GigsWiz Launches A Service For Measuring The Demand For Live Concerts
Gigswiz, a Finnish startup founded by Juuso Vermasheinä with the ex-Floobs duo Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, has just launched in Beta. The service aims to enable bands and artists to better tell where they have fans who'd be willing to come and see them play. The team hasn't wasted any time as the beta launch came just months after they started to work on the idea in this February.
The service is an analytics platform for the live music industry and it should help bands, their agents and local promoters make better informed decisions on where bands should arrange concerts and tours. GigsWiz gathers fan requests through widgets that sit on the bands’ web sites and is looking to combine it with real-time consumption data from online music services. The actual widget can sit on the band's web pages, MySpace pages and Facebook pages.
Ex-Floobs Team Goes After Music Business With GigsWiz
The dust has barely settled since we reported about Floob's ending up in the deadpool on Jan 21st. Now the founding team, Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, is at it again and this times its music gigs they are after.
The new startup is called GigsWiz and is founded by Lemmetty, Pekkanen and Juuso Vermasheinä who has a background in game retail business.
Lemmetty was responsible for product development and business development in the music industry at Floobs Ltd and had previously seen some of the problems in the industry and together with Pekkanen they had some ideas how to help the music industry build a better business. Vermasheinä had started the company already in the summer of 2009 but after meeting with Lemmetty and Pekkanen the three decided to start working together on a slightly different business plan. In addition to the core management team GigsWiz is building an advisory board including music industry specialists, crowdsourcing and 'intention broadcasting experts', which should hint on the area the company focuses on.
Floobs Files For Bankruptcy
I got a call from Kai Lemmetty, one of the co-founders of Floobs, that they are filing for bankruptcy either today or tomorrow. Not a very pleasant call to get by any means, as they've been one of the most passionate guys in the ecosystem and been doing a lot of good for the startup scene itself by helping out with organising and live streaming events. The simple reason behind the bankruptcy is that their sales did not ramp up quickly enough to support their current burn rate.
Sofanatics - Sofa, Fanatics, So fanatic?
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.
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.
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.
Floobs Revises Business And Expands To Europe
I had a chat yesterday with Floobs' Kai Lemmetty, one of the co-founders about their company and how it has evolved over the last 6 months. I have no strings attached here financially or otherwise, but I was impressed the steps this company has taken since we first wrote about them back in October 2007. The new business is a lot more service oriented and the money does not flow in from technology as the idea was before.
Along with the new transformation of their business, they have opened up a new service called Floobs WebTV. This is the new service that they will officially launch on Monday and we managed to get a sneak preview on it. The service works in such a way that there are two major segments they are targeting with this; premium users and the mass market. Premium users in this case are football teams (I'm not talking about your sunday team, these guys are after the elite of the sport - more later) and the mass market includes those who can settle for fewer features and are happier with simpler services.
Floobs Is Going For The Cash
When we last time wrote about Floobs, a video streaming service, had just shifted its focus to niche audiences. Now they have build a business model to match that.
The company has made deals with the Spanish footbal teams of the highest order. For example Almeria Deportivo along with Real Betisin and Racing Santanderin are using Floobs to stream practice sessions and press announcemets. The rights for the games have of course sold for big bucks to major television channels, but everything that happens outside of those covered by the licenses are free game that Floobs wants to tap into. This means that content will be YouTube like clips that for example a football team can capture for their fans to see. Next markets Floobs is eyeing for football are Italy, Germany and France. Along with the international reach, Floobs serves also many other sports associations and teams in Finland.
Event As An Open API For You To Use
I’m writing this from The Next Web Conference at the lovely Westergasfabrik in the heart of Amsterderdam. It’s sunny and the there’s amazing people full of energy all around. This is exactly how events should be: providing an inspirational setting to bring the busy and smart individuals into the same place to bounce ideas from each other and lay those seeds for future projects. I’ve been here for a couple days now and still don’t know nor care much about the program or the content on stage. What matters to me is the people off stage. The content needs to be there to get people curious enough to come in mass, but once you hit the venue, the smartest of us ignore the talks and focus on the conversations in the halls. To mis-use the analogy for events that Adam Greenfield uses for cities: The Events Are Here For You To Use.
That’s how we at ArcticStartup see events, that’s why we take time to travel to events all around Europe and that’s why we go lengths to organize and make sure ArcticEvenings work for the people who take the time to spent the evenings with us.
Here's some events just around corner what are likely to be worth your time and effort.
