ArcticEvening Tallinn - 1st of March, 2012
We're back with organising ArcticEvenings! This year we'll do altogether six ArcticEvenings and our annual Arctic15 conference (more on the other events soon). We will kick off our events this year with ArcticEvening Tallinn on Thursday, the 1st of March. Our theme for the event is startup metrics. We also have a really good speaker coming to present his view on startup metrics - William Wolfram of DealDash. We recently interviewed him on Unfair Advantage about the metrics they use in DealDash. Back then he said they are obsessed with metrics and data. I'm sure there will be more interesting things to hear and ask William on stage.
Unfair Advantage - 001 - It'll Get Better
The first episode of our new podcast is now out and it's called Unfair Advantage. In the weekly talk show we interview thinkers and doers from Northern Europe to understand what makes them tick. The show is co-hosted by me, Antti Vilpponen and our writer Greg Anderson. In our first show we interviewed Alex Esser from Sweden. He is one of the founding members of Tunaspot, a location based music discovery service. The service got its start from Copenhagen Startup weekend in 2011.
ArcticStartup Now On Google+
Are you more active on Google+ than any other social network? Now you're able to also follow ArcticStartup on Google+ and get all our updates in a similar fashion to Twitter and Facebook. Google+ recently came out with its pages feature enabling businesses to create pages similar to those on Facebook. While we don't get a lot of traffic from Google+ currently, we do realise it's in our interest to offer alternatives to our readers in the way of distributing our news. Google+ has also been generally touted as the place where many technologically oriented people hang out.
Happy Holidays!
As the year is turning to an end, we'd like to take a moment to wish all our readers a very happy and relaxing holiday season. We have had an awesome year here and we're glad that so many of you have enjoyed the ride with us. To be exact there are more than 50 000 of you who keep coming back each month. That's a lot when we work hard to stay away from any click optimized, SEO focused content. We're of course very happy about this, but it's more awesome for all the startups in the region - they've got the world's attention.
ArcticStartup At Le Web
ArcticStartup will be going to Le Web this year to see how three days of conferencing will work out. Le Web, held in Paris will be on between the 7th and 9th of December. While the conference is pricey at 2300€ for a standard ticket, they did offer discounts for startups, students and freelance developers (all sold out now). Despite the steep price, it's the largest annual Silicon Valley gathering on this side of the Atlantic.
We'll be bringing you the highlights of the event, the controversies and debates. This year's theme is social-local-mobile, but don't worry - themes in the past haven't restricted conversation and we're bound to hear the latest trends across the board being discussed this year as well. We won't be doing any live blogging or tweeting, but in-depth coverage of the content that matters. The event has an impressive list of speakers and a program that will keep you busy throughout the three days.
Richard White At Arctic15
Here's more of our keynote talks at Arctic15 earlier this autumn. Richard White gave one of the fastest, action filled talks I've ever heard. He talked through the story of his past startups, but also how came to found Uservoice.com. A nice coincidence was that Richard White and Steve Huffman both knew each other previously and thus he made quite a few references to Steve Huffman's Reddit along the way as well. More keynote videos and all the startup pitches coming up in the next few weeks.
Patric Blixt At Arctic15 (Video)
More Arctic15 keynotes coming up! This one's from Patric Blixt from Rebtel. Blixt is the Chief Marketing Officer at the VoIP operator that is surprisingly little hyped about, considering they're doing tens of millions of revenue only a few years after their founding. We had the honor to have Blixt share his thoughts on marketing and promoting startups in the early part of their growth phase. He talked a lot about the virality loops, which are a key component of Rebtel's success.
Heavy Duty Stickers
Let's start off the week on a little bit of a lighter note. One of our readers sent in a couple of photos to us regarding our stickers. We give these out at our events and whenever we meet people and so on. He told us he'd had one of these stickers stuck in his washing machine for a couple of months now. It's been stuck there and gone through tens of washes without leaving any color. We don't manufacture our own stickers, but we're still extremely proud of their quality. Talk about heavy duty!
Arctic15 Mobile App Now Available
The Arctic15 mobile app has now been made available. The mobile app is, bowing to web based applications, all HTML5 and it's been put together by the wonderful team at Webcrumbz. Their team will also be at Arctic15, so go say hi to them! The app is your digital guide to the event and through that you can check the schedule, speakers, sponsors and also send questions to our speakers. Furthermore - it's up to the audience to decide on the audience favorite, who will win 5000€ of sponsorship from ArcticStartup. All this is available in the mobile app.
Head over to http://m.arctic15.com on your mobile to check it out - voting will be enabled tomorrow morning!
Alexander Stubb To Patron Arctic15
pa·tron - One that supports, protects, or champions someone or something, such as an institution, event, or cause; a sponsor or benefactor.
We're extremely proud to announce that Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade of Finland, Mr. Alexander Stubb, will act as the patron of Arctic15. This is very exciting as our efforts seem to resonate well in the top end of the Finnish politics. Even though Arctic15 has no political affiliations and we strive to keep it that way, having Alexander Stubb, one of the most international and active stars of the Finnish political scene supporting our event is simply put - fantastic!
