AW-Energy, the Finnish wave energy developer we wrote about last week, has signed a €3m contract with the EU (press release). The contract itself includes a €3m grant agreement, which gives significant support to the demonstration project in the Portuguese waters. Continue reading »
AW-Energy Signs 3 Million Euros Contract With The EU Wave Project
Mindtrek’s First Day – Full Of Variety
Check, check… mike working, reporting from the Mindtrek conference from Tampere where some 800 people are networking, discussing internet and digital media at large. The day has been action packed and there has been a lot of different content to consume. Furthermore, the audience saw some top notch speakers at Mindtrek this year, especially Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström, who were keynote speakers continuing on the post they wrote for ArcticStartup earlier.
The day began with a keynote by Chris Messina. He talked about identity as a platform. Judging on the amount of comments from people on the aisles in the conference, Chris hit top on with his presentation. Although there were some illogicalities, which he admits, it’s always great to hear news from The Valley on the trends that are pumping there.
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BREAKING: Dazzboard Received 1 Million USD Investment From Finland
While presenting at the MindTrek Launchpad competition in Tampere (Finland), LinkoTech CEO, Tero Salonen, just announced that the company has closed one 0.5 million US dollar first round funding for its Dazzboard product, and is in the process of closing the other half of the round, totaling to 1 million US dollars. The 0.5 million investment comes from Finnish investors.
Dazzboard is branded as an ‘Open iTunes’. Dazzboard wants to become a non-proprietary, web-based personal portal for storing, organizing and sharing (via different of social networks) songs, photos, videos and other media content.
We have our worries with the product and the experience, but I’m happy that Dazzboard team has found believers that are willing to invest in the company. Congrats to the team!
Sponsor: GWeb2 – Digital Marketing Revolution
The majority of these startups have joined the program through one of over 1300 Network Partners around the world. Network Partners are investors, incubators, user groups, advisors and organizations who provide programs and mentoring and uniquely know the Startup Community. To connect to Network Partners in Finland, go to http://www.microsoft.com/finland/bizspark.
Mr. Porvari’s comments on BizSpark:
“BizSpark has really helped us on building our R&D environment providing free resources, such as support and Visual Studio licenses with MSDN access making significant cost savings, which are vital for any start-up companies.”
Would you recommend other startups to join BizSpark?
“BizSpark has worked for us and it really does not bind us to use any particular technology or software solutions, instead we actually use open J2EE in our cloud computing platform, but can experiment with Microsoft’s solutions on the consumer touchscreen and mobile side freely.”
Note: this is our periodical blog sponsor message.
GWeb2 is the Digital Marketing Cloud Computing Company and they were first ones in Finland to join the BizSpark program. More than 20.000 Startups have already joined BizSpark and more than 180 of them from Finland. BizSpark is designed to help accelerate the success of early stage software startups by providing entrepreneurs fast and easy access to software, support and visibility. This summer GWeb2 was nominated as the Microsoft Startup of the Day.
Twingly Channels, Social Filtering On Real-Time Web, Launches Private Beta
Twingly Channels is launching into private beta today, opening up to the wide public later this year. At the moment one has to apply for an invite by suggesting a channel topic.
Swedish Twingly have been building up the hype since early June when they first announced Project Shinobi, the working name for Twingly Channels we then got a sneak preview of for a month ago at the Sweden Social Web Camp. And they certainly are reaching for the stars, or as Martin Källström, CEO Twingly, puts it:
”Twingly Channels lets people cut out the noise of online search and the real-time web — to instantly see what news and content to spend time on. By following topics rather than bloggers or outlets, Twingly simplifies the challenge of RSS, social search, and the real-time web.“
Illtags Takes The Fight Against The Flu Online
Illtags, a Finnish startup that also took part in Slush event, aims to keep us a bit more healthy by letting us broadcast how we feel online. The service is founded by two young guns, a developer and a doctor, that I would call social entrepreneurs.
Illtags aims to combine two things for its analysis: 1) Tags depicting symptoms inputted at Facebook, Twitter or illtags.com and 2) Places, events and groups where users might catch or spread a bug. The strength of this approach is that all of this information already exists in social networks. By combining these two elements Illtags aims to analyze how diseases are spreading across social networks at an individual level, and let us avoid the places where the flu has taken over.
The service has a website, but just as with Dopplr that was acquired by Nokia, with Illtags you don’t really have to visit their website as they aim to integrate deeply into other platforms. Currently they are putting their bets on Facebook as most us are there already and we many times let our network of friends and family know when we have a cold or a flu.
Ahtisaari From Dopplr To Head Nokia Design
We have heard from inside Nokia that the ex-CEO of Dopplr, Marko Ahtisaari has been appointed to head Nokia’s Design department. This comes just after Nokia acquired Dopplr for undisclosed sum and a long silence that preceded the official announcement yesterday (see our story here).
At the same time Nokia has announced that it has appointed John Martin, a former Apple Vice President, to head a unit that focuses on Linux based devices running Maemo operating system like the latest N900. (via Finnish Taloussanomat)
It will be interesting to see how Ahtisaari will shape Nokia this time and how long he will stay there. Last time he stayed almost two years with the Finnish mobile phone giant pulling the Design unit from individual separate pieces into a well functioning shop before leaving in August 2006 to Blyk as a Head of Brand & Design. What goes around comes around.
