Scred, a Finnish community-oriented cost balancing tool, which initially focused on balancing debts and shared expenses among a group of friends announced that they are looking into new possibilities to leverage their back-end infrastructure.

Scred has partnered with Alternative Party which will be held in Helsinki in the coming October. Scred built an inexpensive bespoke ticketing service for the party with which you can reserve, buy and print the tickets straight from the web. Tickets are also machine verifiable which is more than many other service providers offer.

Kristoffer Lawson from Scred told us that the new service is currently not available for 3rd parties, but that they they will see how the first deployment will go and add some features before deciding whether it’s the right path to take. According to Kristoffer tickets can be currently bought via PayPal and ‘couple of banking services’, but the credit card option is on its way.

The party in itself is the second largest ‘demoscene-party’ in Finland after Assembly. Alternative Party aims to mix demos, music and art. Unlike Assembly, Alternative Party’s focus is more on artistic shows and activities and there is practically no gaming.

There is starting to be a lot of activity in the e-commerce infrastructure space coming from Finland. Scred seems to be gradually heading that direction and Fruugo is looking into becoming the “trusted 3rd party of ecommerce”. Based on Fruugo’s still mysterious website we will find out what they will actually offer in more detail later in 2008 when they’re planning to launch. This is something that might also be of interest to Scred since after knowing what Fruugo is aiming for Scred can better adjust their product offering to the market.

MySites, a Finnish startup based in Tampere that provides a single location to save, manage and share content online, has finally launched after delaying their launch for a little over a month to iron out the last bugs.

Even before their formal launch MySites had been active in the sponsoring front having already sponsored ArcticStartup Events, student union parties and gaming events. For the launch MySites did not slow down a bit and went on to sponsor Mashable’s US Summer Tour 2008.

On average MySites has been more active in sponsoring events and websites than we have accustomed to see from a Nordic startup that has just launched . Despite their attempts to get a lot of awareness for the service they have still quite a ways to go with improving the service itself.

The user experience is confusing at best. MySites user interface is not nearly as intuitive as it would need to be and since their service intends to combine many different functions under one roof this should be even a greater concern as the level of complexity tends to creep up anyway compared to one-purpose-only services.

Similarly, the layout could be a lot more unified from the get-go. There’s at least three kinds of different animation on the front page, not to talk about the rather foggy video clip from what should be inspiring user interviews. Maybe this is intentional, but for me it only makes the service harder to figure out.





It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out how to navigate around the site including the times the service froze and I had to reopen the page to continue. Nevertheless if the user interface would be easier to navigate I could see myself using MySites to share movies with my friends which can’t be emailed around due to their sheer size. The 10GB that I get for free by signing up could also be used to share and store other large files among a group of friends or colleagues. Thus for the moment I could see the service moving towards a cloud of stuff that I could share with a group of people. If it only wouldn’t be so hard to use.

Eat.fi, a Finnish website that let’s its users rate restaurants and bars and show which ones are open at a given time, is about to get a serious face lift. The folks at Eat.fi emphasize that the new site is in Beta and unlike Google’s Betas this Beta is really just to test out the functionality, thus all the reviews should still be written to the old site or they will disappear when the new site goes live.

The new site is build on Google maps and the new mashup has really improved the user experience. The site is easier to use and more intuitive from the get go. The functionality has also improved significantly. The website has a new bar on the right hand side of the screen which is quite handy showing the top rated restaurants which are open at a given moment. The ‘top rated’ bar of course changes based on your query, thus filtering out for example all the other venues except ‘Asian food’ if that’s what you’re after.

The smart folks at Eat.fi figured out they could use Jaiku’s active user base to get feedback for their Beta (here). This is an ingenious and many times very effective way to get feedback for your web service due to the vocal yet colorful user base at Jaiku, thus giving you passionate opinions across the board from professional designers and user experience geeks to your average Joe.

The new Beta site and activity at Eat.fi leaves me wondering if or rather when they are taking the concept abroad. It turns out that the same Jaiku thread partly answers that one as well:

• Wow @Spongefile, this is a great service. When might we have this in Los Angeles???

• @JebBrilliant Got a database of LA restaurants? :)

• @Spongefile It’s funny you ask… Can we IM on Skype

[...]

• Looks really interesting. Like to see this worldwide. A category of food/reastaurant that is really important to many is Vegetarian (though I’m a raging carnivore myself)

• @WaveyDavey001 We’re heading there… :)

Growth Forum 08 (in Finnish, Kasvufoorumi08) is an initiative that started on January this year (see the previous post). The forum is an initiative lead by Microsoft Finland and Association of Software Entrepreneurs. The second seminar of the forum was held in June and now when the thematic group I’ve been involved in is on holiday it’s time for a little recap of the first half of the year.

