Hoist is one of the many Danish startups we had the pleasure of pitching us at the ArcticEvening Copenhagen last week.

Hoist is an on demand project collaboration tool joining the long list of business productivity services such as Basecamp. It was launched in private beta at Reboot conference held last week, where I fortunately managed to get a short demo. There’s not too much information found on the site so the best way to find out more is indeed to book a demo meeting, get lucky requesting a test account, or simply wait them to go public later this fall.

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NewsToScreen, the service by Finnish marketing men that aimed to charge consumers for watching ads, has filed for bankruptcy according to Kauppalehti. We covered the company just little over a year ago in March. Later last year I talked to the CEO Marko Parkkinen back then and he quoted them having 80 000 users. Apparently not everyone was paying the 29€ annual fee as it would have brought in revenue of over 2 million euros.

The company had a very respectable board including Marko Parkkinen a reknown marketing man in Finland, Seppo Sairanen known for making his wealth from the private banking corporation FIM (and having invested into Fruugo). Other members of the board include Lauri Hulkko and Ilkka Seppälä. One thing that does surprise me is the resignation of Parkkinen as the CEO just 15 days before filing for bankruptcy. He had resigned the position on the 15th of June 2009 and the company had filed for bankruptcy on the 30th of June, 2009.

While it is never good to see startups going belly up, you have to admit and give it to people for trying. However, despite encouraging entrepreneurs – this is one idea that I never saw taking off, even in my wildest dreams. I remember talking to Parkkinen about the future of NewsToScreen and he was optimistic about the new course they had been taking with licensing the service to large corporations as a tool for communication. Needless to say, marketing without understanding the fundamentals of business does not work very well.

Denmark is a great example on effective use of public promotion instruments on renewable energy. And now we are not speaking merely about  the effecitive use of manpower on transportation (bicycles account for 18 per cent of all trips taken in Denmark)!

Oil crisis in 1970’s created a basis for Danish renewable energy production. In those days Denmark imported 99 per cent of all energy used. After 30 years, Denmark has enjoyed an economic growth ( GDP 56 per cent higher since 1980) with reduced CO2 (35 per cent lower since 1980). In 2004, Denmark has the lowest energy consumption per unit in EU countries.

The share of renewable energy of total production in 2004 was 30 per cent, which is among the highest in EU countries and gained without hydro power. Wind power provided almost 20 per cent of electricity in 2007, while biomass and waste represented the rest. Danish national goal for renewable energy is at least double to minimum 30 per cent of total gross energy consumption by 2025.

Denmark uses wide range economic incentives. Taxes and fees are used to affect the consumption of fossil fuels and renewable, and subsidies are used to increase bio-mass utilisation for electricity production and heat. (please look at Renewable Energy in Denmark by Danish Energy Agency)

Danish wind power industry possess around 40 per cent of the global market with a combined turnover of 3 billion euros with manufacturers. Danish wind power is a great success story altough public incentives have also been supported to biomass and solar collectors. The first projects in 1970’s began privately with public support on R&D. The first public grants, support for installations and advantageous feed-in prices introduced in 1980’s, increasing the development in large scale turbine development. The capital investment grant was revoked in 1990’s. Within few years wind power is expected to compete with fossil fuels without significant subisidies in Denmark (see a Fact Sheet by Danish Energy Authority).

Denmark started to decentralise heat and power production from centralised towards decentralised system. The point was to locate large number of minor plants all over the Country close to end-users to use heat in local District Heating system. Denmark has now more than 700 power plants with different technologies and systems. By using decentralised CHP system, Denmark has reduced fuel consumption by up to 30 per cent and increased the net efficiency of fuel significantly. 

Danish government’s proactive trade strategy to promote Small and Medium Size Enterprises (in cleantech) export trade deserves a special attention. The Trade Council of Denmark (Danida) is the export and investment organization within the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The key task, clearly, is to promote trade and identify trade barriers and provide solutions to break them down. It has set very transparent strategic objectives, targets and follow-up indicators   (please scroll down to page 3) for their operations. In 2006, even 96 per cent of enterprises were satisfied or very satisfied on Danida’s services. (I tried to catch benchmark figures of public organizations in other countries but didn’t find them..)

We all know and love Apple for giving us the almost seamless experience to manage content between the web, our laptop and ipod or iPhone via iTunes. Only problem is that it’s as closed system as it gets. Linkotec, a Finnish startup is aiming to come to rescue with Dazzboard.

Dazzboard wants to become a non-proprietary, web-based personal portal for storing, organizing and sharing (via different of social networks) songs, photos, videos and other media content. Ideally, with Dazzboard you can sync anything with a memory to store your content.

Dazzboard overview from getdazzboard on Vimeo.

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The news that The Pirate Bay (TBP) is to be acquired by Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) for MSEK 60 (App USD 7.7 million) spread all over the media this morning. The purchase includes the domain name and related web sites, including www.thepiratebay.org, and amounts to consisting of at least MSEK 30 in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 30 in the form of newly issued shares in GGF. The transaction is scheduled to be closed in August 2009.

The deal was shortly after the announcement confirmed by TPB, whereby Peter Sunde, the spokesperson of TPB, turned off his phone having too many people calling. According to him the 20 million users of TPB shouldn’t we worried. It is merely time to pass TPB on to secure it’s further development and future. To quote: “Don’t worry, be happy!”

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This is our periodic thank you note to our blog sponsors to describe what they have to offer.

Grow VC launches today an invitiation-only private beta of their “Venture Capital 2.0″ service. Grow VC aims to better enable early stage funding for mobile and web 2.0 startup companies by using a community-based approach. The size of investments Grow VC is looking to facilitate ranges from USD $10,000 to $1M. Grow VC has been founded by Finnish serial entrepreneurs Jouko Ahvenainen and Valto Loikkanen.

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