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Leading analyst selects Maventa as Cool Vendor 2010

Kim Forsman — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:31:51 GMT

Maventa, one of the fastest growing electronic invoicing service providers in the world, today announced that leading analyst firm Gartner has named Maventa as a Cool Vendor in their newly released report on Multi-enterprise B2B.

Vendors selected for the Cool Vendor report are “innovative, impactful and intriguing”

Maventa’s award winning Software-as-a-Service solution makes electronic invoicing simple, cost-efficient and immediately available without upfront investments or process changes. Maventa offers all the benefits of high-end e-invoicing platforms purely on transaction based pricing without any fixed costs or minimum term periods. Besides the superior technology, Maventa’s intra-network transactions are completely free of charge – which has further pushed forward Maventa’s viral growth.

Gartner’s 2010 Cool Vendors in Multienterprise B2B, listing focuses on “as the notion that electronic transactions enable efficiency and save money becomes widespread, and B2B projects proliferate, some nascent vendors are offering interesting, low-cost-of-entry opportunities, especially for small and midsize businesses, for reducing the costs of electronic trading”

“We are delighted by Gartner’s recognition as a ‘Cool Vendor’ and view it as an important validation of Maventa’s position as a leading electronic invoicing platform,” said Kim Forsman, founder and CEO of Maventa. “Our customer growth rate of 40% month-on-month along with the fact that 97% of our customers are new to electronic invoicing demonstrates that not only have we created truly innovative technology, but something that is impacting how the electronic invoicing market shapes in 13 countries where we have customers”.

Maventa’s technology is instantly available and can be adopted within a company in a matter of minutes from the implementation decision, instead of typical electronic invoicing implementation projects, which may drag on for months. The key to our fast deployment is that the customer doesn’t need to change any of their processes or systems in order to deliver or receive electronic invoices. Maventa is offering its services daily to customers in over 13 different countries, including UK, India, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, The Netherlands, Italy and Spain among others.

For more information about Maventa, please visit maventa.com.

About Gartner's Cool Vendors Selection Process

Gartner's listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn't do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner's interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

1 - Gartner Cool Vendors in Multienterprise B2B, 2010, by Paolo Malinverno Benoit J. Lheureux on 12 April 2010.

About Maventa

Maventa is an innovative provider of electronic invoice services. Its award winning software-as-a-service solution makes electronic invoicing simple, cost-efficient and immediately available without upfront investments or process changes. Maventa was founded in 2007 and is one of the fastest growing providers of e-invoice services with +3000 customers in 13 countries. Maventa has offices in Helsinki, Tallinn and Amersfoort. www.maventa.com

Maventa.com rapidly gaining momentum across Finnish SMEs

Kim Forsman — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:05:53 GMT

Maventa.com has today outranked Enfo Oy and OP-Pohjola Group with its existing Finnish customer base of 2377 legal entities and takes the third position within the Finnish operators. With a user-base across Europe in 13 different countries, the network attains over 12 new Finnish legal entities daily. Source: http://verkkolasku.tieke.fi

Instead of dealing with cumbersome implementation procedures or complex format conversions, Maventa takes care of the heavy-lifting on behalf of the customer. Key differentiators from the Finnish Banks include among others: Plug&Play in 10 minutes, Format validations and conversions, Company's own design on their invoices, inclusion of any type of attachments, trade acknowledgements, long-time storage and digital signatures. The banking network is not capable of delivering anything else than the finnish niche-standard Finvoice, which has several shortcomings from a digital trading perspective. 99.998% of all invoices were accurately delivered and processed by the recipients in 2009 - which gives an insight on the level of data-correctness we are able to produce. Our current platform is capable of 18,000 independent transactions / second.

Maventa's aim is to simplify the e-invoicing landscape in to a transparent cloud service, which can be utilized on any software or service. Our service is designed to scale from one-man consulting companies to multinational conglomerates and has been audited by 3 independent IT-security consulting firms.

We are completely format, language and location agnostic which makes us usable in any environment (SAP, Oracle, IFS, Adage, MS Dynamics, QuickBooks, Sage.. just to name few). The financial system is directly connected to the Maventa cloud, extending its current capabilities to electronic invoicing. Purchase invoices are automatically synchronized from the Maventa account directly to the financial system without any additional functionalities needed. The conventionally static financial software becomes a networked tool with real-time transparency to the corporate financial processes. Acknowledgements between senders and the receivers allow the parties to be certain of the delivery. The archaic paper invoicing process, which can last up to months, can be narrowed down to minutes with our technology.

Maventa determines the most cost-efficient route for the invoice, with the least favorable option as a ground-mail paper invoice. All Maventa internal transactions are completely free of charge. No recurring or administrative fees apply to holding or setting-up an account. Sending electronic invoices to 3rd party operators cost from 0.05 euros to 0.25 euros per transaction. Receiving electronic invoices from any 3rd party operator is free of charge.

"We are streamlining the user experience and diminishing costs for SMEs and providing the data accuracy longed by the large enterprises - and we're just getting started."

This could be a new way of Interior Design.

Marcel Vrijsen — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:51:40 GMT

The new way of interior design, create a floor and wall that will change colour during the seasons.
Create a nice atmosphere by using perfumed micro capsules in coatings.
Give every room its own distinctive atmosphere.