First of all both seminars have been successes from my perspective as they have attracted a mixed audience of entrepreneurs, seasoned professionals and representatives of public organizations. For example, in the second seminar Jyrki Katainen, the current Minister of Finance of Finland, held a passionate speech on how important it is to cultivate innovation and intellectual property for Finland to succeed in the future. Furthermore, as the national innovation strategy was also published in June, the government is definitely taking steps to ensure that Finland stays competitive even when the number of employed people decreases as a result of aging of the population.

The findings of the second seminar (and the interim project report delivered to Mr. Katainen) and our small thematic group were surprisingly similar. The group’s focus was the question whether Finnish startups should make exits or grow themselves. Based on several discussions seems that Finland does not lack technology, skills or education to succeed in the Internet era. Rather the obstacles on road to success are financing and attitude. The early stage financing of startups is largely made by TEKES, which in general does a good job, but would require more support from private venture capitalists. There are some ongoing public initiatives to provide tax benefits early stage VCs and business angels. However, it is too early to tell whether these legislation changes will happen.

The attitude issue is much harder to address, but I believe solving it (even partially) would have much wider implications than improvements on financing. Some of arguments for not to start new companies are reasonable, such as heavy penalties and social stigma of going bankrupt. Most growth-oriented startups fail and they should be allowed to do so without personal consequences such as not getting housing mortgages after companies go bankrupt. However, the other arguments are frequently not based on facts. The public discussion revolves around on how hard the taxation in Finland is or how entrepreneurs must constantly work and get stressed because of that. Furthermore, I have heard many people say “I really would like to start a company, but I lack a good idea”. Very very rarely anyone can up with an idea that truly is unique (no-one has thought of it) and can be turned into a profitable business. I believe everyone can come up with good ideas from their everyday life (”isn’t there really a better way to do this?”). A good way to launch a startup is to pick a decent idea, found a company and then figure out the next idea or iterate the existing idea. A good article on ideas can be found in favorite blog onstartups.com.

Moreover, we need stories (from successful entrepreneurs) how working as an entrepreneur can be both fun and rewarding. This was one of conclusions of our thematic group. In addition, we agreed that startups need teams that have a varied cultural and knowledge background, not just the “four Finnish engineers”. Finnish startup scene would also benefit from a Finnish Y-Combinator that would give a needed boost in the early stages. I would be very interested to know if there already is some Finnish VC (or other party) that has plans like that.

In conclusion, we need positive buzz on startups, being an entrepreneur and really aiming for growth.  I think we are going to the right direction on those issues. What are your thoughts on these subjects?

I’m writing this from our summer cottage in Punkaharju, looking at the lake and pondering about the future. Looking back at the last six months, I must say they’ve been excellent, challenging and very rewarding with regards to Arctic Startup. We’ve had two events, which were magnificent successes, tens of blogposts which have gathered tens of comments from Finland and abroad. We’ve also had Ville and Tomi join our ranks after we launched the site last autumn with Miikka.

All of us have been working at our day jobs while putting this together and needless to say, it takes a lot of energy. Nevertheless I’ve talked to the guys and we’re all looking forward to putting in another 100% this coming autumn (I know I know, let’s get through the summer first!). There are a lot of plans put down to paper and I’m now going to share some of them with you.

With organising the two events during last spring we really noticed that there is a lot of demand for a grassroots level, bottom up, type of a forum where the concept is built in co-operation with the entrepreneurs working with the issues. Due to this, we’re going to be having at least two other events this coming fall. They’re going to be bigger and better with more interesting people.

To make this happen, we’re looking towards incorporating ArcticStartup and getting some sponsors on board with us to make the events more worthwhile and interesting to all of us. For the incorporation, we’re not looking for any funding but we will be putting up more information regarding the possible sponsorship packages that many have been asking for.

Furthermore, amidst of all the blogging, we will be participating in a bunch of events during the fall so do follow us to get possible discounts and tips regardging these conferences. We will be co-operating closely with the organisers to bring the best possible experience for the startups and third parties as we really want to shift gears in the Finnish entrepreneurship scene this autumn.

Talking about Finland - we’re hungry and never settle for something that can be reached easily. Having said that, our Finland only focus will be left behind and we’ll be broadening our view to other Nordic countries including Estonia. This is due to the fact that there simply isn’t an organisation that will cover the news and events at these latitudes in a way we would like them to be covered - hence the broadening view.

There’s a lot of things on the roadmap for the autumn, but we really want to work together on these with you the readers, entrepreneurs and vc’s to make all this happen in the right way. As you all know, a good idea only gets you 10% of the way, while a perfect execution will push you the last 90% towards the goal.

What do you think, are we heading the right way? Anything obvious we’ve missed?

Image credits to openDemocracy