Our story
The beginning
Futurice was born at the peak of the first mobile boom at the end of 2000. Our roots are in Otaniemi where three students at the Helsinki University of Technology set up a technology company together with Markku Taulamo on the financing side. The new start-up had its feet on the ground but it's eyes focused firmly at the stars.
The young company soon found a business angel and in December 2000 started up an office in Eteläinen Hesperiankatu, in the centre of Helsinki. The name Futurice refers to the rice of the future – meaning our daily bread. From the beginning we have developed applications with great ambition for everyday people and everyday use.
The founders of Futurice had a strong vision that mobile devices would revolutionise our ways to communicate, access and share information.
First years
Our first customers were mobile operators in Europe. The first solutions developed at Futurice, the Xpressive product family, integrating pictures and mobile texting.
During 2001-2002 mobile developers faced hard times: enabling technologies were not mature enough or sufficiently widespread. At the same time the market crashed. The majority of mobile start-ups collapsed or radically down-sized their operations. Luckily, Futurice survived through the tough years and was ready for fresh growth!
In the spring of 2002 Innofinance became our financier. Futurice was one of the first Finnish IT companies to be invested in after the dot-com bubble burst.
Symbian and J2ME
In 2002 and 2003 the progress in mobile technology finally enabled the development of long-desired applications. However the global market was still very quiet.
Futurice was the first company in the world to concentrate on the research and development of mobile blogging and photo sharing. As a result, Kuvat Kaverille, (Photos to Friends) a photo sharing application was launched. We also started to cooperate with HIIT (Helsinki Institute of Information Technology) a partnership which bore a lot of fruit. Many new application domains emerged, including music and device management.
Futurice started investing its knowhow in Symbian and J2ME technologies and systematically set out to build up a partner and client network across Europe. Futurice also decided to take an active role in the mobile developer community. One of the rewards of this was the Forum Nokia Pro Award prize in 2004. After those challenging years, this year also saw us break-even.
Growth and I18N
Our satisfied customers started to spread the word about a software house with the “can do” attitude. As a consequence we had rapid organic growth of 50 to 100 percent each year.
In 2006 we gained notable successes in a new customer segment, international start-ups. We worked with pioneering customers such as Audible, Exabre, Kaywa, Mobyko, ScanR and Truphone on developing fascinating new service concepts.
In February 2006 we moved to our current premises in Lauttasaari, Helsinki. The same year we started cooperation with Microsoft. In the spring of 2006 Kuvaboxi, a photo sharing service was launched in collaboration with Finland's largest TV channel, MTV3. Further success came as several of our mobile applications were chosen to be pre-installed on handsets made by a number of phone manufacturers.
Strategic Work
In 2007 we hired two new senior advisors to fuel our growth: Harri Roschier, former CEO of Talentum and Markku Silén, former CEO of Accenture Nordic. We widened our partner network with new partners including Avaus Consulting, Fjord and Forum Virium. In addition ConnectedDay Oy was cofounded with SomeBazaar.
Futurice has been at the forefront of creating social mobile and web applications. Numerous concepts have been designed and implemented in close cooperation with our customers. We continue to expand our knowledge; learning the use and possibilities of new technologies including mobile VoIP, Ruby on Rails and OpenC. Futurice has been at the top of the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list for the last two years in a row.
2008 and beyond
2008 started with an exciting technology demonstration, when we released P2P based on PAMP stack. We are building new business teams to answer the increasing demand for our services especially in international markets, fueling our growth up to 70 employees.
We have built new strategic partnerships whilst utilising our business development consultants, who have a long track record in the international ICT business. We support our customers through the whole project cycle.
We are proud of our achievements and hard work thus far and we consistently look to better ourselves. It is in this vein that we go forward. We can. We care. We grow.
