Posts tagged:

24 hour business camp

Twingly Strengthens Its Board With Niclas Heurlin and Björn Jeffery

by Ville Vesterinen, March 18, 2009 — 2 Comments

twinglyTwingly, a Sweden based blog search engine, similar to Technorati, but a spam free one and aimed at the European market, strengthens its board with two new board members: Niclas Heurlin and Björn Jeffery.

Mr. Heurlin has been CEO of inWarehouse and has a lot of experience of e-commerce business. He’s senior partner and founder of Enferno AB and is a member of Twingly’s, Ztorm’s and Yacht Equipments board of directors

Mr. Jeffery is the CEO and strategist at Good Old and has earlier been working at SVT, Sydsvenskan and Göteborgs-Posten. He brings a lot of insight and experience in social media and understanding of media companies to Twingly.

As was pointed out in the Twingly’s blog comments it is great to see that companies start to appreciate competence over age and bring in younger board members as well. This is not the obvious thing to do, but a crucial one if a company aims to build something for the younger generations. We hope to see more of this across the board in the Northern-European startup market. Experience that comes with age has it place in the Board of Directors, but the smartest companies build a mix to make sure they get the full advantage.

(The video interview was captured at the 24 Hour Business Camp, where Twingly CEO, Martin Källström, tell about their service and their latest product, microblog search engine)
Edit: Big thanks to Paula Marttila for the superb filming.


Twingly from CityVice on Vimeo.

24hbc – An Atmosphere For Successful Innovation

by Ville Vesterinen, January 23, 2009 — 6 Comments

24hbc24 Hour Business Camp (24hbc) was wrapped up today at noon. 49 new services and apps (and counting) saw daylight in the last 12 hours and these services are not just some quirky apps, but full blown services. You can find all the projects here.

After all the talk I’ve heard during the past year about innovation clusters and what not, which are without exception driven from top down by pouring money into what are effectively projects that are born dead, 24hbc was the first occasion in which I saw innovation truly actually happening. It’s all about passion and caring, and it matters. In a same way as a person can care for her startup, events and even long term projects should have the same burning desire of a single person or a group of people to create something that matters to them and to their peer group. Anything else fails before it has really started.

All the events I’ve been to, 24hbc was the best I’ve seen along with Reboot that takes place in Copenhagen, Denmark (Reboot beign very different type of event and a lot less productive, but the culture was the same nonetheless). It all came down to the atmosphere. People enjoying their peers company and pushing each other to excel after seeing all the effort that Ted Valentin saw to pull all of us all together. Even the corporate sponsor Bonnier R&D had the right people there who not only blended in, but made the event only better. As they wrote in the Live Blog that were set up for the participants, Beata Wickbom and us to contribute to:

“As sponsors, Bonnier R&D´s main focus was to meet all the entrepreneurs and learn as much from them as we could. Unsurprisingly, we soon realised that the temptation to build something ourselves proved to be to difficult to handle.”

They came up with an innovation that reflects the high level of services that all the participants worked on, and most even finished within a mere 24 hours. Here’s Bonnier’s two cents:

“Morris and I played with the new Mirr:or RFID-reader from Violet. It suddenly dawned on us that sl-rfidthe new SL bus/underground-card has an RFID chip inside, and therefore most people in Stockholm will have one soon. A world of opportunities open.

With a lot of help from Herman (and Pelle), we made a small script that connected the Mirr:or to the Mobilstart API. When the chip is read, a text message is sent to a predefined phone number, notifying what time the reading occurred.

We think this could become a smart little application for families. When the kids come home they simply place their SL card over the reader, and automatically the parents get a text message saying ‘Hi! Sara came home at 14:15’. “

Bonnier was just a drop in the ocean; The young guns developed equally or more promising services, of which I will surely write about later on once they get off the ground. See all of them here and here. Powerfull stuff!

Miikka and I enjoyed our stay. Thank you Ted! Previous post on 24hbc here and here.

The Following Takes Place Between… 24 Hour Business Camp Ongoing

by Miikka Kukkosuo, January 22, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Ted Valentin's kick-off speech

The Swedish 24 Hour Business Camp (in Swedish; try Google translation and our previous post) has been kicked off in the outskirts of Stockholm today at noon. There is a buzz across the Japanese style Yasuragi Hasseludden conference center with over 50 small teams of Swedish Internet entrepreneurs and developers planning their new businesses.

The event started out yesterday evening with a boat trip to the conference center, where the participants tuned in to creative mood by relaxing and mingling over a sushi dinner in Yukata’s, and enjoying spa and the tranquility of the establishment.

Boatride to HasseluddenNothing great is born without pain, though (right?), and there have been some problems this time as well. As Ted Valentin, the event organizer, mentioned earlier, “All one needs is a laptop, an Internet connection and an idea.” Well, so we thought. The equation almost fell short with major wifi fail lasting from the last evening until the very kick-off of the event. Some hotshot technicians were brought in this morning, however, and got the issue fixed in time for the start, preventing the conference group switching to another location. But the network is still rather sluggish and somewhat unstable.

Nevertheless, the teams have not let connectivity issues slow them down, and are working at full speed. Our hope with Ted and the participants is that these kinds of events will radiate the excitement and entrepreneurial spirit across the whole of Nordics and Baltics.

You can find out more from the event’s live blog, and ArcticStartup will also report tomorrow with a new post. We will publish some video interviews later on as well (and of course register the newborn startups in ArcticIndex). See also the Flickr photos.

24 Hour Business Camp In The Swedish Archipelago

by Ville Vesterinen, January 15, 2009 — Leave a Comment

swedish archipelagoTed Valentin, a succesfull Swedish Internet serial entrepreneur and the founder of 24 Hour Business Camp (Google Translated site in English here), believes that you we should forget expensive offices, photo copiers and even business cards when thinking about setting up a business. All one needs is a laptop, an Internet connection and an idea. “The important thing is to experiment”, Ted explains.

Now Valentin is rouding up a group of the most promising Swedish Internet entrepreneurs and soon-to-be-entrepreneurs to spend two days together in Swedish arhipelago in a Japanese spa working on new business ideas in groups (52 small teams!). The concept in called 24 Hour Business Camp (24hbc), which means each team has 24 hours to work on their idea (hence the name) and when they are done, the teams present their ideas, pick up and head back to Stockholm loaded with inspiration. (Here’s more about the 24hbc concept)

ArcticStartup is there as well documenting the project from start to finish. We will not only post updates to our blog, but will be also post short video snippets in a Live Blog with Beata Wickbom . The Live Blog has been set up specificly for the 24hbc and will be in English throughout.

Why is Valentin doing this? Because just as we in ArcticStartup, he wants to push the Nordic entrepreneurial culture forward and inspire creative people around him …and it’s simply just too fun of an idea to not go through with. As Valentin puts it:

The goal of the 24 hour business camp is to have fun, meet other entrepreneurs, test our creative limits, and inspiring other people to build their own start-ups. The inspiration comes from the 24 hour dot com , a similiar but smaller event that took place in Berlin in 2004.

Valentin is also behind the annoskartan.se, which is a search engine for local classified ads (previous post here), which is only one of his many map websites he has released (See all his projects here). Others include Sushikartan.se (the sushi map), Wifikartan.se (the wifi map), Cafekartan.se (the cafe map) just to name a few. Valentin is also runs AcademicNetwork.se – Swedens largest site network for students and academics.

Photo by puyol5 (CC:BY).