Advertise With ArcticStartup And Be Seen!
We’ve never been too shy to promote our advertising solutions in the past and nor are we now! We’ve begun our autumn period with a very nice gain in our visitor statistics which only mean that there is a lot of demand for a media like ours. To be more specific, our visitor stats have improved over 60% compared to our July/August statistics. This of course makes our job easier here at ArcticStartup, but also guarantees a lot of great visibility for our advertising partners. We’re very proud to say that our monthly banner spots aren’t spoiled with high prices – they’re selling for only 400 € a month, that’s a mere 100€ a week!
Why am I bragging about our advertising solutions to you then? Well, I want to make an offer. The fastest to sign up with us in the coming weeks will be guaranteed to have their future ads running at 400€ a month, while the slower ones will have to dig a little deeper. We’re planning to re-check our prices in the coming month for the winter, so for all those thinking about the possibility of advertising with us – think no further, get in touch with sales@arcticstartup.com and we’ll be glad to tell you more.
We’re currently servicing close to 40 000 pageviews a month from over 100 countries. Just to be clear, these visitors aren’t the yellow press type, they stay on site and read – our average visit duration is over 1 minute 30 seconds. On top of the banner visibility, you’ll also get noticed in the two blog posts monthly where we thank our sponsors with a little custom message they may have to the startup community. So if you wish to reserve your spot in the sun, don’t hesitate to contact sales@arcticstartup.com or send us an inquiry through the contact form.
Feed-in Tariff For Biogas To Be Introduced In Finland?
There has been talk a feed-in tariff for biogas (and wind) will finally be introduced in Finland. Biogas plants convert biological waste into energy and producer power, heat and/or fuel. The earning logic of a typical biogas plant is based on port fees, power & heat production and end-products like composting material. In Finland, the feed-in tariff for biogas plants has been on the environmental agenda since 2007.
According to the (as yet unconfirmed) rumours, the planned target price for the biogas feed-in tariff is 83.5 euros per MWh for power production (which equals the planned feed-in tariff for wind power in Finland) and around 30-40 euros per MWh for heating. In this system, a biogas producer is assured a certain long term (15-20 years) guaranteed price. We do not yet know if there are plans to introduce feed-in tariffs for other biogas-based fuels, for example those used to run motor vehicles.
Nokia Acquires Dopplr (This Time For Real!)
Marko Ahtisaari, the CEO of Dopplr, has just posted a blog post on the Dopplr Blog that Nokia indeed has acquired the company. Furthermore, Nokia has confirmed this with their own press release. Last week we quoted on ArcticStartup a rumour originating from Techcrunch that Nokia has acquired them. This stirred up a lot of publicity and since no party confirmed the rumour and one of the co-founders stated the deal was fabricated – we were under mixed messages and were unable to decide which side is right.
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ArcticStartup Goes Reykjavik
On October 13th we’ll kick off our autumn agenda for ArcticEvenings with an event in Reykjavik, Iceland. Our agenda for our event in Reykjavik is little different to our events before. We’re combining two very interesting concepts together, speed networking and a panel. Even though the country and city are small, we hear it’s a powerhouse of entrepreneurs compared to its size!
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Interview With Jussi Muurikainen, CEO Of Balancion
An interesting startup, called Balancion, has been in the talks of the startup circles here in Finland. Partly due to the fact that Balancion is commonly referred to as the Finnish Mint.com. Mint.com was of course sold to Intuit for a very nice amount of money, $170 million USD to be exact. The CEO, Jussi Muurikainen has decided to keep the team small and agile and relies heavily on partners for production.
From this setting, a company that has been in the build for 2 years is surely of interest. I had the chance to talk to Muurikainen about the various issues and what has been the run up to the current state of the company.
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Lithuania – Punching Above Its Weight In ICT?
Guest post by Daiva Naravaite, co-founder of AlpinaSearch. AlpinaSearch is a provider of global Search, Selection & On-boarding services for innovative start-ups and their investors.
Who would have believed that the country with the highest mobile subscription rate worldwide (138% as per World Economic Forum’s World Competitiveness report), the broadest high-speed mobile broadband coverage and the densest network of public internet access points in Europe is the small nation of Lithuania, sandwiched between Latvia, Belarus, Poland, Kaliningrad and the Baltic sea?
Prompted by comments I heard on numerous occasions (including geeky ArcticStartup and TechCrunch events), and equally inspired by the enthusiastic entrepreneurial community in Lithuania, I thought I’ll share a few facts.
Load Impact – On Demand Web-based Load Testing
Those of you who have been working on building dynamic request intensive web services, know the importance of load testing and the challenges that come with it. You also know that somehow the test environment hardly ever is ”really” an exact mirrowed version of the live environment. That said, load testing of ones services can be a tricky one. There’s also so many variables that can make the service to jam up. One can test successfully almost every function separately but when having all working together things start to happen. Those knots are usually not as easy to spot.
So, when I first run into Load Impact, a Swedish startup running its easy online load testing service for six months now, I must admit I was a bit sceptical at first.
Dopplr Acquisition A False Rumour?
It seems that the Nokia acquisition of Dopplr we just wrote about, referring to a TechCrunch rumour, might be a hoax. We’re receiving multiple sources referring to this as nonsense. Perhaps one of the most relevant is the fact that Matt Biddulph, one of the founders of the company, has stated that it’s completely fabricated.
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