Kuneri bloggy

Pikkoo introduces interactive Live Screensavers and partners with Foreca to bring weather-cast of 140.000 locations worldwide to mobile screensavers

Oulu, Finland, 30th June 2009 – Pikkoo, an innovative Finnish startup, today introduced the ground breaking Live Screensaver concept, streaming information to mobile devices without ever pushing a button. Using Pikkoo Live Screensavers, mobile users will not only be served up-to-date information anytime, anywhere without a need to launch an application, but also will be able to interact with their screensaver just as any other mobile application.

With the introduction, the first live screensaver is launched in partnership with Foreca, leading Finnish digital weather service company. Foreca Live Weather Screensaver will bring up-to-date, geographic-specific weather information of 140.000 locations worldwide to mobile screensavers. Users will also be able to get detailed information from foreca.mobi, the most comprehensive mobile weather service, using the screensaver.

“Here at Foreca, we’re very excited to offer such a novel concept to our audience together with Pikkoo. With an ever increasing demand from the mobile audience for accurate, up-to-date weather information; it will be possible for Foreca to bring weather-cast into everyone’s pocket with minimum effort” says Marko Moilanen, VP Business Development, Foreca.

Utilizing Adobe Flash® Lite™ and its own proprietary technologies, Pikkoo interactive Live Screensavers are able to brings contextual content to mobile devices, reducing information delivery to the simplest form possible for today’s mobile devices.

“Why should you launch an application to access information, while information could be served right in front of you?” asks Mr. Ugur Kaner, CEO of Pikkoo. “Our partnership with Foreca is one great example of how weather information could be brought to users, without users needing to go and get themselves. Pikkoo interactive Live Screensavers can similarly be applied to a multitude of uses to a variety of industries as a value-added service that can capture any mobile user today.” he continues.

For more information, visit www.pikkoo.com/foreca-live-weather-screensaver.html or contact Pikkoo.

About Pikkoo

Pikkoo is an innovative startup based in Oulu, Finland. Pikkoo focuses on social, user generated and interactive mobile content for Adobe Flash® Lite™ and non-Flash Lite enabled phones. The company is privately held and founded in early 2009. Pikkoo launched private beta in November 2008, and opened to the public in May 2009.  For more information, go to http://www.pikkoo.com

About Foreca Ltd.

Foreca Ltd. is a full-scale weather company based in Helsinki, Finland. Foreca has more than ten years of experience of forecasting weather and providing internet and mobile weather services. Foreca specializes in weather services for digital media and especially mobile devices. Foreca’s first commercial mobile weather service was launched already in 1997, and it is still steady revenue creator. Thanks to its world-wide partner network Foreca is able to provide accurate weather information for any market. Today, Foreca’s mobile weather services have users across all continents. For more information please visit http://corporate.foreca.com

About Adobe® Flash® Lite™

Adobe® Flash® Lite™ software, Adobe’s award-winning Flash Player runtime specifically designed for mobile devices, to enable web browsing of Flash Player compatible content. Flash Lite has shipped on 1 billion devices (40% of all new handsets in 2008) and will reach more than 2.5 billion devices by the end of 2010.

Contact Info

Pikkoo Ltd.
Mr. Endale Mitiku, VP Marketing & Sales
Tel: +358 443 19 1259
Email: dale[at]pikkoo[d.t]com
Adress: Pakkahuoneenkatu 12 A, 90100, Oulu, Finland

Foreca Ltd.
Mr. Tuomo Kolehmainen, Business Manager, Channels
Tel. +358 44 3300646
Email: tuomo.kolehmainen[at]foreca[d.t]com
Address: Tammasaarenkatu 5, FI-00180, Finland

via Pikkoo blog

Pikkoo wins the startup competition of MOBILE 2.0 EUROPE in ‘Play’ category to present in Barcelona among 5 hottest mobile startups of Europe representing Finland. Kudos!

The MOBILE 2.0 EUROPE conference brings together experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem, including startups, investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, and mobile application developers and web technologists. The conference is an opportunity for companies to connect to industry leadership and startup innovation and broaden your C-level relationships.

via Pikkoo blog

Pikkoo released the latest version of Pikkoo Screensaver Manager with full touch screen support for Nokia phones such as 5800 XPress Music and N97.

Release notes:

- Full touch screen support (for Nokia 5800, Nokia N97 etc..)

- Bug fixes

- UI improvements

Apparently, Nokia decided to remove screensaver support on Nokia 5800 XPress Music (or S60 5th edition we should say?). As enjoying Flash Lite screensavers seems to be impossible natively, there is a small widget application enabling Flash Lite screensavers on 100 Nokia S60 phone models, including Nokia 5800 XPress music. With this widget application, it’s also possible to get unlimited free screensavers designed by users or yourself.

Below is the step by step guide on how to enable Flash Lite screensavers on S60 3rd and 5th edition devices, such as Nokia 5800 XPress Music or Nokia N73.

1. Download and install Pikkoo Screensaver Manager

2. Browse through screensavers on gallery, or create your own using Pikkoo Themes.

3. Note down the pCode (Pikkoo download code) of the screensaver you like

4. Run Pikkoo Screensaver manager on your phone, goto “Download” menu, enter the pCode code and download

5. Activate the screensaver. Voila!

Now you can enjoy the full power and fun of Flash Lite screensavers on your Nokia 5800 XPress music and many other phone models

PS. If you use twitter; I recommend you to follow Pikkoo.

[via Pikkoo blog]

Maybe not the grand prize, but we are happy to see Pikkoo in the list of Judge’s Choice Award for Nokia Calling All Innovators global contest.

First round of the contest was maybe not exactly our thing; but the next round has a special category for S60. I strongly believe we have a good chance there :)

A new round of Calling All Innovators was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The new categories for the contest are: Internet Innovation, Flash, Emerging Markets

Pikkoo released 2 ultimately cool mobile screensaver & wallpaper templates: Snowboarding and Rainy Day.

If you love Snowboarding, you should definitely want to show that off on your mobile and design your own snowboard screensaver/wallpaper and why not snowboard.

If you love cute and tiny characters, Rainy Day template is great to spread the cuteness on your phone. I like that one.

Pikkoo (mobile screensavers and wallpapers 2.0) is selected to Le Mobile 2.0 2009 taking place in March in Paris. Honored to be among such interesting and cool startups like Floobs and Mippin. We are trying our best to make it there, but the notice came little late, and we are caught unprepared. Hope we can make it there.

Here is the full list of selected top 28 mobile Startups.

It’s been some time we have been working on our “Next big thing” project Pikkoo. It’s not a ‘yet another screensaver and wallpaper site’, but the world’s first community to create, download and share interactive mobile screensavers and wallpapers for free. There are many unique mobile and web technologies behind Pikkoo, which probably have no comparable existing; but surely Flash Lite and Nokia has the biggest role and focus in the story. We hope that people will enjoy using it and the power and the idea behind Pikkoo will be understood and grasped in time: Fingers crossed.

Why not launch? Well, we will make more buzz, talk and discuss on it and release formal stuff with press releases etc.. However, before getting into all that, we just wanted to ’silently’ air Pikkoo to public and have it a smooth start instead of a load of traffic and undesired situations. Therefore this is an “On Air” situation, more than a “Big Launch”. Otherwise, it’s not a common practice for anyone to launch a flagship product late Friday night :)

Anyways, Pikkoo is open for registrations and all now. Just stop by, let us know what you think about it. There is a whole Pikkoo Forum dedicated for that.