Arctic Startup

We’re beginning to calm down for the holidays, as is the Finnish start-up market. It’s been quite an interesting autumn in terms of Finnish companies, however it is still very miniscule compared to other European countries.

We do have some plans for 2008, which include a design improvement, more posts as well as some new media to follow, possibly videos. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from people and it’s been encouraging despite us two, me and Miikka, being very busy this autumn. Thank you for that!

If you are still wondering where to stuff your christmas money, think about supporting Kiva’s entrepreneurs. Kiva offers microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries who would otherwise have trouble raising funds. With these funds, they can build successful enterprises and support the local community in a totally new way. You can participate with as little as $25 USD.

With that, I would live to wish everybody a very enjoyable holiday season! See you in 2008!

Reporting from LeWeb3 in Paris, Dopplr has announced today that they are open for public by dropping the beta.

More on their blog.

Alarm:clock euro pointed us to Aito Technologies getting another injection of VC capital, this time from Creandum to fuel its international growth.

I’ve heard from relatively reliable sources that Aito is definitely onto something big and good here. Initial demand for the product/software they are building is incredibly good. The software as far as I’m informed, is a tool to analyse network traffic and thus serve as an indicator for operators to streamline their services. For example, as funny as it sounds - not many operators know the percentage of successfully delivered MMS messages in their networks and as far as I know, Aito’s software will help with these sort of problems.

Whitevector and Gyllene Skor have announced cooperation to enable Gyllene Skor’s customers to better utilize knowledge from web discussions their business. Gyllene Skor will utilize Whitevector’s web-based analytics application TracSense in measuring, tracking, and making sense of web conversations and their effects from the clients’ marketing communications point of view.

Whitevector is a Finnish startup founded in 2005. The company helps marketers, PR consultants, journalists and other professionals to monitor the digital news and social media discussions in the Internet. Whitevector’s TracSense product offers various business benefits from improved online reputation management and staying aware of consumer trends to tracking word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. For journalists the product offers possibility to complement traditional news with the latest insights from blogs and forums. Whitevector promotes TracSense by hosting a service picking up recent topics Finland is discussing about.
Among Whitevector’s owners with a minority stake is M-Brain, a Finnish intelligent digital news monitoring and analysis solutions provider.

Gyllene Skor is a new digital media company, just founded this autumn, aiming to be a strategic partner for its customers on e-business and marketing solutions, driving revenue growth and gaining competitive advantage through better use of digital media. Owners of Gyllene Skor include the management, Marketing Agency Bob Helsinki, and Engagement Agency Toinen Helsinki.