Arctic Startup

BarCamp lands in Helsinki! Helsinki has seen some interesting international event concepts land in the city within a short time frame including Ignite and OpenCoffee Club. This Saturday is BarCamp’s turn.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. Antti Akonniemi (from the IgniteHelsinki fame) is partly responsible for bringing the event to Helsinki. Along with Antti, Mari Koistinen a prominent blogger, is part of the organizing committee. Both active Jaiku users, Antti and Mari along with a few others kick started the event organizing in the Jaiku forum.

The proposed BarCamp Helsinki sessions include the following:

• Time management
• Creative flows
• Case studies: Effects, aspects of use of Jaiku as organizing tool
• Location-based services
• Microformats for bloggers: What, why and how?
• Scred vs BillMonk (with Peter Robinett

The event takes place in the new Fjord offices on Saturday 10th May.

Floobs is taking part as the only Finnish company in the MIPTV’s Content 360 pitching competition in Cannes this year.

More precisely, Floobs is one of the three finalists in the “Advanced Mobile Interaction with TV Content” -series, where the two other contestants are Coded Vision, Twenty Six Leeds (UK) and BBC TV Talk, Wyndham-Leigh (UK).

Kai and Joonas let me know via e-mail that they will be sharing some comments from Cannes later on after their presentation.

Due to lack of time, I was unable to write about this earlier, but the Next Web 2008 was organised during the end of last week. There were a lot of companies there from Finland as well. I’m counting at least XIHA Life, Scred and Floobs were present.

Timo Paloheimo from Startupbin.com was also there and has some coverage of the two days of activity as well as some photos.

Juhani Polkko from XIHA Life, sent us an e-mail that they released a new language-based search feature in Amsterdam during the conference.

Update: TripSay was present as well, so quite a good presentation from the Finnish startup scene, I must say.

There’s some good comments being thrown around as Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch interviewed the developers of Scred in Amsterdam’s NextWeb Conference. There are a lot of competitor’s names as well and it just shows what kind of competition you usually end up with once you execute.

I’d be even daring to say that the idea is nothing, execution is everything.

I and Miikka had a chat yesterday with Tatu Laurila, CEO of Greater Helsinki Promotions about a venture they are organising for Finnish startups and prospects to Israel. Greater Helsinki Promotions is co-organising the event with Technopolis ventures.

Ten of the finest Finnish companies eligible for this venture will be sent to Israel to the IVA Hi-Tech Conference 2008. The event is held in Tel Aviv 19.-20.5.2008. The Israeli Venture Capital Association (IVA) has offered the Finnish organizers an opportunity to bring 5-10 promising start-ups plus an accompanying delegation to Tel Aviv for IVA’s annual conference, which attracts about 1,500 global players from the high tech industry, including VC and Corporate investors. Large number of global VC’s will attend the conference. The estimated cost for the whole program is a maximum of 5000 € at the maximum, a more exact budget will be available in the next couple weeks.

Deadline for enrollment is 2.4.2008. If you’re interested, contact Will Cardwell of Technopolis Ventures for more information on how to apply.

For those who are unaware with the startup and entrepreneurship environment in Israel, it is a lot more effective than it is in Finland. The countries themselves are similar in size and population. With a focus on entrepreneurship and a 15-year strong track record, Israel has managed to enlist over 100 companies to Nasdaq and there seems to be more in the pipeline. There’s definitely a lot there to learn. Arctic Startup will try to cover the process, preparaion up to the event and the event itself as thoroughly as possible. Stay tuned!

Tekes organizes a free morning seminar “Doing Business in the USA - An Overview of the Opportunities and Challenges” April 7th in Helsinki.

Keynote will be delivered by Marshall S. Ferrin, Director, International Business Development Program, George Mason University. He will provide an overview to business opportunities in the East Coast USA, especially in the capital area, and related challenges to Finnish firms. You can also schedule one-on-one with Mr. Ferrin, taking place after the event.

Dopplr, the social network or business travellers, has just announced at ETech a teamup with AMEE. AMEE stands for Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine and they provide a neutral, open platform for measuring the “Carbon-Footprint” of anything. Dopplr states on their blog that they are still putting finishing touches on the feature, but will be releasing it soon to the public.

I’m not sure if this has anything to do with saving the world from excessive carbon emissions, but at least it should make frequent travellers think of the consequences of their travels. Nevertheless it’s a move to the right direction.

The Annual Seminar of Forum Virium Helsinki and DIMES ry will be held on February 28th starting at 11am at Vanha Ylioppilastalo, Helsinki.

The topic for this year is “Odottava Oranssi - Waiting for User Generated Services”. There will be keynotes given by Jari Pasanen (Nokia), Luis M. Correia (Technical University of Lisbon), and a special guest media artist Marita Liulia. In addition the organisers Jarmo Eskelinen (Forum Virium Helsinki) and Kimmo Ojuva (Dimes ry) will give a joint presentation. Also a variety of social media experts will be on stage, including Taru From (Ego/Taivas). Naturally the event includes also a networking part.

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.