Twitbear Defies Twitter With Commenting
Three Finnish Jaiku fans have created a service called Twitbear that describes itself as "enabling conversations around tweets". Antti Akonniemi, CEO of Kisko Labs, Kai Lemmetty, co-founder of Floobs and Helene Auramo, CEO of Zipipop came up with the service after Jaiku had started crashing fairly often after Google announced it would pull the plug from it las January.
The service itself is based around threaded communication and is currently in closed beta. At the moment, it pulls tweets from Twitter and adds the comments to the service itself - enabling the threaded communication that many other services have tried to pull off, inluding Tweetree. In essence it is a microblogging platform that pulls part of its data from Twitter. According to the creators of Twitbear - services like Friendfeed are too manyfold and difficult to use, something that many former Jaiku fans can agree with, I'm sure.
Only a handful of users have received invitations to the service and each registered user is given 5 invitations to share. It's nice to still see innovation around threaded conversations, something that remains to be tackled with a proper service. Jaiku had a good try at it, but with Google buying the service - development came to a halt. I've personally noticed many Finns beginning to use Brightkite, a service similar to Jaiku. It remains to be seen which will be the service that will take off outside Twitterdom - or do we need one?
Flowplayer - The Next Open Source Success?
I first heard from Flowplayer from the guys at Floobs. Kaitsu, their CEO, said that I might want to check out these guys. The line was something in the lines of '...yeah, He's really good. He worked for us before but wanted to go and develop his own open source project. It's all cool'. This healthy attitude is something that other industries should copy. Very rarely you hear such a supportive attitude toward someone who takes off to develop his own project.
Flowplayer is a flash video player, just like YouTube player. Except that the founders claim it's a dramatically better alternative and they have the number to back up the statement. They are currently receiving 14 000 visitors visiting their site a day and the player is downloaded 1 000 times a day. The founders aim is to make Flowplayer the #1 Flash video player in the world.Why its better than the alternatives out there
- Customization - Every single aspect of Flowplayer can be tweaked to meet your needs. This includes both the behaviour and the appearance.
- Scripting - Flowplayer API is object-oriented and not just a flat list of functions. The event model is taken to the next level, allowing you to link custom functionality to every player event.
- Plugins - Flowplayer can be extended with plugins. Some already-existing plugins allow you to, for example, place HTML content over the video when the playback ends, or implement custom playlists using only basic HTML skills.
- Streaming servers - Flowplayer offers specialized streaming plugins for several different types of stream source. You can also build your own.
- Multiple players on a page - You can have many player instances on a page without compromising the page's load speed or usability. A splash image loads in place of the video players before they are clicked to begin playback - but you can still supply a full configuration to each player in advance of it actually being loaded.
You can see more of the above here.The story
Flowplayer's story is a story that I have heard many times over, but before it has so often taken place in Silicon Valley. This time it takes place in our backyard, which is something I expect to see happen a lot more often. Good stuff!The story of Flowplayer began in 2005 when there wasn't good video players around. There was no YouTube and the Internet seemed to lack the kind of video player that works on all major browsers. Flash technology came to rescue and Anssi placed a small open source project called "Flowplayer" to SourceForge. The first version was quite limited but enough to attract a few downloads per day. These download numbers were enough for Anssi to get excited and he started improving the player. Soon it became so popular that he decided to ask if Tero would be interested to join the project.Tero joined the team at the beginning of 2008 and started working on the website. Soon after that we realized that we want to make a player that is something different - something better...
Business model
Licensing is Flowplayer's number one business model and a single commercial license costs 95 USD. Other commercial licensing types are north of that sum and go up to 1495 USD for a bundled license.The Free version of Flowplayer is licensed under the GPL license and it includes a copyright notice together with Flowplayer's logo. According to the GPL this information must be displayed even if you modify the source code of the player. Flowplayer's commercial versions are free from this rule and you can brand your player the way you like it. Their number one competitor i is JW FLV Player.
Flowplayer is also experimenting with advertising as a business model. This could yield potentially lot bigger revenues than the simple commercial licensing, but is only in its infancy across the industry. Flowplayer is now partnered with LiveRail, but others have also contacted the company and are working on Flowplayer integration, including EyeWonder, MediaMelon and DoubleClick. Flowplayers's goal is to have many advertising partners and customers can choose from a list of options, including pure Open Source alternatives that one can host on her own without any ad-networks taking a cut from her revenue. The advertising solution is showing promise already as the company receives 10 queries a week asking about the advertising option. We believe that this space is going to get very interesting before the year is out and we are surely not alone with our prediction.
Red Herring Global Top 100 Finalists Announced
During the weekend Red Herring, a global media company, announced 200 finalists of their annual Global Top 100 technology companies competition. The winners, top 100 out of 200, will be announced in January 14-16, 2009.
