The common picture we have of wind turbines are the ones which stand on tubular towers and have three rotor blades, varying in different sizes. The design is very much similar to the windmills of old, which were used to pump water and grind grain. However, Risto Joutsiniemi had already developed another kind of wind turbine over two decades ago – the Windside vertical wind turbine. Its a unique product which has many advantages in comparison to the horizontal wind turbine, most notably that they are able to operate at very low wind speeds and in extreme temperatures.
Windside – A Different Kind Of Wind Turbine
Hitlantis Looking To Enable Better Content Discovery
Reporting from the second day of MoneyTalks, being held here in Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland I bumbed into a new innovative music startup called Hitlantis. I talked to one of the co-founders Timo Poijärvi about the concept and what they are doing. Poijärvi has worked in the music industry and with some startups before, but has a strong experience from the ways the music industry works. This showed up in our talks and he openly questioned the need of Teosto (Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society) and record labels for musicians. The future is about the community around the artists.
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ArcticStartup Reader Census
The other day I saw Chris Dixon’s Tweet, where he was tweeting about his company’s new nifty little widget that let’s you learn about your blog’s readers (and lets them learn about each other). I instantly thought how I’d like to share it with ArcticStartup readers, with you, so all of us can get a better sense of what our community looks like.
The company behind the nifty widget is Hunch, a New York City based startup that was founded among others by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and SiteAdvisor co-founder Chris Dixon. Hunch aims to use machine learning to guide practical decision-making. You can see more about how Hunch works here.
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Estonia To Make Business Environment Less Friendly Towards Startups
Estonia has previously enjoyed a relatively high reputation among startups and international high tech companies due to its friendly and very incentivised tax environment. Well, if a new law regarding the different kinds of income goes through we might have to say good bye to that reputation. Baltic Business News reports that the government is in talks of revising the Income Tax Law to change the status of benefits, such as share options and shares. Instruments which are highly used by early and later stage companies to motivate employees.
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Chat With Mårten Mickos (Video)
During our trip to the Silicon Valley we aimed to meet people who have experience from the Northern Europe on one hand, and from the Silicon Valley on the other to get the bottom of the differences between the two places. This is the third post of the series. See also the previous posts here and here.
We talked to Mårten Mickos about the his experiences in coming to Silicon Valley, How MySQL made the decision to establish a presence in the US and his advice to young entrepreneurs wondering where they should set up a shop. Mickos became known as the CEO of MySQL before Sun Microsystems acquired the company in 2008 for a whopping $ 1 billion. Now the buyer is being bought if the regulator in Europe allow Oracle to snap her up. Mickos is currently an Entrepreneur at Residence at Benchmark Capital.
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ArcticEvening Stockholm Tickets Now Available
The tickets for our next week’s ArcticEvening are now available for booking. Please find the sign-up form for registering to the event below. Note that if you are unable to make it to the event, please don’t sign up. We have a limited amount of space available and would like to get everyone on board. Likewise, if you need to cancel for any reason, please inform us at events(at)arcticstartup.com so that we can reallocate the ticket.
Expect a house filled with like-minded entrepreneurial people, and lots of networking. We will start off with a brief presentation from Jaycut and continue with an interesting panel discussion. See the Stockholm event page for details. If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, have a look at videos from our previous events.
So sign up below and come spice up our wonderful mix of people!
Cleantech Invest VIGO: A New Venture Accelerator In Finland!
Vigo, the start-up venture accelerator programme, is continuing with its fourth venture accelerator.
The Ministry of Employment and the Economy in Finland accepted Cleantech Invest into its Vigo accelerator program. The new cleantech start-up accelerator will provide funding for early-stage ventures and create growth stories by combining cleantech expertise, industrial know-how and capital. Cleantech Invest Vigo is lead by managing partner Ismo Rautiainen, accompanied by Cleantech Invest founders Tarja Teppo (in picture) and Timo Linnainmaa. The team estimates that most of the Finnish deal flow will come from the clean energy area. The other promising sectors in Finland in terms of deal flow include energy efficiency, new materials related to energy technologies, recycling and waste management solutions. Continue reading »
23 Video Disrupting The Online Video Business
I was recently given a demo of 23 Video, a Danish online service offering a plug and play web-tv platform to set up ones own web-tv channel.
The first thought that crossed my mind during the demo was the feeling of sligth anxiety that occurs when checking out the roaming costs on the phone bill. If not chockingly high, they’re usually more than expected. Even though you had checked out the costs in beforehand and were being sensible using your phone abroad.
How come? Because it’s the exact same feeling of uncertainty and confusion one often faces when dealing with streaming costs. It already starts with the business offer letter, usually three pages long with no mention of the actual final cost. And that after a meeting with a sales person who’s supposed to know your needs and demands by then. Need a video player, too? Call some more people.
23 Video is determined to kill that mumbo jumbo and all talk about difficulties surrounding online streaming and setting up ones own web-tv channel.
Your Grandchildren Will Enjoy A Utopian Startup Ecosystem
The godfather of venture bloggers, Fred Wilson, posts today on the timeline of a startup ecosystem, with the assurance that it takes at least a generation to reach a level that is, “fully formed and producing great companies.” He breaks down the development process into 3 decade-long periods, with the middle phase described as:
In the second decade, you start to get it right. The entrepreneurs are doing it for the second or third time. The infrastructure has developed (lawyers, VCs, recruiters). And it is easier to get talented employees to do a startup. This is where Silicon Valley was from 1975 to 1985.
This is an accurate description of the scene here in the Nordic & Baltics, and makes it seem that we’re on the way to becoming a “dynamic ocean” of innovation. However, whether we really can “get to the mountaintop” here in Northern Europe and take a place as a leading center of startup energy in the 21st century is far from certain. Continue reading »
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