Jippii

» see jippii.fi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2000 I was on a dial-up line in Turkey looking at Turkish portals, and somebody in Finland was on a dial-up line looking at this one. Same year and same modem noise, on a different country's version of the same page. The national portal was the standard shape of the web before search flattened everything into one box, and almost none of them survived meeting Google.

Jippii opened in 1999 as saunalahti.fi, the portal side of an internet provider that had been assembled through the late nineties by buying up a dozen small Finnish operators. In spring 2000 the parent listed on the Helsinki exchange and raised a hundred million markka. It renamed itself Jippii Group at the same time, on the reasoning that Saunalahti was too Finnish a word for a business about to go international.

For a few years the portal was either the biggest or the second biggest web medium in Finland, depending on which month you measured. Then the company did what a lot of companies did in 2000. Jippii bought Gigabell, a German operator that had already gone bankrupt, and came close to going under with it. It pulled out of Germany in late 2001 and gave up on the international idea. In 2003 the name went back to Saunalahti Group.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the bubble ~

The Jippii years produced a court case that outlasted the portal. In May 2006 former executives were charged over securities offenses connected to the boom-era accounts. A district court threw out every charge in October 2007 and the prosecutors appealed. After further proceedings, an appeals court rejected all of it unanimously in December 2012, taking the unusual step of criticizing the prosecutor's objectivity in the judgment.

Nobody was convicted of anything. What the six years of hearings did produce was a full public record of what the 2000 listing had actually been worth, arriving twelve years after the share price had already answered the question.

~ what happened to the name ~

In July 2004 the portal was sold on its own to iTouch, a British mobile content company, for about thirty-seven million dollars. iTouch was bought by the Italian firm Buongiorno in 2007, and by then Jippii was a line item in somebody's ringtone business rather than a Finnish home page. It was discontinued around 2010. The exact date is not recorded anywhere I can find, which is its own small verdict on how much the second owner cared.

The other half of the story ended better. Elisa acquired Saunalahti in 2005 and ran the brand as a mobile operator, folding it into Elisa Saunalahti in October 2014. So the dial-up company that once wanted a global internet portal is now a phone tariff, and the international name it bought itself for that ambition is a dead domain.

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