As long as I can remember there’s been talk about building a bridge between Silicon Valley and one of the many want-to-be-a-startup-hubs. Several locations have taken turns building this golden bridge, which has come to be the holy grail of every emerging technology hub regardless of the nationality. There’s many who have tried their luck including China, Israel, Bangalore and earlier on even Helsinki to just name a few. It has been studied to death and visited by the ministers, mayors, professors and venture capitalist, all trying to figure out how their respective institution, city or country could become like the Valley or at least enjoy the benefit from a distance.
Building The Infamous Bridge
Preseco And Pontos Target To Set Up A Fund For Customer Project Financing
Preseco closed around of €10m round including an equity investment by Pontos, a private equity investor and project financing arrangements with Atradius and Finnvera. In addition, Preseco and Pontos have begun strategic co-operation and are aiming to set up a fund for project finacing. This is a new and very innovative vehicle to resolve the issue of customer financing requirements of €10m-€20m per project – a typical sum for global environmental technology projects (press release). To close the transaction, Preseco announced the appointment of Risto J. Pönnö as their new CEO to speed up Preseco’s growth (press release). Continue reading »
Every Time A Chinese Social Network Looks To Ericsson For Content, A Startup Dies
Ericsson announced yesterday morning that they have completed a partnership agreement to bring mobile applications to Kaixin001, a Beijing based social network with 50 million users. The press release mentions that photo sharing, SMS alerts, and location based services will be the first applications. The fact that Kaixin001, a startup itself, has chosen Ericsson as content partner should be interpreted as huge missed opportunity for all startups developing mobile applications in Northern Europe, and I’ll tell you why.
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Uppspretta To Help Battle Recession In Iceland
Uppspretta is an Icelandic startup focused in social lending. At the moment Uppspretta is only available in Iceland. It was co-founded by Ragnheiður Magnúsdóttir, one of the panelists in the ArcticEvening Iceland. The site works in such a way that it works as a facilitator between people who want a loan and people who are willing to lend some money. For the time being, the site is concentrating on smaller companies and startups as their market.
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ArcticEvening Helsinki Coming Up October 27th!
We’ll be continuing our tour of the ArcticEvenings around the Nordics and Baltics with our next event being held in Helsinki, Finland. Our event will be themed software growth businesses. We’ll be hosting a fabolous panel for you on the 27th of October. It will have some young, but extremely successful local startups from the software sector.
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Crystalsol Is Getting Ready To Revolutionize Solar Energy
Solar energy is a favourite of many governments and environmentalists: free and easy to harness energy from the sun – what’s not to like about that? Well, for one the production of conventional photovoltaic panels isn’t without environmental impacts, and it also uses rare metals which are increasingly difficult to source. Crystalsol, established in 2008 as a spin-off of the Tallinn University of Technology, is developing a product which gets rid of these negatives.
The company’s key innovation is the use of tiny semiconductor crystals made of copper, zinc, tin and sulfo-selenide, CZTS for short, where each crystal works as a tiny solar cell. This technology is the combination of decades of research for the Russian military and Philips semiconductor know-how dating back to the 1960s. The result: a new type of flexible photovoltaic module with a significant cost advantage compared to all currently known photovoltaic technologies. The modules are produced roll-to-roll – think paper manufacturing – which eliminates the scale-up issues that thin film producers usually face. Once production is up and running, which should be by mid 2011, Crystalsol forecasts production costs below €0.50 per watt, which should give them the lead in low cost PV modules.
Global Call Stirs Up The Market In Iceland
During my visit to Iceland earlier this week I met with a local VoIP company called Global Call. While there are many VoIP companies around, Global Call had managed to arouse some serious interest and hate towards them. First of all, many of their clients like them for their low rates where as the other telcos seriously hate them for competing with them. I talked to Benedikt Bjarnason and Höskuldur Darri Ellertsson about their business and how they’re doing.
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It’s All About Changing The World, Right?!
During the past week I was looking for topics to write about and there was a few rather interesting ones even though they weren’t exactly scoops. But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about all the useless web apps that I kept finding when I was looking for something useful.
I admit there’s some truth in that if you just fiddle around and create nifty little apps or services you can make something very useful in the end, but only if you believe there’s something much more than that, something big and game changing in the end. For example, I agree that fiddling is largely how Twitter got started. But if it’s for a quick buck or quick success and you’re putting all your time and energy into it, it’s just cutting short your potential as a human being and wasting all our time.
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Finland Makes 1Mbps Internet Connection A Legal Right – So What?
Finland made headlines yesterday with a news item that many media sites and bloggers echoed on; the government approved a law to make the 1Mbps internet connection a legal right for everyone in the country. I read many of the stories around the web and believe that there is a large misconception on what this actually means. Almost everyone is referring to the fact that Finland has taken a great step forward as it will be wiring the entire country for everyone. To disappoint you, this won’t be the case. There is a twist in the text that states the true meaning of the law: it’s a legal right to have a 1 Mpbs connection, but it isn’t stated that it will be free.
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Geek Girl Meetup Gathers 100 Women To Talk About Tech
ArcticStartup is joining Geek Girl Meetup as a media partner. Geek Girl Meetup is a Swedish unconference for women, by women, who are interested in technology, web, social media and entrepreneurship. The event takes place October 24-25 in Stockholm and is being organized for the second time despite its short existence. What started as a one day event for 50 participants in March has now turned into two day event with 100 women attending. And there’re still ladies on the waiting list!
