Arctic Startup

There will be a special startup developers get together event in Helsinki on May 22. The purpose of the event is to exchange knowledge about technologies and conventions touching startup developers, and also to demonstrate students “how cool it is to run and work in a startup”.

There’s quite a good bunch of startup speakers participating, including Lare Lekman, CTO of Star Wreck Studios, Jani Luostarinen, System Administrator at Floobs, Joakim Achren, founder and CEO of Ironstar Helsinki (MoiPal service), and Taro Morimoto, CTO of Zipipop. After the afternoon event there will be an evening party as well, place to be declared later.

The event will take place on Thursday, May 22, starting at 1pm at HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science in Helsinki. Check out the detailed agenda and enrollment on Yahoo upcoming or Facebook.

If you can’t make it, you can see the live stream from Floobs. Sponsors are also sought after, so if you’re interested, contact Kai Lemmetty @Floobs.

Are you aware that sailing enthusiasts earn annually almost double the income compared to amateur golfers in the US? That was news to me when I chatted with the co-founder of sailingregister.com (later abbreviated as SR), Vesa Lindqvist. They have tackled a tightly defined, but potentially lucrative, niche of sailing races.

SR offers something for all parties that include spectators, sailors and race officials. SR’s key service is a secure sign-up system for sailors and race organizers. Sailing event organizers also lack proper services for providing race coverage for sailing spectators ashore and home. SR proposes to provide a reliable, secure and feature-rich alternative.

Their initial business model is to charge a premium from fees collected from race participants. However, the founders have a strong background of mobile business and we can expect the service to offer a range of premium rate mobile services for spectators in the future. Furthermore, they plan to offer social network driven marketing services to advertisers targeting this high-networth customer segment.

With many vertical social networks currently popping up this space is also contested with players such as Regatta Network and Compete-at-sailing. However, I believe SR is on the right track as they target enterprise customers as well with their marketing services. One has to bear in mind that according to Mr. Lindqvist, the total size of the sports industry internet spending in the US alone is circa $239 million.

SR is currently self-funded. They continue their negotiations with lead customers so that they will be ready for sailing season 2008.

I wish the SR guys all the best and good sailing.

Another Technopolis event coming up is MoneyTalks™ Forum Special on 8th of May, claimed to be the largest investor event in Finland during the spring of 2008. The event is invitation-only and targeted to VCs, business angels and promising high-tech & innovation based start-ups seeking financing. Companies interested in pitching in the event should check for further information.

The bi-annual special event promises to feature the rising stars of the Finnish high-tech scene and prominent early stage investors from Finland and abroad. Participants should have plenty of opportunities for one-one-one meetings with investors and entrepreneurs.

Photo by cpalmieri.

Fiksuhuuto.fi is an online bidding company founded in early 2008 by Jussi Mäntylä and Tuomo Siurua. The idea behind the concept is simple yet unique. There are open bids on the website put up by the company. You purchase a right to bid for those products (priced between 1,90 and 0,84 euros). Every bid you make increases the price by one cent. Also, when you place your bid for the product the countdown to close the bid starts from the beginning. The coundowns are usually between one and two minutes.

Jussi and Tommi have filed a patent application for the idea. Currently they employ 12 people and ship around 100 products per day. If you calculate 30 bids per product (which is probably far too little), they would be getting somewhere around 3000 euros a day (on an average bid price of 1 euro) just for the bids.

I did a video interview of Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen from Floobs some time in February. I never had time to edit and go through the video, but I finally managed to do so in the Easter holidays. During the editing of the video, I noticed that the add-on microphone was slightly faulty and it only recorded the left channel - therefore the sound quality is quite bad, apologies for that. Nevertheless, I decided its better to release the video late than never - so here it is:

I met Christoffer Landtman the CEO of CompanyCube in our Open Coffee with Arctic Startup event. CompanyCube has a very interesting position in terms of their business. They have managed to penetrate the somewhat unsexy commodities market of traders with their product. More specifically, they offer steel traders a viable solution to handle their processes.

The service is provided over the internet, accessible from anywhere - even the mobile phone they claim. The service includes trading management, customer relations management and business intelligence. Trading activities are managed as seperate projects and each project therefore includes certain routines such as stakeholder management, scheduling and so on. CRM is the regular integration of customer data to match more closely to the trading activities. Business intelligence has been built in to give a quick dashboard type of display to running your business and help make decisions faster.

CompanyCube is positioning themselves in huge market, measured to be 318 billion USD in 2005 worldwide. Due to large acquisitions and mergers the IT solutions are a mess and largely fragmented, according Christoffer Landtman. They have started off well in Finland as SteelTeam, the largest trading house of steel has began to use their product to streamline their business.

Laurea is arranging a series of seminars for entrepreneurs in Finnish. The first was actually held today, but the next one will be on 25th of March in Leppävaara. The speakers in the series of seminars are Joonas Turkama of CoreFinland and Mikko Silventola of Calcus Kustannus, Mohamed El Fatatry of Muxlim.com, Esko Alanko of Micromedia, Taneli Tikka of Wisdom Like Silence, Heidi Ekholm-Talas of BSG Marketing and finally but not least Eero Lehti from the The Federation of Finnish Enterprises.

Interesting line-up with interesting people! You can read more about the series of talks from here. As a short reminder, we (Arctic Startup and Open Coffee) will be hosting another event in April on entrepreneurship. The schedule and theme will be announced later.

Creative agency Bolder Helsinki Oy was founded in the last week of February. The firm promises to do, uh, bolder and more creative and experimental marketing compared to more conventional and established agencies in both offline and online. Target customers are especially new firms, those planning to transfer their business to web, and firms who have undergone a generation shift and might need a strategic approach in creating or renewing their marketing as a whole. Their whole site is unfortunately only in Finnish right now, but an English version is promised to be launched before the summer.

The founder team consists of six Helsinki School of Economics students, who look forward to offer their experience of marketing in the student communities to national and international brands, which are looking to cover segments that might be difficult to reach. The founders are open about their excitement and enthusiasm to help create new success stories, and they’re looking to support entrepreneurship and encourage more Finnish students to consider it as a more tempting career option.

Competition in the media business is tough, but there’s always room for guys who believe in themselves. Best of luck to Bolder and kudos for stepping up with the challenge.

[This post is slightly late due to my winter holiday, sorry about that.]

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.