Start up! The European Entrepreneurship Summit
Brussels, 21 February 2012
Joonas Hjelt, Blaast
EIT finalist: With this start-up, a smartphone is just a Blaast away
Finnish start-up Blaast, nominated for an EIT Award by the ICT KIC, has an 'app' to make your phone a smartphone.
Early in 2010, two groups of Finnish entrepreneurs went on a blind date.
One was a research-based team, led by Joonas Hjelt, the other a telecoms industry team, led by Vesa Kemppainen. "We were introduced by investors we both knew," says Hjelt. The teams met at Aalto Venture Garage, a co-working space for Baltic and Nordic entrepreneurs at Aalto University. They clicked and ended up fixing a second date. By June of the same year, they had co-founded a company and called it Blaast.
The main aim of Blaast is to bring mobile applications and a smartphone user experience to people who don't own top-of-the-range phones. With Blaast, the "apps" run in a cloud computing environment - on remote computer servers connected to the phones, rather than on the devices themselves.
Downloading Blaast transforms a mobile phone that was primarily used for calls and text messages into one which you can use to chat with friends on social networking sites, play games and keep abreast of the news. The company says downloading its product is like upgrading an old phone.
Investors behind the Helsinki-based company include the founding engineers of Skype (Ambient Sound Investment), Veturi Venture Accelerator and angel investors. No doubt the track record of Hjelt, who founded cloud infrastructure company Nervogrid, and Kemppainen, former chief operating officer of telecom IT solution provider Tecnotree, helped secure the high-profile backing.
Blaast's primary target is emerging markets. The number of Internet users in BRICI countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia) is expected to double within four years, reaching 1.2 billion by 2015, according to estimates by Boston Consulting Group, and the means by which many of these people will access the Internet is their mobile phone. Blaast has therefore analysed the market, identified the basic problems for users in these countries and set about trying to solve them.
The next 1 billion people to get online will have "mobile apps from day one", and their mobile online experience will be much more user-friendly and efficient, says Hjelt. In fact, Blaast's service has already gone live in Indonesia, with the official launch in Jakarta set for the end of January.
The company, which employs 25 people in Helsinki and 15 in Southeast Asia, is not just targeting emerging markets. Given that Blaast uses cloud-based technology, it can serve devices all over the world, Hjelt said. "We're planning to bring out something globally" in the coming months, he said, without going into detail.
As far as end-users are concerned, Blaast is essentially an app store that works on affordable mobile phones. For developers it is, in Hjelt's words, "an incredible distribution opportunity." And for operators, it is a chance to convert voice users into more lucrative data users.
Read more about this finalist: The Finalists - Just the Facts
 |
|
 |
Organised in cooperation with the Science|Business Innovation Board |