We’ve been looking closely at the startup scene in the Nordics and Baltics for the last two and a half years and I have to say, the amount of events on the market these days is very attractive. There are a lot of different kind of events and I’m sure there’s something for everyone. While these events have their own functions and drive their own agendas, there’s no getting round it – they’re great fun and will surely improve your business if not by any other means than at least by networking with the other visitors there.
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Summary Of Some Of This Spring’s Startup Events
Nutiteq and Mobi Solutions Join Forces For Mobile Location-Based Services
Estonian mobile service company Mobi and mobile mapping firm Nutiteq have announced that Mobi has acquired a 33% stake in Nutiteq. The investment will be used to strengthen Nutiteq’s product development and international marketing. Nutiteq’s provides customized white label open mobile mapping applications for developers, service and content providers.
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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TaxiPal Brings Reverse Auction To Taxi Rides
T+1 Solutions, an Estonian R&D and technology solution provider has come out with Taxipal – brokerage software for mobile devices which functions like a reverse auction. Its aim is to make the EU’s taxi market more competitive and bring down the prices for consumers.
The service makes taxis compete for their business, where the customer can choose between price versus how quickly the taxi arrives to their location (see screen shots below). To be able to do this, the customer must first position herself (or let her mobile device do it by default) by entering necessary details of the trip, including the time window in which the person wants the cab to arrive. Subsequently, the customer will receive a list of bids from the registered taxi companies to her mobile. Continue reading »
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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Estonia To Make Business Environment Less Friendly Towards Startups
Estonia has previously enjoyed a relatively high reputation among startups and international high tech companies due to its friendly and very incentivised tax environment. Well, if a new law regarding the different kinds of income goes through we might have to say good bye to that reputation. Baltic Business News reports that the government is in talks of revising the Income Tax Law to change the status of benefits, such as share options and shares. Instruments which are highly used by early and later stage companies to motivate employees.
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Tailor Your Scarfs With Scarfmaker
A nifty little Estonian startup called Scarfmaker, has launched its less than a month ago. As the name suggests they make scarfs, but not any kind of scarfs – custom tailored ones. The company was founded in October 2008 and has been around a little over a year to develop the service. In the year of developing the service and company, I have to say I like the end result and makes me want to test their service.
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Maintain Your Sticky Notes Online With Listhings.com
Listhings.com is a new Estonian “eco-friendly” online web tool for storing sticky notes about anything from To-Do lists to grocery lists and phone numbers.
The man behind the project is Martin Tajur, also Creative Director and co-founder of United Dogs and Cats (see our previous coverage). Martin has also worked as a graphical and user experience designer at Skype.
Fortumo Growing Like A Weed, Expands Into 9 New Countries
Fortumo, an Estonia portal that offers free access for website-owners and small businesses to monetize their user base through Premium SMS messages, announced that they are expanding internationally the way rest of us only tell our investors we do with little hope of actually doing it.
Fortumo announced that they are expanding into 9 major markets in Western Europe, namely UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland. That’s right, 9 at once and we’re talking about a startup which needs to deal with notarious Telcos to do this. This means today Fortumo is providing its service in 26 different countries.
Edicy Turns One And Celebrates With 85k Sites
Edicy, the Estonian startup that enables people to create their own websites without knowing any technical issues affiliated with website design. I first met Tõnu Runnel in Le Web Paris last year and interviewed them regarding the product. He was also pitching their company in the startup track among other European startups.
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DailyPerfect Launches A Predictive News Service
DailyPerfect, an Estonian startup, has launched an interesting predictive news service. We wrote about DailyPerfect earlier with a quote: “it predicts users’ interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on the web.” Now the time has come to validate whether that holds true.
I took a ride with their service and I have to say it got me saying, “ooh, nice” couple of times. The unexpectedness of the new valid content with content that I follow already was in perfect harmony.
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New Seed Incubator In Estonia
Estonian Development Fund has launched new seed business incubator, SeedBooster. The purpose of the incubator is to help develop early-stage businesses to get them mature enough for venture capital financing.
However, the leader of the SeedBooster project, Andrus Oks, comments that the new incubator is actually nothing that much new – it is in fact part of activities Estonian Development Fund has performed already for some time, now just productized and branded. Targeted firms are ones operating in Estonia with a strong desire and possibilities for fast international growth.
So far SeedBooster has taken in for example programming analysis firm Programeter (which just won the runner-up prize in the elevator pitch contest) and website platform developer Edicy (our previous coverage) under its wings. The incubator is looking to include further 5-6 new projects within the next month.
Fits.me Raised A €1.3m Round And Won In Tallinn
I’m writing this on a ferry over from Tallinn to Helsinki coming back from a pitching event we organized in collaboration with Enterprise Estonia as part of the second annual International Technology Law Association conference in Tallinn, Estonia. The pitch competition was held with support from Connect Estonia. I very much enjoyed the conference as it mixed nicely technology law and venture capital finance. There was some interesting comments from a top-of-the-line Nordic and Baltic VC panel, but I’ll get into that in another post. Here’s about the line up of companies that pitched themselves to the jury.
Based on the application process five startups had made their way into final pitch competition. Here’s some thoughts on each of them.
More Accurate Time Tracking With Toggl.com
Toggl.com is an online time tracking tool created by an Estonian software development service firm Apprise. The service popped up on our screen via ArcticIndex registration.
The UI of Toggl is clear, and pleasant and fast to navigate. To start recording time for a new task is dead simple, just type in a client and a task name, and toggle the icon to start tracking. Tasks can be set to be billable. Different projects and clients can also be set up to organize the work. In addition to web site and iGoogle widgets, there is also a desktop client available, with just recently launched offline support. Reports are available with a variety of different filters.
Red Herring 100 Europe Finalists
This year’s Red Herring 100 finalists from Europe were announced last week. The competition is held annually to find Europe’s most promising tech companies. This year the list is nicely populated by companies from the Arctic area. More than 40 of the finalists this year come from the geographic area we cover – nicely done! Sweden, Norway and Finland are most represented and after that come Denmark and Estonia. Latvia and Lithuania still shine with their absence.
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