There are a few Nordic companies listed that were also on Red Herring's Top 100 European finalists this year, including Floobs, Muxlim and Aito Technologies. Some of the new comers to the global short list include Hammerkit and Ball-IT, which was listed also in 2007.
Congratulations to the finalists and watch out for the monkey business.
Are Web Conferences A Waste Of Time?
There has been lively discussions of whether the many web conferences are really the most effective use of time for a startup. Similarly many people see the value in these conferences very differently, for example people from the United States tend to spend most if not all their time networking in the lobbies and hallways, at least more so than the Europeans are used to. We, the Europeans, on the other hand, tend to pay equal attention to the speakers at the stage.
At ArcticStartup we believe that meeting friends and strangers, as many as possible, is the best way to spend your time in these conferences. But that's just us. Thus, we wanted to know what other startups think and decided to ask a group of Finnish startups, who travelled to the LeWeb with us, what they think. Here are some perspectives:
Slush Live @ ArcticStartup
You can follow Slush live at ArcticStartup via Floobs' live streams. Remember, do give us insight in terms of who you'd like us to interview in the comments of our previous post about Slush. The event will kick off at 9 am EET and the video streams are courtesy of Floobs.
Slush track 1 - Entrepreneur 2.0
-- removed (we'll add the archived the material later on) --
Slush track 2 - Software Developer's Gathering
-- removed (we'll add the archived material later on) --
Will be great to meet all of you at Slush!
Floobs Goes After Niche Audiences
Floobs, a Finnish video streaming service, has shifted its focus to niche audiences by starting to work with local community sports associations. The service covered many sports already from the get-go, but now they have made a conscious choice to put all their weight behind the local-community-sports strategy.
The guys behind the service, Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, had played around with the idea already for a while when trying to figure out how the beat the video streaming giants like Qik, Kyte.tv and Flixwagon in their own game. Now the duo has decided to go with something very Finnish: Sports!
Finland is notoriously sports-crazy: Sports has traditionally been the primary way (and many times the only way) to build success stories in the international arena. A tradition that dates back to the post-war years. Traditional or not, what a better way to beat the US video streaming giants than going where they can't reach. Similarly by working with the amateur associations they can tap into a market that is not interesting enough for the national TV stations. Floobs has already signed many contracts with local sports associations. They have signed up football and floorball association, and planning to expand to table tennis- , skating- and horse riding associations.
The community organizers and local associations are also happy since they now have a forum for those events and games that are too small for the traditional media. They can also take the videos with them to Facebook and to MySpace with a Floobs widget.
A great way to turn what was initially a disadvantage (not located in the eye of the storm in Silicon Valley) to an advantage (going local in your own market).
MindTrek Finalists Have Been Chosen
MindTrek Startup Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The following companies made the cut (in alphabetical order):
Floobs
HammerKit
MahShelf
One Did It
RunToShop
Star Wreck Studios
TripSay
Zipipop
There will be eight finalist in total in the pitch competition and each startup will have 6 minute pitch to present to the high profile jury. Read more about the Startup Launchpad here.
Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!
The free bus ride for startups to the MindTrek and back from Helsinki on 8.-9.10.2008 will depart 8.10. Wednesday morning at 7.15am in fron of Kiasma (the bus has MindTrek sign on it).
The bus will head back to Helsinki on 9.10. Thursday at 4pm departing in front of Hotel Rosendahlin at Tampere. If you want to come along contact Hanne Lehtola at hanne.lehtola [at] culminatum.fi
Antti Akonniemi from Kisko Labs is also running an Ignite while we are driving up there. Antti wrote a short intro on what’s on offer for the ride up:
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? And what if your stage was an actual bus full of startup entrepreneurs? Fun of karaoke and excitement of Powerpoint combined. Sounds too much like the movie Speed? Introducing Ignite:Mobile. Join ArcticStartup’s bus trip to MindTrek and experience the first ever Ignite:Mobile.
There should still be plenty of room in the bus, so drop Hanne a mail and come along.
Slush Helsinki
There has been much talk around Slush lately. Yet, it has not yet been very clear at all what is happening and I'm partly to blame. Now I try to shed some light onto the issue and at the same time invite you all to Slush.
In a nutshell Slush is a new Helsinki originated event for startups by startups. The whole process started when I along with a few others passionate about the subject were trying to brainstorm on how to give a boost to the Finnish startup scene, home and abroad. We had an idea that a bigger annual event might be the answer for the lack of visibility among Finnish startups in the global arena. If nothing else, we saw that such an event was missing from the Finnish startup fabric.
