There’s a new startup in town called Sofanatics. The company, based in Helsinki Finland, is in its early stages and has nothing but a simple splash screen on their website. Earlier today the team tweeted about this and thus broke the silence regarding the company – at least on the level that who’s on board the startup. The team behind the startup is Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve co-founder managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman. Nyman is a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto.
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arcticevening
Sofanatics – Sofa, Fanatics, So fanatic?
More Tickets Available For Tomorrow’s ArcticEvening Tallinn!
ArcticEvening Tallinn sold out yesterday, but we decided to add another 50 tickets to the event. The evening will be a very interesting one with 3 entrepreneurs in different stages of their company explaining about the importance of marketing and how it is made successful for the company. You can read more about the event in our previous blog post, but just to sum it up we’ll have Martin Koppel from Fortumo, Petteri Koponen (former Jaiku Co-Founder) from Lifeline Ventures and Kai Lemmetty from Floobs.
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ArcticEvening Going Tallinn 3rd December, Registration Open Now!
Early next month we will go to Tallinn, Estonia to hold our end-of-the-year ArcticEvening in co-operation with OpenCoffee Club Tallinn and Connect Estonia. The event will take place on 3. December and focus on startup marketing. We will hold a panel under the ‘What is marketing for startups and how to do it effectively’
Yet again, we have a solid lineup coming: An experienced serial entrepreneur that have a several exits under his belt and two young guns who are on their way to their fist big hits. See our list of panelist below and figure out who’s who.
The ticket sales are open and the price is the only right one, the tickets are free. Go get yours while they last! We will announce the venue in due course once we get them confirmed.
If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, we suggest you take a look at videos from previous events.
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ArcticEvening Tampere Tomorrow
Tomorrow we’ll be having another ArcticEvening event in Tampere. The event will revolve around some interesting startup pitches and a panel with some very interesting industry heavy weights. Last week we went through our procedure to pick three companies available for pitching at the event and the chosen ones are (in random order): Tagregator, Tribe Flame and There Corporation. On the panel we’ll have Jussi Harvela, Otto Chrons and Heikki Halme.
You can read more about the event on its own page. Want to come? Sign up now, there are still some tickets available. The show will kick off around 6pm at Demola.
ArcticEvening Stockholm Tickets Now Available
The tickets for our next week’s ArcticEvening are now available for booking. Please find the sign-up form for registering to the event below. Note that if you are unable to make it to the event, please don’t sign up. We have a limited amount of space available and would like to get everyone on board. Likewise, if you need to cancel for any reason, please inform us at events(at)arcticstartup.com so that we can reallocate the ticket.
Expect a house filled with like-minded entrepreneurial people, and lots of networking. We will start off with a brief presentation from Jaycut and continue with an interesting panel discussion. See the Stockholm event page for details. If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, have a look at videos from our previous events.
So sign up below and come spice up our wonderful mix of people!
ArcticEvening Tampere taking place November 17th
ArcticStartup will be travelling to Tampere to tap into the entrpreneurial buzz there we’ve heard so much of. The evening will be an interesting one wrapped around the theme of Networking and Pitching. More specifically, we’ll be discussing the different ways entrepreneurs can take advantage networking to grow their business. We’ll have some very practical advice from industry heavy weights and local entrepreneurs.
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ArcticEvening Stockholm On November 18th
Our second ArcticEvening this year in Stockholm will be held on 18th of November 2009.
The theme of the evening will be Mobile smartphone solutions and trends – how to strategically build business around the different native application platforms and mobile web.
Discussion around delivering content and servics to Android, iPhone, Symbian, and different app stores is stirring up the mobile industry, and there are lots of different views on how to approach the smartphone market. In our evening’s panel discussion, we have representation from three firms: one that provides their service using mobile web browser and SMS solution (Traveas), another that uses a native application to complement otherwise “app-less” service (Rebtel), and third a cloud computing firm making it possible to access your documents and virtual computer on any device over-the-air (Cloudo). Each of the firm will surely bring interesting viewpoints into the discussion.
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ArcticEvening Helsinki Tickets Now Available
As promised last week, we have opened up ticket sales for our Helsinki event. Please find the sign-up form below for registering to the event. Also, please remember that if you are unable to make it to the event, please don’t sign up. We have a limited amount of seats available and would like to get everyone on board.
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Uppspretta To Help Battle Recession In Iceland
Uppspretta is an Icelandic startup focused in social lending. At the moment Uppspretta is only available in Iceland. It was co-founded by Ragnheiður Magnúsdóttir, one of the panelists in the ArcticEvening Iceland. The site works in such a way that it works as a facilitator between people who want a loan and people who are willing to lend some money. For the time being, the site is concentrating on smaller companies and startups as their market.
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ArcticEvening Helsinki Coming Up October 27th!
We’ll be continuing our tour of the ArcticEvenings around the Nordics and Baltics with our next event being held in Helsinki, Finland. Our event will be themed software growth businesses. We’ll be hosting a fabolous panel for you on the 27th of October. It will have some young, but extremely successful local startups from the software sector.
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Thoughts On Iceland And Its Startup Scene
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.
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ArcticEvening Reykjavik – Reminder: Be There!
A quick reminder before the weekend regarding our ArcticEvening in Reykjavik coming up Tuesday the 12th of October. We’ll have a very interesting show planned for you so I strongly suggest all the locals and foreigners who happen to be in Iceland next week join in. The show will begin at 8pm at Grandagardi 2. You don’t have to sign up or anything, just show up!
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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Building Your Own Internet Service. Yes We Can
Here’s a nifty service in Beta. RunAlong.se is a small Swedish startup that came about because its founder, Heidi Harman, wanted to go for a run but figured it would be nicer if she could invite her girl friends to come along. This proves the point, even thought obvious but many times forgotten, how easy it is to build a service if you just pull up your sleeves and decide to do it. One of the biggest barriers to entry into the wonderful world of running your own service is no more: The money you need to set up a consumer Internet service is fraction of a fraction of a cost what it used to be.
Here’s how to you start. Post a message for example to http://www.arcticindex.com/jobs/ saying you’re looking for a developer and designer to hire or to find a co-founder with the right skill-set. You could also use a service like iFreelance or just walk into your local technical university and post a message to the bulletin board saying “looking for a developer. will pay real money!”. Do the same for the art school to find your designer. Then set up Amazon S3 or Google App Engine to ensure your infrastructure can scale in the beginning. Then all you need to do is do it. Really!
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Youcalc Visualizes Your Data With A Click (Video)
Over the years, as I have worked with several great designers, I have come to appreciate well designed info graphics more and more. At the same time, where I’m not that much of a designer myself but why I can help companies with their products’ user experience is because I am one of the most impatient persons you’ll ever meet when it comes to bad user interfaces – If I don’t figure out right away what’s happening with a given product, the interface is broken as far as I’m concerned. These two reasons added to the fact that I love big data go a long way explaining why I like Youcalc so much.
The company is not doing anything that revolutionary, but at the same time it just might be for those who use the product. In a nutshell, Youcalc is a Danish startup that let’s business people create and share custom reports and analytics on data from SaaS systems, in a very clear and easy manner I may add. And by business people I mean those impatient, busy people who can’t concentrate to learn to use (let alone set up) a complex reporting tool even if their life depended on it because they are busy making that next sale. And that’s what they should do, but that’s also why they may need Youcalc. The company’s mission is to create the world’s largest library of analytics apps by allowing business users to create and share those analytics apps. Here’s Youcalc’s presentation in ArcticEvening Copenhagen from a while back.
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Biovakka Suomi Oy 
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