Zipipop has been chosen to present their latest mobile service tomorrow in the Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona. Mobile 2.0 Europe is a extension of the famous Mobile 2.0 event which started in San Francisco. The new service is called Zipiko and has been kept secret until the Mobile 2.0 Europe launch.

Zipiko is a quick and effortless way to see what your friends are doing and a way to invite them to your chosen venue whether it’s it a local cafe or your own place for drinks, lunch or whatever you fancy. You can also see what your friends are doing throughout the day from the main page where it’s only a matter of a few clicks to join an event, given that you’re invited.

The service itself has born out of Facebook application Mennäänkö Yhdelle (Let’s go for a one in Finnish) that Zipipop developed earlier on, where the best bits have been transferred to this new browser based mobile service.

I interviewed Zipipop CEO, Helene Auramo, after the festives had already started in Barcelona and she explained that “when you invite friends to a party they will receive an SMS to which they can then answer ‘Yes’ with a mere SMS. So the idea is that you don’t necessarily have to access the web at all to tell that you’re coming. And to make the experience complete one will receive a text message just before the event to know who else has answered ‘Yes’ to know who will eventually make it to the party” . Helene emphasized that the value of the service is in spontaneity and the ease of setting up a meeting on the fly.

Once you register to Zipiko you will receive 30 free SMS for organizing get-togethers, but in the long run Zipipop wants to bring in advertisers that would pay for the SMS messages, thus making the service free for the users. The advertisers would get their name on a discreet message at the end of the invitation SMS.

It seems that Zipipop has found a simple way to bring an aspect of a Jaiku/Twitter like service, SMS and Meetup together to organize spontaneous get-togethers . Now they only need to get the advertisers on board to pay for the SMS messages.

You can see a demo of the service here.

Techcruch also made a note about Mobile 2.0 Europe event and Zipko.

MySites, a Finnish startup providing a single location to save, manage and share content online, has decided to focus their marketing efforts selectively in two niche audiences. This is an interesting marketing strategy for a startup since it might make it possible for a startup to reach a critical user base without an acceptance from a wider community for what is still a rather generic service.

MySites has decided to go after gamers and university students.  MySites CEO, Ramine Darabiha, tells us that gamers and students are the kinds of users who respond the best to MySites as they tend to prefer sharing pictures and music. Many users also seem to use MySites as an “private online hard disk”, to access for example their school documents.

MySites had a strong presence at Lan79, a large European gaming LAN party. Ramine told us that this way they made important contacts there with key players in the online gaming industry, such as the largest online gaming news sites, event organizers , as well as several top teams.

This allowed MySites to gather attention for their own CounterStrike Source tournament that took place on the 9th of May when MySites organized a large one-night tournament for CounterStrike Source. The teams were competing for a total cash prize of 1000€. Coverage of this tournament was spread across 8 prominent online gaming news sites, namely Vakarm, Cadred, Team-aAa, eFever, Actu-Lan, London Mint, Team-Coolermaster, Inside Source. Additionally, Ramine told us that there was a live web tv stream of every match, which hosted up to 1000 spectators.

MySites has also been focusing their promotion on students, targeting student unions of universities of Oulu and Tampere. The company has been presenting the service to the heads of the student unions in order to get the most active members of the student body involved in promoting their services.

According to Ramine, as a result of these efforts, MySites is known by and has contacts in many of the top gaming teams and the staff of online gaming sites as well as uniniversity student unions. This in an interesting grass roots approach that reminds me of the the way Facebook spread in the early 2005 among university students before it hit the mainstream.

MySites is clearly facing the same IPR issues as any other site regarding the sharing movies and music online. Thus, it seems to be mainly a convenient way to store data into the cloud for one’s own personal use since it can hardly steel a significant share of the personal photo sharing business from Facebook, Flickr and the likes. In this respect the strategy of targeting niche audiences with specific needs might prove to be a wise approach.

Disclosure: MySites is sponsoring Arctic Startup Events

Kauppalehti, a Finnish business daily, reported yesterday that Sulake’s CEO, Timo Soininen, is planning to take the company public. According to Mr. Soininen the earlierst possible date for the listing would be sometime next year.

Soininen thinks Sulake starts to be big enough for an IPO. Soininen’s comments takes place after Sulake was valued 9th in Alley Insider valuation (at 25 times revenues) for digital startups. Read more on the story here.

Soinen added that Sulake is profitable and aims to a 20 percent increase in turnover this year. Last year’s  turnover was 43 million euro.

Despite the Alley Insider estimation Soininen himself refuses to comment on his company’s valuation.

The investment groups Ambient Sound Investments or ASI for short (from Skype fame) and Seed Fund Vera make an equity investment in Senseg, a Finnish company developing a breakthrough touch interface technology. The sum of the investment remains undisclosed.

Senseg is one of the startups whose journey to Israel to meet Israeli investors we have been following. It only makes sense that Senseg comes out with the announcement right before they pitch to the local VCs on Wednesday, May the 21th to capture the full benefit of the announcement.

Senseg has developed a new technology to produce touch-like sensations. The technology has a wide range of applications, for example generating the feeling of virtual buttons on smooth surfaces such as mobile phones and other touch screens. Iphone with a keyboard you can actually feel, anyone?

Dr. Ville Mäkinen, Senseg’s CEO, described the technology nothing short of revolutionary:

Senseg’s technology is something completely different. It is a novel communications technology based on human sensation. [...] The technology has unrepresented potential. I can be licenced easily and used in hundreds of different ways and applications. Senseg’s technology can therefore initiate a significant and fundamental change in how consumer gadgets are designed and used.

According to Moaffak Ahmed, Chairman of Senseg, the technology will be available for a select group of equipment manufacturers in the second half of 2008 and be officially launched when the first products are introduced to the market, which he expects to be in 2009.

Arctic Startup will follow Sensig and other Finnish startups throughout the week and report on how they manage to attract attension from the VC scene in Israel.