Arctic Startup

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”.

MahShelf Ltd, founded February 2008 in Espoo Finland is wanting to become the “youtube of books” - a place where you can read and share books online.

The three students, managed by Odin Chen, began working on the concept in the end of 2007. They are pushing out a public beta in April, according to their blog.

MahShelf is in a very interesting area with their service, but they do have heavy competition from Scribd and similar services.

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.

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.

The Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity has interviewed about 25000 people around the world on what they call innovation confidence. Finland has received 44 points of the 100 possible points, which makes it the one of the least thrilled by technology. We’re in the pack together with Slovenia, Turkey and the Netherlands.

This is very worrying, as we’ve been noted as one of the most technologically advanced countries, especially when it comes to the mobile phones and internet. Finland is usually considered in general a very early adapter of new technologies and thus it’s stressful to see this sort of attitude change.

Via New York Times and ReadWriteWeb.