Posts tagged '24hbc'

EmotiCards – Your Best Pictures As Postcards Via Facebook

by Paula Marttila, August 27, 2009 — 4 Comments

Swedish startup EmotiCards is one of the many projects that saw its daylight during the 24 Hour Business Camp earlier this year. Today, six months later, Emoticards have seven employees and have just launched in beta on the Swedish market. The Company is a self-funded joint venture project between Spontu, Pixell Productions and KST Info Services. The idea of offering to send real, printed postcards using ones own pictures isn’t a unique one, but EmotiCards are trying to differenciate their service.

Environmental Approach With Premium And Free Cards
Apart from the obvious efforts to try to keep the interface very simple with few steps and easy payment, EmotiCards are printed on FSC-certified paper. Printing itself is as far as possible done locally close to the recipients thanks to the Xerox Premier Partner Network, shrinking delivery times and the need for air mail.

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Auktionsfynda – Find Your Last Minute Online Auction Bargains

by Paula Marttila, July 24, 2009 — 1 Comment

Auktionsfynda.seAuktionsfynda, Swedish online auction search engine service launched today. It’s focusing on listing the auctions about to close, thus triggering the great feeling of satisfaction when finding the best bargain. The service initially indexes five auction sites (Tradera, Auktionskompaniet, Brabud, Metropol, Lauritz) and is planning to add two more in the next coming weeks. For time being only Swedish auction sites are included.

Auktionsfynda is a service with a simple search and clean GUI, the main page displaying random selection of items that have 10, 30 or 60 min. left to bid. The search results include a short description of an item, time left to bid and link directly to the respective auction. No transactions, nor bidwatching is handled by the service, at least not yet. I think on demand notifications on auctions closing shortly would add value, since many of the bidwatching applications and services on the market are made service specific, especially for eBay.

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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).