vilpponen

I can only comment on our offering, but naturally DigitalOcean is putting up great competition in terms of pricing.

A few things to consider when hosting with us:

1) We only use enterprise grade hardware currently from Dell and all network related devices are from Cisco (so high performance is guaranteed through out the device lifecycle in SSDs for example).

2) We take redundancy very seriously. All of our stack is redundant from routers, switches to the software level - basically. Performance is nothing without control meaning your data is hosted always on two separate storage backends, both RAID5 secured. In addition to this, you can naturally take backups which are hosted on a different physical machine.

3) Control: we have Android and iOS apps to control your servers when not in front of your computer. You can create the most basic server tasks while on the go. In addition to the mobile apps, our API enables more demanding solutions to be put in place by clients. We also use our own API for our Control Panel, so it is always up to date with the latest additions.

4) 100% SLA: as we have built everything by ourselves we can guarantee extreme availability (and also taking into account our redundancy).

Just to name a few.

Thanks for the comment!

Design is something we're really keen on, so all comments regarding usability are taken seriously.

Will try to answer all questions here. Also keeping an eye on our systems due to the expected heavy load.

Thinking of writing up a blog post on this to our company blog as the dust settles, how a campaign like this works.

Absolutely, major typo there. NO credit cards required for the sign-up.

Thanks.

And to add the fine print:1) We give 100 euro of credit that enables you to run it for more than 70 days.2) No commitments, credit cards needed. 3) Non-transferrable, non-refundable, one per account - 1000 servers given out in total.

We're just eager to make a splash and hear feedback on how people use and would like to use a service like ours.

ps. Here's our recent discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5317647

Hey, thanks for the questions!

1) Many different providers have different pricing for their different availability zones. On our part this is partly due, because we want to offer competitive pricing out of London (but also because there are different costs involved per zone). But thank you for the comment regarding the unified pricing, we'll add a tick to that in our roadmap :)

2) When setting up servers in Helsinki, for example, you can clone the server to London with just a few clicks. This automatically sets up the same server in London based on its status it was copied from in Helsinki.

We believe this is currently as far as we want to go with the automation (meaning that our clients choose where they want to clone the servers to) as it would not make sense for us to clone servers without customers' consent to other availability zones.

Let me know how you feel about the above mentioned setup!

Thanks again for your feedback, greatly appreciated!

We're prepared for a ton of interest in our service and thus we need to limit the free trial somewhat (but we still want to give everyone a go at it). However, for 10 euros we are removing all limitations and also giving you 100 euro worth of free credit towards our service (part of the launch campaign).

Let me know how this works for you, thanks for the feedback!

Even though our management services, billing, API and high availability automation, among others, are homegrown - on the hypervisor side there is no added value in building your own, and we are using the open source KVM virtualisation.

Thanks for the comment!

Thanks, we're also on Twitter @upcloudcom if you want to follow us for more frequent updates.

Thank you :) Would love to hear your feedback on us as well.

I'm the guy interviewed in the article. Would love to learn more what you guys value in cloud infra solutions. We're still a small, growing startup and all feedback is extremely valuable.

We believe in providing extreme redundancy, with enterprise grade hardware bundled with constantly high performing resources at internationally competitive prices.

Good story, however I'd like to ask if Vesterbacka made any clearer statements on what "managing revenue" means. Their 2011 filing for the Finnish officials state they made about 75 million euros in revenue (far from the $500 million cited in the article).

Does this number represent the value of the merchandise sales of the company or was he explicitly referring to the revenue of Rovio itself?

Edit: here's the link to the Finnish officials' records http://finder.fi/Televiestintälaitteita%20ja%20palveluja/Rov...

Thank you, very much appreciated! And as said - we're looking for ways to continue it as a community driven thing, so I'm sure it's going to be around in some form. Lots of people reaching out to us currently.

Thanks for the comment!

We optimised the price in a way that we are able to sell out. It was also the maximum in revenue we could have reached so I think we did well in that sense.

The key here, in running a media business, is how do you go about building enough products that will keep you running through out the year - when there are no events (which for us where the biggest source of revenue).

I think this question will also remain a question to answer for the future, no matter how ArcticStartup will run.

I'm the guy running the company, or the guy who used to run it. It's been an awesome ride and a great learning experience. Most importantly though, I think we've been able to positively affect the Northern European startup scene in a sustainable way.

The hardest part of all this is to let go of my fantastic team. If you have part time, or full time work for them - please get in touch with them through the contact details in the post.

Hacker News community - you've been instrumental in spreading our news as well.

Thank you everyone.

I like to run ArcticStartup as neutral/transparent as possible. People are able to find out my relation to TenFarms from my LinkedIn page anyhow.

In the end, writing about news that are favorable to me aren't necessarily favorable to the startup industry in general.

Integrity builds trust and traction.

Sorry guys, seem to taking a bit of toll here. We'll see if we can sort things out on our end to keep the servers up.

My thinking is that while the game reached 100 million downloads quite fast - the ramp up to 500 million was a lot faster. You can't keep up the hype if you don't do things differently.

I talked to Peter Vesterbacka a little more and also published another article based on this discussion. I believe it also opens up their thinking regards to expansion quite well.

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/11/02/rovios-plan-conquer-...

I talked to Peter Vesterbacka (the Mighty Eagle/marketing guy) some 10-15 minutes ago about this. He said that looking back, it's easy to state that they've done all their marketing acts differently from everyone else and that is probably, according to him, the main reason that they are seen something different from similar games.

Yes, that's correct.

The data is coming from Cherry Media Group, and they've collected it from publicly available figures.

This is one of the reasons Readability links you back to the original article when you share document inside the service. It keeps a small overlay at the top which you can use to make the page more readable again.

Slightly off topic: I've been playing around with an idea for a service that would be able to share content this way - would make reading a lot more fun again.

My take on this is that they want to differentiate it enough to make it more "Nokia-like". However, what this means concretely - is still unknown.

Also, my guess is that they will announce something on this the coming summer, well before Nokia world in September.

(edited for repetition of words)

These are interesting comments from Nokia in the light of their partnership with Microsoft. Most likely this would mean Nokia will change the UI of the Windows Phone environment to their taste.

Secondly: According to Nokia, Microsoft will be adopting Ovi Maps to all their services in the future.

As the writer of the article, I want to apologise for that inaccuracy. I have added this clarification to the article itself and mentioned of this in the end. The mistake was completely unintentional.

However, it would be interesting to research if there are single entities larger than iTunes or Spotify selling "analogue" music on a European level - which could hold the initial statement true.

I heard a talk by Andreas Ehn (Spotify's former CTO) last year and he actually mentioned in his talk that piracy was the benchmark they were trying to compete with Spotify.

Piracy still is the market leader in catalogue size and ease of use for consumers at large (just see the AVC post in another comment). This is actually a fantastic way to look at it - Spotify didn't set out to beat iTunes or any existing market player with a business model, they wanted to beat piracy.

Now that's an ambitious goal, even though many other services aim at doing the same indirectly (by beating existing market players).

I personally believe a big part of the experience is to go to these events alone, without knowing anybody else. This is the best way to get the most out of them. You'll basically learn a lot about yourself and also make new friends with a varied skillset.

May come in handy when you're building your next startup, you never know.

Garage48 is one of the best event formats I have seen and experienced. I wrote a first person post on the experience.

I have a business background, but also have a basic understanding what can be achieved with different languages. These events are definitely needed to spur interest towards creating interesting web applications (and startups).

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/01/18/last-weekends-experi...