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.

We’ve been quiet too long, but we’ve got something good for you coming up! Next week’s Thursday we’ll be organising an event together with Ville from Open Coffee Club Helsinki in Dubrovnik.

We will have 4 companies on stage giving you talks about entrepreneurship and how they came up with what they are doing. The companies, some of which have also been covered on Arctic Startup, are Vailoma.com, Floobs, Whatamap and Mysites.com.

Mysites.com is also sponsoring the event. Mysites.com is a new Finland based company which lets its users manage and put all their online content in a single place. They will launch in the very near future, but they wanted to give us a sneak peak behind the curtain next Thursday.

Here’s the event in more detail:
Date: Thursday, March 6, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Dubrovnik Lounge & Lobby
Address: Eerikinkatu 11 (downstairs), Helsinki

The event goes more or less as follows:
-Doors open at 6pm
-The presentations will start at 6.30pm
-Each company will talk about 10-15 minute
-And for the next hour and a half we can chat over a cup of coffee or a pint, meet new people and connect

If you want, you can join in on the event in Facebook. See you next thursday!

First Line Angel Group FLAG.fi, a Finnish business angel community with a global reach, is launching on 25-26th of February 2008 at EU EASY Event in Milano, Italy. FLAG.fi is stated to be the the first and only global portal dedicated to investors, entrepreneurs, and business angels.

The founder Peter Bougdanos, a well-acclaimed business angel, hopes FLAG will be “a solution to the startup situation in Finland and all over Europe”. The problem statement manifests that many entrepreneurs and opportunities go unnoticed and/or unfunded in Finland - and also in Europe in general - because of a lack of a true angel community, consensus, support, and meaningful interaction among professionals in the field. This is something that was also identified recently in Growth Forum 08 as reported by Tomi. In addition many investors get caught up in long exit cycles, ending up tying up their valuable resources of time, money, and expertise.

The vision of FLAG is to become the first true Angel Group in Finland which mirrors the activities of angel groups in the USA. It’s mission is to make Finland, Finnish companies, Finnish business angels, and the Finnish venture capital industry a healthy, competitive, and interactive community. FLAG targets to create a currently missing dynamic forum with both a professional and social function for business angels to meet and discuss angel investments. Peter Bougdanos aims to promote Finnish startups and help them “get the commercialization and business concept traction that many fail to do”. Recent members of FLAG include online business traveller tool Dopplr and free news service forum ampparit.com.

The service will be Finland centric, but it’s claimed that already over 3000 pan-European interested members have been identified, and the majority of them have expressed keen interest to enroll. FLAG also looks to integrate Middle Eastern and Asian flare of active members. It is planned to be the melting pot for existing angel associations, stand-alone organizations, network clusters, and independent actors on local, regional, and international levels, operating both online and offline.

FLAG will offer a whole community universe for connecting investors, with a wide spectrum of tools and services, including facilitating selling of companies angel-to-angel, and providing company information and management bios. FLAG also believes in giving back to the community and 25 percent of profits will go to funding stipends for young students, lower income families’ teens, and budding entrepreneurs to gain international experience, overseas exposure and professional and academics skills.

Greek American Bougdanos has helped to foster nearly 50 startups in Finland, since moving from NYC after surviving 9/11/2001. His background includes investments in companies like Google, Skype, and Finnish Helmi Technologies, Nordic Koivu, FogScreen, Concilio Networks, and Trackway, among many others. Peter is also a founding partner of FirstRound Startup Center, which has a unique smart money approach to incubating fast track early stage companies.

It is great to see something of this scale being initiated in Finland, and hopefully FLAG will be able to give rise to new business angels activity and many new fast growing firms. If you’re interested in joining FLAG, be sure to check the web page. We can also put you in touch with Mr. Bougdanos, just drop a note at info [at] arcticstartup.com.

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Edit: I have heard there are some two-fold opinions on how Mr. Bougdanos works, so it’s advisable that you first discuss with people who have worked with him before jumping right in, to make sure there is a good match (as would be good with any new relationship in general).