- Paint a room so it smells like fresh cut grass.
- Let the wooden floor change colour when temperature changes.
- Look at the chair changing colour after someone sat on it.
- When you turn on the light you get a smell of Roses.
- Look at the sealing and see the starry heaven glow while you turned of the light.

How can you create these "own spaces"?

- Thermochromic paints or coatings for colour changes in your interior design.
- Perfumed microcapsules inside paints of coatings to give a smell to different items.
- Glow in the dark pigments.

Would you like to create your own space, or give a public space a special treatment?

There are so many possibilities, and I have found no company who would like to create these products. Does someone have an idea, where to go with these products?

With kind regards,
Marcel Vrijsen

Proposal for program: electronic financial services

Esko Penttinen — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:36:20 GMT

In the boat seminar, we have room for four small groups. Here, you can make proposals for the topics.

Naturally, I suggest one topic to be electronic financial administration. The small group would consider joint projects around the themes of electronic invoicing, electronic payments, mobile payments, electronic ordering systems, electronic auctions, electronic banking etc.

Ideas welcome!

Real time marketing

Jan Gerrits — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:54:39 GMT

Over the years digital signage in public places has become an increasingly common sight in shopping common sight in shopping centers around the world.

TruMedia have been pioneering the smart sign surveillance technology.

However until recently there's always been one big problem with the expensive advertising medium: How can advertisers tell if anyone is actually watching it?

To solve that problem, ad companies are turning to technologies more commonly used to track terrorists than trace consumer behavior in an attempt to regain ground with fragmented audiences.

The new breed of digital signs are capable of measuring which ads are most appealing to what demographic, even instantly changing screen content based upon the age and sex of the people in front of it.

The full story: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/11/db.smartsigns/index.html

The future of Mobile Gaming

Tuomas Nurminen — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:00:12 GMT

Mobile gaming has not succeeded in the past. A good example of this is Nokia N-gage which was not as successful as hoped. In my opinion the market still has growth potential which is why the mobile gaming industry should be examined. It cannot challenge console gaming, nor it should, as their usage is very different. In the essay I will study the two-sided network and use theories to clarify the possible future of mobile gaming. I will also examine the most important techical features of the mobile phones and how they should be developed to support and enable the development of mobile gaming.

Use of Social Media techonologies in companies

Antti Karhu — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:29:26 GMT

I have the following idea for my essay:

How can the new so called enterprise 2.0 techniques like wikis and blogs change the way the work is done at companies? How these social media based ideas are different from current IS offerings to companies? What does it for example mean that a company stops using Word to create documents individually and employees begin to do their work using a wiki?

I plan to cover what is the real value added by these new techniques that are based on Web 2.0, and what does it take to fully utilize these techniques.

I am going to go through a few real-life examples as well as theory.

The key issue linking this theme to the information economy course is that at the core of these new techniques is the value of information and to help companies get better value out of it.

Essay: Paper books have a challenger in Amazon Kindle, an e-book reader.

Katri Railio — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:56:27 GMT

Paper books are loved for many reasons by book buyers. In general people like to read from paper and not from a screen. For some people the whole reading experience requires holding an actual book and turning pages. As technology develops and more online goods are created also paper books are challenged. Amazon has launched this kind of an e-book reader called Kindle with successful outcome. Kindle is a device that you can use to download books, magazines and newspapers online. One important feature that makes it attractive is the electronic-paper display that mimics actual paper. One aspect to study this subject can be two-sided markets and another that this will eliminate the two possibly biggest expenses that paper books have: printing and logistics.

Essay: Renting and selling movies online â an insight into an evolving business

Vesa Keski-Pukkila — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:22:26 GMT

An extremely big industry, the movie industry, has been able to sustain its business model and way of distributing its products through traditional channels for quite a long time now. The development of technology hasn't affected the business model itself, even though the ”package” has changed over the years (VHS → DVD → Blu-Ray). As broadband internet connections are becoming a commodity and pirate versions of films have been available for downloading in the net for some time, it is evident that movie renting and selling business will be facing significant changes in the coming years. Yet, there are only a handful of service providers offering downloadable movies for consumers to rent. Technological barriers have clearly been overcome, so the main points are on one hand the willingness of movie renting businesses to give up their lucrative model and on the other hand the consumers willingness to adopt habits that may revolutionize the business and drive current brick-and-mortar businesses, such as Makuuni in Finland, into serious trouble.

Measuring the business value of IT in purchase-to-pay

Heikki Lempinen — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:04:06 GMT

Evaluating business impacts of electronic purchase-to-payment cycles (i.e. electronic purchase orders, invoice handling and payment) can be a challenging task without proper tools. It is not always clear how the IT-enabled operational performance improvements create business value (=money) for companies and organizations. This leads to two major problems: first, since organizations cannot see the potential payoffs of digitizing these activities, they might be reluctant to adopt IT applications e.g. e-ordering and invoice handling systems. Second, organizations cannot utilize the potential of existing electronic processes to the full since they do not have the required tools for process monitoring purposes. In my master's thesis work for RTE, I built a structured, catch-all evaluation tool for investigating business impacts of IT in purchase-to-payment. It links floor-level efforts to company-level business impacts through a hierarchical structure. In addition, it depicts the effects of horizontal system integration. The thesis will be available online soon, link will be added here later.