Here are some of the videos that we thought you should see this week:
Adele - Rolling in the Deep by Tya Vladini Putri
30 Seconds To Mars - The Kill by kaya_ke
Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart by Elizabeth Arandia
Chisu - Sama Nainen by Jonna Anneli Hyttinen
Laura Branigan - Self Control by Jaana Lundberg
New ticker
As we've said earlier, we are pretty awesome, quite nice and definitely love you all. For the same reasons we are bringing yet another big set of updates and new features, only 3 weeks after the last one! Last time we opened the competitions for you, now we are making the actual competing much easier:
Happy winners Krista Heikkinen & Jouni Asikainen
Already two competitions have ended and two happy winners have received their prizes: Jouni won the very first weekly Sokos Hotel Vantaa competition and Krista took home the second free hotel party weekend for two. The third week of Sokos Hotel Vantaa's competition is coming to a close today, so remember to participate!
Also all our monthly competitions are ending (and starting again) in the coming Monday, so if you’d like to spend the weekend productively, check out some these cool competitions:
Startup Sauna Hot & Heavy: get a chance to win a set of extremely cool merchandise from the world's leading open source seed accelerator
Monthly Rock: rock out with your clock tightly around your arm and win a set of Pocket Karaoke Rock'N'Roll DVD's
Monthly Pop: be the next Madonna and win some of those Madonna tracks along with the Pocket Karaoke Pop DVD's
Monthly Metal: if you've got what it takes to shout and growl while still being entertaining, this one is for you! The winner gets all the legendary Heavy Karaoke DVD's
Monthly Classics: when you've been singing karaoke for a while, you know all these songs from end to the beginning. The classic is our biggest competition with over 10 Pocket Karaoke DVD's as prize!
Karaoke MM Suomi: unfortunately only for the Citizens of Finland, but if you happen to possess a Finnish passport, you can enter in to the Karaoke World Championships Finland via our competition!
Holiday Club Saimaa: The setting for Karaoke World Championships 2012 is giving out two luxury spa weekends every month. It's the largest entertainment spa in Europe, what are you waiting for?
First competitors have already signed up!
PRESS RELEASE
5th of April 2012
Karaoke World Cup Ltd. Oy
FREE TO DISTRIBUTE INSTANTLY
FINNISH STARTUP TO LAUNCH WORLD’S FIRST FULLY DIGITAL SINGING COMPETITIONS
KaraokeWorldCup.Com, a startup from Finland, is launching the world’s first fully digital singing competitions on 5th of April. The service enables users to enter into a singing competition with their favorite track, without ever leaving their own sofa! Operating idea behind the service is to give each and every singing talent in the world a chance to prove their worthiness, regardless of time and place.
The founders of the company are fans of TV’s talent search formats, but they’ve always felt that every production has a large problem built in: due to restrictions in time and places of such events, not everybody are able to participate. The production budgets of even the biggest of productions will never make it possible to reach all singers.
“All of us founders had ran into the exactly same problem either as organizers, competitors or fans of singing competitions: in Finland alone there is a huge pool of phenomenal singers who mostly get to perform in school musicals. We want to change all that.” said the CEO of the company, Atte Hujanen.
Working logic of KaraokeWorldCup.Com is rather simple. When a user lands to the site, she gets to pick her favorite song from a catalog of over 700 songs and sing it in karaoke-style. During the singing, the system automatically records webcam and microphone input in order to create a Youtube-like music video. If the user finds the video and the performance pleasing, she can go on and enter that video recording into the many competitions that run on the platform. For the launch, KaraokeWorldCup.Com has eight competitions lined up that feature prizes from karaoke products to spa weekends.
The need to build KaraokeWorldCup.Com came from the founders’ experiences in other media productions
Atte Hujanen, the CEO of the company, has been organizing Karaoke World Championships since 2003 with over 35 countries participating yearly. Over the years he has constantly found that there is much more talent out there than his network of tens of countries could ever reach. So that is how the idea of a internet competition started to grow back in 2006.
Other founders of the company had also ran into similar problems and realizations, Saku Tuominen and Jaakko Kievari while operating in the TV-entertainment space and Juha Ruuska while working as a music & karaoke producer. Tuominen led Finland’s most successful TV-production company from 1990 to 2008 and worked as the Chief Creative Officer of the world’s third largest production company. Already in the late 90’s, internet was a hot topic in the creative workshops. It could open a whole new dimension to talent search formats. Juha Ruuska saw the industry going digital while working as a producer of many music and karaoke products already in the 90’s. Only in 2010 technology and legislation aligned in a way that a venture like KaraokeWorldCup.Com could be executed succesfully.
More information
CEO Atte Hujanen, +358 44 51 42 686, atte.hujanen@karaokeworldcup.com
Karaoke World Cup Ltd. Oy is the company behind KaraokeWorldCup.Com. CEO Atte Hujanen, other founders include Idealist Digital Ltd, KSF Entertainment Group, Timo Koivisto and Tomi Pajunen.
Atte Hujanen is the CEO of Karaoke World Cup Ltd. Oy and the Managing Director of Karaoke World Championships. He is also acts on the board of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society - Europe’s largest entrepreneurship society.
Idealist Digital is a cross-media production company specializing in media, content and their new combinations in the digital world.
Jaakko Kievari is the CEO of Idealist Digital. He is a seasoned multimedia professional who has led businesses and productions of games, movies and mobile services both in Finland and internationally.
Saku Tuominen is the Chief Creative Officer of Idealist Group. He is one of Finland’s best known TV-producers and sought-after public speakers. He was the Chief Creative Officer of Zodiak Entertainment in London and has consulted dozens of companies on innovation and creativity.
KSF Entertainment Group is Europe’s largest producer of karaoke related content and has offices in Finland, Sweden and UK.
Juha Ruuska is one of the pioneers of European karaoke culture and has been a key player in the rise of the Finnish karaoke mania since the early 90’s.