After throwing ideas back and forth for while I, Peter Vesterbacka (of Mobile Monday fame) and Kai Lemmetty (of Floobs) came up with an event that would show the best Finland has to offer, once a year every year. Later on Helene Auramo from Zipipop jumped along to bring her positive energy to the team and give it an even stronger startup perspective. Peter came up with the name Slush and so it started.
Finnish summer can be an amazing experience with its nightless nights, but there's also the dark winter we
live with the other six months. Thus, any startup born in Finland have equal number of slushy and dark Novembers in their DNA as they have those warm sunny Julys. Many say the one quality a startup needs above all is perseverance against adversity and out of all the languages Finnish is the one that has its own word for describing just that. The word is Sisu and I believe that it has much to do with Finns pushing through those dark slushy winter months. Thus, an apt name especially for a startup event. Having said that, I believe this is the case with startup DNA all over the Nordic and Baltic countries.
After finding the right people to take on the challenge we were ready to start working. What we really aim to do is light up the startup scene, namely by showing students what entrepreneurship can be at its best, and show the international crowd that there is much more to Finnish startups than the tip of the iceberg they've seen so far. Naturally big part of the whole event is to enable the Finnish entrepreneurs meet not only each other but also investors and other businesses from home and abroad.
We know there's a plethora of events that are not working as well as they could for the entrepreneurs themselves, and thus we decided that everything we do should be done in the interest of the startup scene in mind. If something is in conflict with that focus, it will be scrapped from the agenda. For startups by startups or nothing.
Now we are at a point where the website is up and running so we can tell people about the event, invite them along and spread the word. Even the fact that the website leaked out half ready turned out to be only beneficial, since many people wanted to help out. For example the nice guys at Valve volunteered to help out right away. I've also heard that the Bolder guys are ready to do their part and Scred has promised to make the actual platform for selling tickets for the event.
The event itself will take place 24th November at Korjaamo Culture Factory in Helsinki and run through the whole day. The program will be a combination of four parts:
- Success Stories - This is were we have the Finland's finest web entrepreneurs lined up. Risto Siilasmaa from F-Secure, Petteri Koponen from First Hop/Jaiku, Ilkka Paananen from Sumea/Digital Chocolate, Asmo Halinen from Apaja only to name a few of the entrepreneurs that have started small and made it big.
- Technology track - This is modeled on the Startup Developer Gathering (SDG), which was put together by Kai Lemmetty. For Slush Kai is putting together a tech presentation bar none. This track will go on all day and have many Finnish heavy weights like Teemu Kurppa (Jaiku/Google) presenting their insight for the Slush attendees.
- Thirdly, a showcase where up to 40 local startups can show what they have, be it products, services, their team, philosophy behind the concept and what not.
- Fourthly, probably the most important reason pulling the event together in the first place, we have seven pre-screened teams presenting their business ideas to the audience. These teams will be funded by the Slush Fund. The Slush Fund will be in effect just as big as the combined sponsorship revenue plus the proceeds from the sold tickets will allow it to be. In another words we will channel all the money from the event (minus cost e.g. rent for the venue etc.) to the seven teams. If you are a student with an idea for the next big thing you should apply. Instead of writing code and making coffee at one of the big corporations next summer, you could spend the summer of 2009 working on your own idea and have the expertise of most of the Finnish startup community to draw from.
In a nutshell this is Slush Helsinki. An event for startups by startups.
If the website seems that it does not give out all the details yet, it is by no means because we want to keep you in the dark but rather because we are working on the agenda as we go along to make it as good as resources and time allow. ArcticStartup will be naturally reporting what is happening at the event itself but also how the event is developing from now until the day itself in late November. Welcome to the Slush everybody!
Edit: There was a mistake saying October instead of November. The correct date for Slush is NOVEMBER 24th.
MindTrek 2008 coming up fast
MindTrek Conference 2008 is just around the corner, so if you're a startup make sure to apply to the Startup Launchpad competition if you haven't already. It's worth it.
Registration is open until September 19th. You can register here for the Startup Launchpad and here for the Conference itself. I'll be hosting the competition itself and the jury include Marc Davis from Yahoo! and Sharon C. Ballard to name only a few.
We’re organizing a free bus ride with Culminatum, Sombiz and Floobs to the to the conference leaving from Helsinki on the 8th and coming back on the evening of 9th.
The idea is to rent a bus and take off to Tampere together from Helsinki with a bus full of start-ups. Spend the Oct. 8th and 9th at the Conference and give the start-ups a possibility to pitch at Startup Launchpad competition.
