Arctic Startup

Several Finnish companies have been included as finalists for the 2008 Europe 100 list of the of most promising ventures Red Herring is once again publishing. The companies are Aito Technologies, Floobs, Muxlim, nCore, Severa, Whatamap.com, Widisys, and Valimo Wireless. The winners will be declared at Red Herring Europe 2008 event in Malta on April 14-16th.

While the nomination gives good visibility to the companies, it’s worth a note, though, before going boasting around that the reputation Red Herring has is not that good everywhere. There’s a whole lot of suspected monkey business going on related to the company. According to rumors (see ValleyWag’s posts for example), Red Herring’s CEO and Chairman, Alex Vieux, doesn’t pay his bills (nor employees’ salaries). In addition, he’s got the U.S. tax officials of IRS on his back, suspected of having $2 million in unpaid payroll taxes according to ex-employees. Mr. Vieux has also been said to to have fled French and Swiss police also interested to investigate possible unpaid taxes. A good sign is neither that Red Herring has lost quite a many board members over the last couple of years.

Although not all the rumors may be true, it nevertheless seems the company is in trouble and it’s unsure if it’s able to turn its course. As a takeaway it’s good to enjoy the publicity the nomination brings, but at the same time it’s worthwhile to assess what kind of association to have with Red Herring in particular and keep one’s ears open.

Venture Cup Finland, the national business plan competition, announced the winners for the second round of this year’s competition. The award criteria emphasized innovativeness, customer benefits and potential market, and feasibility of the business model.

Numcore from Kuopio won the main award, and got also additional environment and safety prize. The company develops and markets innovative high-tech monitoring and controlling instruments for online use in process industry. With its products complex processes can be monitored and controlled continuously, helping its customers to refine their processes and reduce the environmental impact. Numcore is planning to expand internationally and is looking for venture capital at the moment. The CEO Anssi Lehikoinen states they are now ready to commercialize more than a decade of research, and have invested a lot in their team, which has industry experience and expertise in R&D, sales, and financing.

Other winners and their business concepts:

• Beautiful9 - offering a virtual wardrobe for pregnant women, from which they can rent affordable evening dresses and business outfits.
• BlueFors - commercial fully automated cooling device capable of reaching -273.15 degrees Celsius, just 0.025 degrees away from the absolute zero.
• LaTiDa - skin care products produced without any chemicals and with environmentally-friendly supply chain.
• Sinteri - natural baby food produced locally, innovatively combining production, sales, and community-based service.

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.

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.