Just as a reminder to everyone coming to Arctic15, we're fully sold out so come early - registrations will open 8.00. We've had no last minute changes, so everything is in order for a blow out event!
Arctic15 Summer Special Sale Ends August 19th (Or As Long As Tickets Available)
Arctic15 is getting close and we're getting very excited. For a couple of reasons actually. First of all, this will be the biggest event we've pulled together in a long time. In addition to that, we're going to have very high quality startups in the final, not to mention the speakers we have. We're going to announce the last speaker this week, but trust us - it's going to be hot. So for these, and a ton of other reasons - if you're thinking of coming, please book your ticket today. The summer special sale will end August 19th (or as long as tickets are available).
Link: Can You Name A Startup That Got Better After Being Acquired?
Nathan Bowers states quite a controversial statement in his post from last year: "Can you name a web startup that got better after it was acquired?". He says he can't and gives a few examples.
Feedburner: Google folded them into their own login scheme. Google added crummy ad options to feeds. Otherwise the product is stuck. Feels undead.What they should be working on: improving the display of RSS feeds, making RSS feel more like a human connection between publisher and reader, fixing the fact that when you put an RSS button on your site it’s a dumb, non-stateful button (compare RSS buttons to Tumblr or Twitter follow functionality).
Quick Update On Arctic15
Last night the deadline for Arctic15 startup competition closed. This morning, as I checked the final amount of companies who applied to the competition - my jaw dropped. All in all, 90 companies from the region applied to the competition. While we haven't yet had time to analyze the data on a more detailed level, each country is pretty equally represented in the applications. We'll now dive into analyzing these applications with our secret jury and choose 30 or so companies to compete for a chance to pitch on stage at Arctic15.
New Types Of Posts: Links
In our quest to search new ways of serving our community better with interesting, educational, inspirational and most of all - useful content, we'll be testing a new type of post in the coming few weeks. The new type of post will be a link to an external website, preceded by "Link" in the title.
Want To Publish Your Articles And Content On ArcticStartup?
We're always on the look out for great content to publish here on ArcticStartup. From time to time we want to remind our community that we're here for you and want to get your stories across to the larger audience. To do this in a successful manner we want to hear about them! Furthermore, if you feel you can write a blog post or two - don't hesitate to get in touch with us. We're also eager to publish contributed content, when it fits our editorial guideline and isn't an outright commercial for your own services.
To contribute, all you need to do is get in touch with editor@arcticstartup.com and suggest a topic what you'd want to cover.
Have A Great Midsummer!
Every once in a while, a weekend comes along when it's worthwhile to stop being productive and take time off to enjoy it with your "family, friends and fools". Midsummer is one of those, so have a great, unproductive midsummer with whoever you're spending it with.
We'll be back in action on Monday, but until then - stay safe and have a great time off!
ArcticStartup Stickers - Get Yours Now
A lot of people have been asking us about our stickers and how to get them. We've been passing them out at our events and whenever we meet clients and new people, for example. However, we thought it might be actually easier if we just put up a Google Docs form for you to fill out and we would then ship you some stickers. So, to make the long story short - fill out the form below to get some cool ArcticStartup stickers for free.
Nordic And Baltic Startups: Launch At Arctic15!
Is your company still in development mode, but looking to launch a product or a service later this year to the public, or in open beta? How would you like to attract hundreds of influential users to your service while speaking in front of a huge crowd of investors and other opinion leaders? Without sounding too much like a telemarketer, all this is possible if you wish to apply to the Arctic15 competition. All you need to do is fill out this form.
Looking For Talent? We Can Help
For the past 3 weeks or so we've been promoting Applifier and their recruiting needs. Applifier is one of the fastest growing Finnish companies and like many of its kinds, one of the hardest things to do to support the growth is to find the right people. We've come up with an interesting promotional product and we think it's a good fit for companies looking to find the best people for their company.
New Improved ArcticStartup
If you're reading this through our e-mail newsletter or an RSS reader, you should come visit our site as we've done a small facelift with some additional features to the site. I've outlined some of the key improvements to the site in this post, to help our community take advantage of those. First and foremost though, I'd like to publicly thank our Karri Saarinen for putting in all the extra work to get this done. He's worked with Kisko Labs to get the site out and functional. Many thanks for the effort!
Happy Holidays!
It's been an action packed autumn and now it's time for some well earned R&R, but not to worry - we'll return to our regular operations right after Christmas on Monday the 27th. We hope you enjoy your time off and spend it with loved ones, they are among the most important people that enable and both drive entrepreneurs forward.
We've made a Christmas tradition to support entrepreneurs in emerging nations through Kiva. We've setup an ArcticStartup community that you can join too.
Happy holidays and we welcome you back on the 27th of December!
