New Rockstart Accelerator Taking Applications In Amsterdam
You may have met some of the team behind the new Amsterdam-based Rockstart Accelerator if you were present at Slush in Helsinki, or the Startup Weekend Copenhagen. Over the last 18 months, the team behind Rockstart Accelerator organized Startup Weekend events all across Europe, in London, Copenhagen, Athens, Bucharest, Warsaw, Bratislava, Brussels, Prague, and Amsterdam where they saw about 200 startup teams and 3000 entrepreneurs participate. It's not a bad way to get to get name out to the freshest young teams across Europe.
Rockstart Accelerator is open to all types of startups, whether they are in technology, sustainability, retail, or other sectors. The Program starts on March 1, 2012, and the application period ends January 6.
Well Done Arctic Valley!
The startup ecosystem in the Arctic Valley (pardon us for our selfish term) hasn't always been a very well functioning one. Not that it is extremely functioning today, we're increasingly getting more evidence that the world is noticing your startups, your efforts and most importantly - your passion to change the world.
This week Wired UK wrote a piece on the hottest startup cities in Europe. Three of the nine startup cities in the outlined story are from the region; Tallinn, Stockholm and Helsinki.
The Next Web Brings The European Startup Scene To Amsterdam
The Next Web 2009, the fourth edition of the conference that began in 2006, will be held again in the beautiful city of Amsterdam on the 15th to 17th April.
The great guys at The Next Web gave us 10 passes with 20% discount to give out to our readers, you guys. First come first served, so be quick. You can buy a discount ticket here.
TheNextWeb also announced the 19 startup competition finalists. Among other we're happy to see Prezi on the list. Congrats to all the finalist!
The conference has traditionally had a solid line up of speakers and this year is no exception. You can see the whole list of speakers here and the agenda for the three days here.
I will be in Amsterdam for the three days, so if you're coming join ArcticStartup Dopplr group and drop me an email if you want to meet up. See you in the windmill country!
Photo by earcos (CC)
An Outsider's Take On Finnish Startups
We invited Peter Robinett of Bubble Foundry to come and attend Slush on behalf of TheNextWeb blog, an Amsterdam based weblog that reports on everything that influences the future of the Web, in any way. Peter himself is a developer now living in Amsterdam and very active in the local startup scene. Peter for example organizes Lunch 2.0 and Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam. Here's Peter's take on the Finnish startup scene.
I had a great time attending Slush on Monday and Ville asked me to share my thoughts of the Helsinki startup scene. While more directed at ArcticStartup's Finnish readers, I hope these comments proven interesting to all ArcticStartup readers. My experience with startups is mainly through working with Dutch ones and organizing various events in the Netherlands, though having grown up in Silicon Valley I hope I have a somewhat accurate sense of how things work there too.
Arctic Evening on the 2nd October
We're back with events and would like to invite all of our readers to enjoy a laid back evening at Dubrovnik atmosphere with some drinks, networking and discussion on our very own startup scene on the 2nd October, 2008.
Wisened up from the feedback from you guys, we aim to keep the program brief and to the point, but still interesting. We will have Peter Robinett flying over from Amsterdam to come and chat with me about the lastest developements in the Amsterdam startup scene, the hottest Dutch startups, and even the Silicon Valley scene in general and what we could learn from the two to make the Finnish startup ecosystem more dynamic for all of us.
Peter is an accomplished coder and a web designer. He's originally from Palo Alto, California which is undisputedly the most dynamic start-up ecosystem in the world. After moving to Europe he quickly settled in Amsterdam, Netherland and have been active impacting the local start-up scene by organizing Luch 2.0, Barcamps and most recently the iPhone Dev Camp.
In addition to the discussion with Peter, we will have an open mic for any start-up, entrepreneur or other like minded persona to talk about their project, product launch, open source project and what not. Addition to this we attempt to bring in one interesting speaker that will be revealed at the beginning of the evening itself.
The venue will be the tried and tested Dubrovnik Lounge & Lobby in Helsinki, Finland. We will start at 6pm and wind down the official program around 9pm. Naturally those willing are welcomed to go until the wee hours.
To pay the bills we are looking sponsors for the event. If your company is interested email Miikka your contact details at miikka [at] arcticstartup [dot] com and he will contact you. We'll give you proper visibility and you can say a few words about your company at the beginning of the evening.
We're are also celebrating our one-year birthday, so leave the NDAs at home and come along to toast with us to the buzzing local startup scene and to the entrepreneurs we have here.
Edit 14/09/2008: Please register here if you have a Facebook account and you're planning on attending, so that we'll have an idea of how many will attend and can prepare for it. If you don't have a Facebook account feel free to write me or tell us you're coming at the comments. Thanks guys!
