Arctic Startup

As you probably know from our earlier posts the IVA conference was held last week in Tel Aviv, Israel. Now it’s time for a recap. I had an opportunity to interview Jussi Harvela, Pekka Roine and Kristian Järnefelt from Concilio Networks who all participated in the event. They all agreed that the whole trip was a success.

The Finnish delegation of fifteen people attended the conference (with total of 1700 attendees) itself and the companies also pitched for a selected VC audience just after the conference. Furthermore, all eight companies had private meetings with potential investors and partners. The advice from the experts (check the video) was clearly followed by the companies as the quality of pitches was described as “very good” or “excellent”. The Finnish companies were pretty unknown for Israeli VCs who were anyhow impressed by the absence of “me-too” startups among the pitchers.

Mr. Järnefelt also provided some personal insights on Israeli business as well. He said that Israel resembles Silicon Valley a great deal and many of leading US VCs are also present in Israel. There are quite a lot early stage capital available and a bubbling startup scene as well. One notable thing is the amount of serial entrepreneurs who yet are rare (at least in software business) in Finland. According to Mr. Järnefelt Israeli startups have a strong level of ambition in general and the incubators (that acccept only 3-5% of applicants) encourage such behavior. However, one thing the Israeli ICT segment yet lacks is “a Nokia”, so that gives the Finns something to chat about.

One the trip’s goals was to deepen the co-operation between Finland and Israel. Thus, representatives from Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy, TEKES, Finnvera and Technopolis Ventures got a first-hand look on, for example, the Israeli VC industry and the incubator system. After the Finnish delegation returns we hope the co-operation gradually deepens and gains momentum. The signs seem promising in any case.

There were discussions that an Israeli delegation consisting of VCs and government officials would visit Finland sometime during the Autumn. It would be great if Estonian and Russian startups could attend such an event along with Finnish companies. We will keep you posted if and when we hear more of this kind of plans.

In conclusion, an excellent event and we hope to see a more deeper interaction between Israel and Finland in the future.

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.

Musiikki&Media organizes a free seminar with the theme “New revenue models of music” on May 16th 10.00-15.00 at Sibelius Academy, Helsinki. The seminar features opinions and insights around what seem to be the revenue models of the future and what are the changes already taken place in the music industry.

Why I’m picking it up is because the event might interest also those not directly involved in music business as Johan Vosmeijer, Managing Director of the interesting German startup SellaBand will participate. Crowd sourcing is one of themes covered in the seminar.

Free registration before May 13th is required. The enrollment and later on event details are available on the Musiikki&Media 08 web site.

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Photo by malingering.

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.

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.

Technopolis and Technopolis Ventures organize a brief morning seminar on April 29th in Espoo with a theme “Virtual Communities as a Tool for New Businesses”. The free of charge event is quite short, light even, but does feature a keynote from the software business research legend David G. Messerschmitt, what might make it just worth your visit.

More information and registration (due April 24th).

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.

Last week we were wondering what was happening to Jaiku as Petteri posted something that caught our eye. It seemed that he got the week’s mixed up as last night Google announced in Google Campfire that Jaiku will be one of the first services to be running on the new Google App Engine. Let’s hope this will shorten the somewhat lengthy development cycles we’ve seen since Google acquired Jaiku last year.

Google App Engine, according to TechCrunch (who’s Michael Arrington crashed the Google Campfire event with Robert Scoble), is an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store services. According to Arrington the service is somewhat less flexible than Amazon’s S3 as it requires developers to lay the whole development stack on the Google servers where as in Amazon’s case you can pick and mix.

The Camp Fire website states that all users of Google App Engine get free quota of 500MB in persistent storage, and 5M monthly pageviews. In other words, developers are able to scale to a few million users without “infrastructure headaches”.

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.

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.