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.

Something’s definitely happening in the UK and Mountain View today - according to Petteri’s Jaiku post. Petteri is the co-founder of Jaiku working in the UK, while Jyri Engestrom is working in Mountain view with his wife and son.

Yesterday we got our 20 invites and Petteri even replied to his Jaiku announcing those invites as “OK, sounds good. Expect some news shortly :)” - we’re on the lookout!

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.

Jaiku has slowly opened up new registrations to their service after Google bought it in October 2007. They have given all current members 20 invites to for registration. Arctic Startup has 20 invites to give away to the 20 fastest commenters. Leave a comment and be sure to give your real e-mail in the comment field. We’ll be sending out the invites later on today.

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.