Popa

POPA (Projects of PAssion) has been our home turf since 2000. Through POPA, we start or engage in interesting projects that have the potential to turn into fun and business. We started POPA after working in other exciting organizations such as Tele2, Aspiro, Lunarstorm (Magnus) and Jobline, Campuz Mobile and Pressglobe (Johan). There, we gained great experience working with communities and internet and mobile services. Through those organizations we were bitten by the start-up bug; the only cure seemed to be running our own exciting projects and businesses. So far, our journey has been a combination of logical steps, miscalculations and strokes of luck. We started out in 2001 by acquiring Everysport from the IT-company Ementor (now ATEA). Coming from a background in mobile services and communities, we had a vision of turning Everysport into a purely mobile-services company, providing SMS results and wap-portals for sports. Needless to say, it did not go well, and because we had exactly no income from mobile services, we had to find a way to bring in other revenue. We went to the dailies in Sweden and offered help in administrating local sports results and statistics, which was much more successful. Everysport now serves approximately 75% of the Swedish dailies with results, tables and statistics in many sports and divisions. In the beginning, we outsourced all of our development to the Gothenburg-based development team Surikat. Things were great, but we saw that the amount of development steadily increased and we wanted even more control over the technical direction for Everysport. We contacted BTH in Ronneby, who set us up with some really interesting projects in collaboration with their students. Through these projects we found super talented developers Lars Widmark, Kaj Wiklund, Mattias Eriksson and Carl Grundberg, with whom we then started technological lab Menmo. Menmo now provides tech development to all of our companies and is the founder of our technological ventures, such as Mobenga. Over the years, the line between POPA and Menmo has blurred; today, most of our focus is on Menmo projects. Everysport and Menmo collaborated in 2004 to build mobile sports service Sportzapp, a mobile java app that allowed fans to follow their teams, receive live score updates and chat with each other in real-time. Sportzapp launched in versions for media clients DN and Göteborgs Posten; however, even though with massive advertising campaigns and events, the app was unsuccessful, perhaps due to our underestimation of the technological hurdles required to install java apps on phones in 2004. In 2005, we re-launched Sportzapp with the ice hockey club Malmö Redhawks and suddenly saw a ten-fold increase in the number of users over our media clients, perhaps suggesting that a close tie-in with a team motivated users to overcome the technology hurdles. Later that year, we launched a java app with live score service together with the betting company Bet and Win (now Bwin), and the number of users increased even more; as users got closer to the money, the hurdles appeared even lower. Sportzapp's success inspired us to start a specialized mobile-betting development company, Mobenga, with the guys from Mgoal. Mobenga started in the fall of 2005; we soon had our first customers and a very skilled CEO in ex-Expekt.com CEO, Christian Rajter. It took a few years, but mobile betting really took off; now, Mobenga is the market leader in making betting businesses mobile. We took on investment from a business "angel" and ALMI Invest in 2009 to further grow the business; in 2011, we sold Mobenga to LSE-listed betting software developer Playtech.