Arctic Startup

We are pleased to announce that Tomi Luostarinen will join our editorial team. Tomi is an entrepreneur himself, founder of Innofile, and he has around ten years of experience from the wireless communications and Internet industries. Tomi is a member of The Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association, and will be providing reports from related events among other things.

More detailed bios of all editors will be published soon in the About section.

Message from Tomi:

First of all, I would like to thank Antti and Miikka for having started this wonderful blog. I truly think that growth and entrepreneurship need some fresh perspective here in Finland. Usual public discussion on these subjects begins with ’should’ rather than ‘how’. I hope that this blog brings you ideas and possible answers to that ‘how’. From now on I’ll be joining the guys as a (more or less) regular writer.

I don’t like monologues so I hope that you frequently comment, criticize, and discuss my future posts. Your views are always appreciated. You can also reach me via e-mail at firstname.lastname(at)iki.fi.”

Sincerely,
Tomi Luostarinen

Our warm welcome Tomi, it’s great to get you aboard!

I did a video interview of Juha Huttunen of Vailoma.com. Juha also tipped us to some invites they are sharing - if you want to get one to their service, send a request to info (at) vailoma.com.

The GSM Association (GSMA) has selected Valimo Wireless and Xtract as finalists for the Mobile Innovation Global Award.

Valimo develops software to secure and perform transactions in both mobile and fixed network environments, offering solutions for digital signing, authentication, and validation.

Xtract promises to optimize marketing and advertising in the web 2.0 and mobile environments with automated software solutions. It had the seventh fastest growth rate in Deloitte Fast 50 Finland 2007.

Via GSMA news.

The Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity has interviewed about 25000 people around the world on what they call innovation confidence. Finland has received 44 points of the 100 possible points, which makes it the one of the least thrilled by technology. We’re in the pack together with Slovenia, Turkey and the Netherlands.

This is very worrying, as we’ve been noted as one of the most technologically advanced countries, especially when it comes to the mobile phones and internet. Finland is usually considered in general a very early adapter of new technologies and thus it’s stressful to see this sort of attitude change.

Via New York Times and ReadWriteWeb.

Fromdistance Ltd. has won the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards Round Finland, and will represent us in MobileMonday European Peer Awards in Barcelona on February 11. The two other nominees were community-driven live TV streaming startup Floobs, and Intelligent SMS provider BookIT.

Fromdistance is actually registered in Estonia, though founded by a Finn. It was allowed to enter the competition nevertheless. The nomination was based on Fromdistance’s amateur reporting tool called Mobile Citizen Reporter (already available in Finland). The jury found the company to possess the strongest characteristics with an innovative idea, lucrative and high potential market with a global appeal, as well as a good overall presentation. The privately-owned company was founded in 2004, and sells software licenses to large enterprises and media companies.

The participation in the peer awards Finland competition was quite light, though, compared to e.g. Norway, which witnessed the following nominees for the Norway Peer Awards 2008:

• Opera Mini
• Colibria IM
• mBricks
• mobilize by Adactus
• Fluid by Favourite Systems
• Studio1: by Rubberduck MediaLab
• Zizzr
• Dextella by Mobiletech
• SMT Phonename
• Mobile Manager by Touch Mobility
• MobiSearch by ZapDance
• her.no by MobileInfo

According to still unverified news Adactus won with their cross-platform content delivery system mobilize. Interestingly, Adactus also offers a mobile reporter solution, although with not as end-to-end business offering as Fromdistance.

Altogether, despite lacking competition participants, there were some really interesting companies represented in the Helsinki event, which we’ll hopefully have a chance to cover later on.

Next week there are two interesting events, MobileMonday Global Peer Awards Round Finland, and the second annual StratMark seminar.

MobileMonday Helsinki will select a company having the best mobile application or service to represent Finland at the MobileMonday European Peer Awards on February 11 in Barcelona. The European winners will then continue to Global Awards Finals in Malaysia in May. Admission to tomorrow’s Helsinki event is free, just do it now.

StratMark program (all material in Finnish, though, except research publications) on the other hand is focused on improving the strategic marketing know-how of Finnish companies, along with creating an academic research paradigm on the subject. The seminar on Thursday is second of its kind, and unfortunately fully booked by now. There will be lots of interesting people from top Finnish companies, and academic highlights include marketing professor Rajendra Srivastava from Emory University, Atlanta.

I’ll be participating both events, so you can look forward for a report.

Innofile, a Helsinki-based startup founded in 2006, launched Innofile Courier service this week. The service allows customers to send large files easily over the internet, as opposed to using often-awkward email attachments. The service targets especially media, publishing, and engineering industries, where larger-than-email files may still be transferred physically using CDs and DVDs.

The user interface of the service looks pleasantly simple and straightforward to use. You just select the files to upload, then enter your activation code (you pay 1 euro per uploaded file package), and then get the access link to your files, which you can share with any number of recipients, or fire off email notification directly from the site. Simple, fast, and elegant.

However, large file delivery market is facing some tough international competition these days with a huge amount of players. There are many free services available, though pretty much all of them include ads in the site and/or emailed messages, what is not typically a favored feature when sending files to business partners. Ads may also make one question privacy and security. Many sites offer also ad-free and even white label services, but those are typically based on monthly subscription fee. Innofile’s pay-per-shipment model may thus lower the threshold to try their service (though the initial invoiced upfront payment is 50€), offering also a cheap alternative to subscription for infrequent usage.

I think it’s clever from Innofile to position their new service as “digital courier” - when you want to send somebody a physical delivery, you use physical courier services like UPS. So when you want to send digital content to somebody, you select the digital one… If Innofile manages to anchor this idea to people’s minds, it might just take off, at least on some scale. Though 1€/delivery is not necessarily the price point you expect these days for distributing information. But nevertheless they at least have revenue model, so it’s good to see this approach as well, as regards the scale vs. revenues question. It’s very interesting to see what kind of reception Innofile gets.

Innofile’s press release (in Finnish).

Teemu Selänne, the NHL hockey player, has cashed in on the MySQL deal, where Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for a billion dollars.

Teemu had invested about 330 000 euros seven years ago into Holtron Capital Fund I, which is managed by Inventure Oy, according to the Finnish Venture Capital Association. The exit value for Teemu’s initial investment was worth just over 1 million euros, according to Ilta-Sanomat.

Congrats to Teemu!

Those in the Helsinki region, do take part in the Open Coffee Meetup tomorrow at Bistro Nolla in Kamppi.

Lots of people coming. I’m trying to make it to the event myself so come say hello if you’re down there!

I had lunch today with Juha Huttunen and Leo Koivulehto of Vailoma.com. We discussed entrepreneurship in Finland and how it differs from the rest of the world.

The conversations pretty much rolled around the difficulty of raising funds in Finland, compared to availability of funds in Europe and the US. The problem was again tied to the post I blogged some time ago: scale or revenue. The Finnish VCs usually wanted to see revenue and a potentially profitable business model compared to their European counterparts who are willing to take more risks. I believe this has got to do with two main points: (1) No previous success in internet companies, ie. no culture and knowledge in these sort of investments and (2) lack of funds.

The reason why I see this a problem is that as foreign VCs keep investing in Finnish startups, we won’t see a culture evolve here nor do we see any growth in capital as those successful investments pay off. This further creates problems in starting born global, growth companies in Finland.

Would it make sense to start a government owned fund to help companies grow in this stage of their lifecycle? We have TEKES, who helps with financing startups in their birth stage - what about helping startups more aggressively in their growth phase?