Building And Managing A Successful Sales Team In The U.S. Market, Part I
Pirjo Tuomi, an experienced Finnish saleswoman who’s worked in the U.S. for the past 16 years, presented her experiences and tips for Building and Managing a Successful Sales Team in the US Market in Verso Software Sales Camp last week (see our previous post from the event). Pirjo has long experience from U.S. B2B sales, positions from Sales Rep to SVP Worldwide Sales, going through 5 M&A’s and 1 IPO, growing a firm from zero to $250M in revenues and up to 120 team size, among other things. In the following, I will also reflect points from Jussi Harvela’s presentation.
First of all, Pirjo stated the U.S. market is obviously vast and hugely competitive. Local sales presence and sales support is crucial. For getting the first reference customers, you should look to work very closely with them, developing the product together, and building and managing the expectations.
One clear potentially differentiating point repeated by both Jussi and Pirjo is urgency – the business culture in the U.S. is used to focus solely on particular initiatives and getting them worked out in due course. For example in Finland a lot happens in “multi-tasking” mode and thus takes more calendar time. If you don’t follow up the next day (or same day) after your meeting, you may have to start all over in two weeks when you get back with the material you promised to deliver. So, when you are pushing a deal forward, do not let your grip soften – you will need to follow up constantly. “Do it yesterday!” is the mantra, as Pirjo stated. However, this does not mean that you would be able to score deals with major corporations in less than six months, it does take time to go through all the necessary steps.
Another point to consider is the fierce competition. Pirjo emphasized you can be sure the deal is not “in the bag” until the shipment has been made and you have received the payment. The competition intensifies the closer you get to finalizing a deal, and you can be sure if there is an existing provider, they will use all possible means and tricks to just try to keep their business with the customer.
Winning the first deal is crucial, and will require special effort and perhaps special arrangements like discounts and/or on-site engineering support commitment. The entire firm needs to be focused on the deal. Titles are sometimes important and thus CEO should participate in the sales process as well as needed.
To enter the U.S. market, Pirjo explained that as an entry requirement the firm should look to reserve minimum $1-2 million investment. Establishing the sales and the support organization, legal entity, starting basic marketing and establishing awareness, and tailoring the product to the U.S. market will take time. Furthermore, depending on your deal size and the customer organization size, closing the first sales could take anywhere from 6-12 months or more. It will likely take 2-4 years to reach $5+ million in sales, Pirjo argued.
Pirjo Tuomi, an experienced Finnish saleswoman who has worked in the U.S. for the past 16 years, presented her experiences and tips for Building and Managing a Successful Sales Team in the U.S. Market at Verso Software Sales Camp last week (see our previous post from the event). Pirjo has long experience from the U.S. B2B sales, positions from Sales Rep to SVP Worldwide Sales, going through 5 M&A’s and 1 IPO, growing a firm from zero to $250M in revenues and up to 120 team size, among other things. In the following, I will also reflect points from Jussi Harvela’s presentation also covered in the previous post.
Two Years Is Up, Jaiku Founders Leave Google
We just heard yesterday that Jyri Engeström, Jaiku co-founder, is leaving his Product Manager job at Google after his two year earn out is up. Today Petteri Koponen, the other Jaiku co-founder announced that he is leaving Google and joining Lifeline Ventures, a Finnish startup accelerator that’s part of the Vigo program (See our previous stories on Lifeline Venture here and here).
This not such a big jump as Petteri worked at Google in a wide variety of roles that gave him an ideal view into what was happening in the market. First Petteri worked at the Android product team and subsequently on Google’s New Business team, which continuously searches for and works with startups that partner with Google. It’s exciting to follow how the Vigo program evolves. At least Lifeline Ventures seem to be already hard at work. Petteri told me that they have already done some investments even though the whole program is just coming together.
Seluxit – Monitor And Control Your Energy Usage
Saving energy is an important and simple way to ease the burden on the planet. What’s not so simple is to find out where you can save energy. Enter Seluxit from Denmark, one of the 18 cleantech start-ups to present at the Nordic Venture 50 Forum on October 19th in Copenhagen.
Seluxit, which was established in 2006 by Morten Frederiksen and Daniel Lux, develops and markets software and hardware solutions to monitor the energy consumption of buildings. The company is already marketing two different sensors which use the Z-Wave wireless standard, offer two different Gateways and are currently developing a Mobile Phone programme which will run on all mobiles that support GPRS and Java. The mobile phone app will allow you to monitor and control your house on the go, which could be useful if you’re traveling and aren’t sure if you switched off the heating system. Continue reading »
Thoughts On Iceland And Its Startup Scene
I’m in Reykjavik, Iceland, hosting an ArcticEvening event for the local startup scene tonight. I thought I’d do a little write up of the thoughts and discoveries regarding the startup scene up here. First of all, to put things into perspective, you need to understand the size of things we’re talking with. Iceland has a population of around 320 000 people and that’s scattered across the island. On the other hand, they’re a relatively wealthy bunch of people, despite the current economic crisis, with a GDP per capita a little over $40 000 USD for 2008. Talking about the econmic crisis, it is definitely the biggest subject in discussions these days. On my way to meet up with some local entrepreneurs last night, the cab driver said that he’s sure there will be something happening in the coming months. According to him, “regular people are tired of paying the mess of the large companies.” I can understand his rage completely.
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