Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, offers Finnish companies possibility to take part in the UCLA Global Access Program once again this year. In the program MBA students of UCLA will make an international business plan for the companies as their final thesis, focusing on analysis and action plan for entering specific international markets. The program was ranked last year as the best of its kind in the US, and the bar for both participating companies and students is high. There have been yearly around 10 Finnish companies participating in GAP, including e.g. one of the fastest grown firms Openbit and Cidercone.

Eurostars is an European funding and support program specifically dedicated to creating competitive SMEs that will be leaders in their own sector. The program tries to ignite international collaborative research and innovation projects by easing access to support and funding for growth companies. The program is initiated by EUREKA, pan-European intergovernmental network founded to enhance competitiveness of European businesses. Eurostars offers 400 million euros of R&D funding to SME companies over a six year period. Tekes funds the Finnish participants with 5M euros per year. The next deadline for electronic submission of applications is November 21st 2008. See instructions from Tekes.

Gaming and interactive media companies can also apply for funding of 10,000-100,000 euros for producing product demos and prototypes in the Media 2007 program. The program is aimed at companies developing on and off-line interactive works. Eligible are interactive works for the computer, internet, mobile phone, games console (including handheld), and digital television, that present a substantial degree interactivity, narrative, and innovation. Companies that submit an application must have completed a previous interactive work, or an animation of at least 24 minutes, and prove that the work has been commercially distributed between January 1st 2006 and the date of submission of their application. The next deadline for applying is November 17th.

Normally there isn’t nothing big in companies appointing CEOs or recruiting people. However, this time I believe there is something ineherently different happening in terms of Blyk that will tell the whole industry how different it is compared to a few years ago. Blyk is a Finnish based startup that offers a free mobile contract to 16-to-24 -year-olds in exchange for advertisements.

Eric Samson is the former Managing Director of Carat Belgium. Now as far as I know, Carat doesn’t engage itself in mobile operator business at all. When Blyk is bringing a heavy weight advertising and marketing specialist onboard it tells about the business the company is in as well as how dedicated they are to promoting the way the company is seen.

This brings about an interesting point to many startups - how many are still focusing on technology through company recruicts, when (possibly) the focus should be on answering the market needs such as in the case of Blyk? No doubt the technological understanding is important, but isn’t the customer insight even more important?

[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]

Estonian company Poohtech has launched a service called Cmart (.swf link) in Latvia that enables paying utility bills in 99 local Narvesen kiosks. Poohtech is an Estonian startup focusing on electronic ticketing and payment solutions. Toivo Annus, the former lead engineer of Skype, has reportedly invested in the firm. Poohtech has earlier provided electronic ticketing for in public transportation in Tallinn, Estonia.

The Cmart service enables Latvians to pay their bills at local newsstand chain Narvesen. The barcodes of bills from different service providers (including telecom, security, energy , etc.), are scanned in and paid on the spot.

The value statement Cmart makes is letting people to pay their bills on the go makes their life much easier. Toivo Tänavsuu comments at least in Estonia most of the people pay their bills online (similarly in Finland), and probably in Latvia also, but on the other hand the service could be very valuable for elderly people.

Poohtech is aiming for international markets with Cmart, and mention they would like to hear from potential partners.

Here’s a video where Ramine Darabiha, the CEO of MySites, is interviewed by Mashable, whose summer tour MySites sponsored. MySites is a Finnish startup that provides a web desktop that lets you store up to 10 GB of photos, music, videos, and other files that you can easily share

I was critical of MySites on my earlier post and MySites has been very active working on the site since. In the video below Ramine points out that MySites is not going after the most savviest of tech geeks, but aims for students and gamers only somewhat familiar with technology who many times use for example Microsoft’s products. This in mind MySites has for example made the desktop icons double clickable just as you would open a file on your desktop.

So instead of going for the ultimate user experience as we know it MySites is going for the familiarity and build the user experience around that. An interesting and brave strategy to not aim for improving the experience, but rather to make it resemble what people have used to using. Even though I still do think MySites has ways to go with the service you can’t blame them for not trying.

KaraokeParty.com is a music service that let users sing karaoke, practice singing, and challenge friends on the web. The service is provided by Karaokeparty Online Gaming, a Swedish startup founded in 2007.

All the user needs is a microphone and a computer connected with Internet connection to start singing. The service is open and free for everybody. There are two playing options, one with leading vocals for practicing and one with backing vocals only. You can also register to the service to store your scores to your profile and top lists, interact with the karaoke community, and to request new songs. The unique scoring technology makes it possible to compete with friends, both at home and all over the world over the Internet.

The service features most popular pop songs. At the moment there seems to be a bit over 100 songs, with more being added. All the songs are performed by cover artists, and Karaokeparty has the rights to the songs granted by Swedish Performing Rights Society and Nordisk Copyright Bureau (STIM/NCB). I’m not sure how this arrangement covers the global markets, though, but apparently the company is having users all around the world and has added many localized language versions already.

Karaokeparty Online Gaming AB has just announced finishing a funding round last week, securing SEK 3 Million (EUR 0.3M or USD 0.45M) investment from a group of Swedish angel investors.

According to the CEO Mattias Öberg the company is extremely pleased with the development so far, and has reached user numbers beating even their most optimistic forecasts. With the new funding, KaraokeParty will “intensify its expansion plans and increase its catalogue of songs which should make the service even more popular” as stated by Mattias Öberg. The new investors are Kent Gustafson, Håkan Janson, and Rolf Johansson, who were co-owners of Swedish Gekås, one of the biggest low price shopping centres in Europe. They have also worked as angel investors in other different projects.

As of now there doesn’t seem to be any revenue model implemented for KaraokeParty.com, but it’s quite easy to think of quite a many different interesting options.