News

Alexander Stubb, Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade of Finland took some of Finlands most exciting startups along with him on a business trip to the US (NY and SF). While missing out on the New York fun (due to SXSW), we were happy and proud to participate in San Francisco, meeting Microsoft, Dave McClure from 500 startups, Facebook, Accel partners and finishing of with a great session at RocketSpace.

Thanks also to our friends from: Finnmob, AudioDraft, AppGyver, PowerKiss, Alekstra, Wantlet, MobileBrainBank, HeiaHeia, ScoopShot, Mendor, Flockified, AaltoEs, Idean, Futudent, LagoonCapital, Conmio, DealDash, ThingLink, TribeStudios, MicroTask, HammerKit, WebOfTrust, Sunduka, Transfluent, Verso and Boardman

After an exhausting and really exciting week in Austin, we were able to receive the grand price of this years start-up accelerator competition (in the Music category). There were many really exciting other startups in the finals (from apparently over 750 applicants), so it is a huge honor for us to win this competition. My favorite was 45sound which lets you remove the often poor audio recording of videos shot with a phone at a concert, and replace it with a high-quality recording of the band.
More info about the competition here.
Personal note from Chris: In case you wonder how I managed to run out of time in the 5min presentation. I had to decide whether to user the time to rehearse for the pitch, or to go and test-drive the Chevy Volt (electric car)… the future is definitively electric, no question.

Today we learned that WildChords is one of 20 finalists out of more than 700 apps submitted to our App Spotlight contest 2012. Some coverage of the price can be found in the press release, on VentureBeat and Mediapost.
Unfortunately I missed the Flurry party in Austin.

At SXSW, I bumped into Daria Musk, the singer and songwriter who has been giving virtual life concerts in Google+ hangouts “in front of” hundreds of thousands of people. She got excited about WildChords and started playing and was obviously quite happy about it.
You can watch her inspiring talk at TEDx here, and find out more about her and her music on Darias webpage.

Thanks Daria for your enthusiasm and positive vibes. Just the kind of music enthusiasts we hope to inspire with WildChords.

If you ever wondered how you get animals to understand music, you can attend the seminar at Stanford University
Date: Mon, 03/12/2012 – 11:00am – 12:30pm
Location: CCRMA Seminar Room
Event Type: Hearing Seminar

For immediate release:

HELSINKI — Ovelin, developer of the award-winning guitar learning game WildChords, announced today it received 1.4 million dollars in seed funding by True Ventures. With its interactive music games that listens to what you play, Ovelin is changing the way people learn how to play a musical instrument. The company will use the funds to further develop their current product, and extend the concept to teach people how to play a real music instrument through computer games.

“We are really excited to work with True Ventures, because they share our big vision of making the world more musical. With the investment from True Ventures, we will grow much faster, and build a wider range of interactive music games to teach people all over the world to play music instruments. Of course, we were also happy to learn that one of True Ventures founders’ sons was already learning to play the guitar with WildChords,” said Christoph Thür, CEO and co-founder of Ovelin. “We use game-like features to teach our users to learn to play a music instrument in a fun and motivating way. Our first game WildChords is a good starting point, as it is easy enough for total guitar beginners to get started, and by playing a fun game, their actual guitar skills improve significantly.”

The IMGAwards (International Mobile Games Award) committee announced the nominees for the different categories. In the category “Most Innovative Game 2012″ is our wild animal chasing game WildChords! We are really happy and excited, also because so many of our friends made it to the nominees in different categories: Congrats: Bike Baron, Death Rally, Shadow Cities and DrawRace 2HD! Everyone, please go and vote for our game here.

MIDEM today announced the winners of the MIDEM labs startup competition in three categories. One of the biggest and most influential music conferences in the world has announced MPme, Crowdsurfing and Ovelin the winners in their respective categories. Great to see the high level of innovation in the music space, and also the words from the music industry that they want to support entrepreneurship and allow new ideas to get to the market. You can find the short interviews of the winners here.

The Sunday Times as released its annual list of 500 best apps 2012 here. Amongst the winners is our WildChords guitar hero for real guitar. Maybe it is because now the kids are playing WildChords on Sunday mornings, so their parents have time to read the newspaper. Anyway, we were really happy to hear about that!

Today the Finnish magazine “Talous Elämä” (largest business weekly in Scandinavia with the highest readership of any business weekly in Europe) featured an article about the 20 hottest startups in Finland. You can find the list here. Not only was Ovelin one of them, but also the entire article contained much of our story. We were really happy to read it, and see the crocodile claws grab the guitar (we borrowed from TribeStudios actually, thanks guys).