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.
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 
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.
I talked to Sami Kuivasaari, one of the people behind a Finnish spin-off startup 
Helsingin Sanomat 
On Monday 
Sulake has just announced that will initiate negotiations to lay off up to 20% of its workforce in Helsinki. Sulake is the Finnish company behind the successful teenage web service Habbo Hotel. Just yesterday 
This is cool in making the web more accessible to people around the world. While everyone’s keeping a lot of noise about the fact that text should be readable and scalable larger if the viewer wishes to, not many people realise that about 8% of men and about 0,5% of all women suffer from color vision deficiency. WOT 
Cleantech venture investment continued its recovery in Q3 of 2009 according to preliminary results from the 
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
