the larger competitors have many different licenses, and it takes time to figure out how much your image will cost.”
How Entrepreneurial is Europe?
“Looking at the rest of Europe, Germany comes out surprisingly badly, actually below the European average, while the U.K. does well, with three times the VC investment per capita. But it is Sweden that comes out most strongly on the Continent, with four times as much in VC funds per capita as the rest of Europe.”
Read the entire article here