Image by Markus YK
Take Our Reader Survey - You Might Win An Amazon Gift Card
As the year's coming to an end - we'd like to take a minute of your time to answer our reader survey. The survey is short and we'd very much value if you had a minute or two to go through it. In doing so, you'll be helping us a lot in understanding what kind of content you'd like us to cover in 2011 and how. The survey is available until the 26th of December.
Click here to take the survey.
Image by Marco Bellucci
Meet Our Little Social Analytics App - Funneld
This internet app story is going to be a little different. We're going to be covering our own little analytics app called Funneld that we've been working on behind the curtains this autumn. The origins of this app go back to problem we've had with understanding visitors coming to ArcticStartup. A lot of our readers come to the site from Twitter and Facebook for example, but the currently available tools fail to show us which stories are the ones that attract visitors. So, we went about and created a little app for that. In doing so, we realised that others might have the same problem and we decided to set it up as an app of its own and develop it like any other startup out there works on a product or a service of theirs.
The Unsung Hero
In the stories, the hero fights for the people, faces failure and great uncertainty, and ultimately wins.
In Finland, we think he’s a fool who thinks he’s better than everyone else, disrespects the rules and is probably Finnish-Swedish.
Entrepreneurs are the same. They are opportunists and idealists. In its original French, the word means: somebody who will attempt to create something.
On one hand it’s a risky, lonely and difficult endeavor. But on the other hand, it’s thrilling, challenging and potentially offers great returns (value, jobs). I believe we Europeans, and especially in Finland, spend too much time focusing on the former and not enough on the latter.
ArcticStartup Partners With Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association
We've signed a partnership deal with the Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association to give young innovative software startups the possibility for free visibility on ArcticStartup. The deal is close to 5 months long and it's now been going since last week. Here's the drill. Any Finland registered company creating software should leave their details through this form as you'll then be in the draw for a free article on ArcticStartup - to be used in any way you wish. The first round of the draw is now on!
Welcome To The All New ArcticStartup!
It's been quite sometime in the making, but it is finally time to launch the new site with some neat features that enable us to make ArcticStartup so much more it used to be. Let me explain what we've developed and why.
The new ArcticStartup has been designed to give more tools to the community. We wanted to reach out to the community and give you more ways to initiate discussions and share material (news, links, press releases, etc.) on our site. Our article sections is still there, but we wanted to add more ways for the community to discover new, interesting and most of all relevant content.
ArcticStartup's Vigo Questionnaire
Disclaimer: This article is targeted mainly for our Finnish readers. We're working to survey the effects of the Vigo accelerator program on the Finnish startup ecosystem. Other nationalities will surely find it useful once we release the results.
Vigo accelerator program has been a much debated issue here in Finland. Rightly so. It has been promoted with a lot of noise and much to its cause, it is the biggest change in the startup ecosystem for years. Now that it has been up and running for a while, we'd like to know every Finnish reader's opinion on the program and what you think and know of it.
Co-editor for Sweden!
The Nordic and Baltic startup scenes have come of age and ArcticStartup has grown with them. Much has been done, but there's still much to do. I will outline some of the changes, improvements and future plans below, but there's one message above else that should take priority: We are looking for a new member to fill big boots in our team. We are looking for a full-time co-editor for Sweden. This role is a big deal and it will also command equal compensation.
We will offer a modest monthly salary and equity for a suitable candidate who is a real self-starter and can take the lead in the Swedish market building a strong editorial side-by-side with the team in Finland, as well as develop the monetization and business areas, which we will identify together. We expect you to have:
- Some previous writing experience (a personal blog or articles in other publications)
- An interest in reporting on breaking stories
- Familiarity with the Web and online business
- Fluency in Swedish and English
- An interest in entrepreneurship
- An interest not only in journalism, but also in monetizing an online media
Also:
- Previous work or connections with advertisers are a plus
We don't care so much about what you have done before, but want to hear what you will do in the future as the co-editor of ArcticStartup. Send your application to editor(at)arcticstartup.com by 20 December 2009.
The co-editor will join a strong team. Antti Vilpponen has taken on an important role as our new CEO making sure the business stays on course. Antti will also have an active role writing stories just as before, and will keep our product development on schedule. What product development, I hear you asking.
We recognize that there are a number of ways we could help out the startups in their journey from an idea to a successful business. We have watched the space for quite a while and have subsequently identified the areas we believe we can really help out. It's still early days regarding the product and we'll be sure to let you try it, see it and comment on it when there's something ready. I'm happy to announce that Karri Saarinen will lead our product development with the help of the rest of the team.
Further, Hendrik Morkel has joined us as our new cleantech writer to take the growing cleantech editorial forward with Päivi Kangasmäki and myself. Nick Mueller has also joined us to cover Sweden. We are really excited to welcome both writers to our editorial team (see everybody's bios here). Welcome guys!
On the same note, we are sad to inform you that our Sweden correspondent Paula Marttila has left the team. We thank Paula for her invaluable contribution and wish her all the best in her future endeavors.
Exciting times!
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.
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.