Antti Akonniemi from Kisko Labs is also running an Ignite while we are driving up there. Antti wrote a short intro on what's on offer for the ride up:
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? And what if your stage was an actual bus full of startup entrepreneurs? Fun of karaoke and excitement of Powerpoint combined. Sounds too much like the movie Speed? Introducing Ignite:Mobile. Join ArcticStartup's bus trip to MindTrek and experience the first ever Ignite:Mobile.
Even if you decide to not apply or will not make the cut, you're more than welcome to join us for the bus ride up and for the conference itself. Although for the conference you will need a ticket.
RunToShop.fi went live and back
I attended RunToShop party last week at Shaker, Helsinki along with a lot of Finnish entrepreneurs and it was a blast. It was an opening day of the RunToShop.fi service, which was to act as the first step towards opening the service internationally at RunToShop.com
RunToShop is a social recommendation service for stores that rewards its users for recommendations as well as for the actual purchases. Whether it works or not is anybody's guess at this point when the full fledged service is not rolled out yet.
The service at .fi address came and went. I did create a profile and browsed around the service to familiarize with it and decided to came back later on. Yet, today I found that the guys had but the site back behind a login and a password, probably to fix some buggy code. I didn't get a proper look with still so few stores and service providers on the site at the time and am eager to take a another look as it goes live again. Hopefully there will be a lot more to browse through.
What is notable in RunToShop however is the way it was build: The guys behind the concept started building the start-up only in April 2008 and according to RunToShop CEO, Taneli Tikka, the service has already over 150 partners: Mostly in Finland and in the UK.
What is also unusual is the very strong advisory board the start-up has gathered which includes close to 30 experienced entrepreneurs and key figures in the industry. Similarly Taneli Tikka who is driving the start-up as its CEO has a long list of start-ups behind him, including Dopplr and IRC-Gallery to name only a few.
I did a video interview with Taneli, but since I only had my iphone with me Kai from Floobs borrowed me his Nokia N95 to record the interview. Unluckily I didn't have a chance to pick the video clip from Kai last week, and when I gave Kai a call yesterday I got an SMS back saying he was hiking somewhere in the Norwegian Lapland, so it'll have to wait a little. We'll post the interview on the blog as soon as I get my hands on it.
MindTrek prizes for start-ups a positive surprise
We speculated earlier on that this year's MindTrek's Startup Launchpad prizes would be pretty good, and nice they are.The guys at MindTrek have shown that when it comes to getting start-ups on board, Tampere knows what its doing. Here's what they have on offer quote on quote:
The winner elected by the jury will be nominated as the MindTrek Startup of the Year 2008, and given the right to pick up the prize first from the basket. The three prizes are:
- Two tickets for an international conference (max á 1300 €), like Le Web 3 Le Web08 in Paris (December 12th – 13th) December 9th – 10th*
- Supercoaching training by Sharon Ballard
- Technopolis Ventures incubation program (12 months contract, worth 3 000 €) and an opportunity to participate in the Money Talks Forum
In addition, the winner will get two tickets for the MindTrek 2009 conference and one hour face-time with one jury member to discuss about the concept, business model, financing opportunities, markets, etc.
The company nominated as second will select prize after the winner, and the bronze-medallist will get the remaining prize.All companies selected to present their pitches in the conference will be given an opportunity to participate in a half-day pitch training session before the conference.
If the prizes are noteworthy, so it the jury. The jury line up includes Marc Davis from Yahoo!, Sharon C. Ballard, the founding President/CEO of Enable Ventures Inc., Tapio Siik from Nokia Growth Partners, Pekka Pärnänen theHead of Finpro at Silicon Valley and Henri Rantalainen the CEO and Business Development Advisor at Technopolis Ventures Professia.
But as they say there's no such thing as a free lunch and even start-ups have to invest real money sometimes as much as it hurts. There is no real registration fee for the Launchpad competition, but if a start-up is selected it will have to register for the conference to get to pitch and be eligible for the prizes. The registration fee is 75 euro (+VAT) for the Thursday when the actual pitching competiton will take place, and if you want join the whole two days you have to pay 110 euro (+VAT) for a two day ticket, ie Wednesday and Thursday.
To ease the pain a bit, we are co-organizing with Culminatum, Sombiz, Floobs and MindTrek a free bus ride for all the startups to Tampere and back. Regardless of whether you're pitching or not, you're most welcome to join the ride. write me at ville [at] arcticstartup [dot] com if you wanna come and I'll reserve a seat for your team.
You can read more about the competition and fill in the registration for here. Good luck!
*Edit: A correction to The MindTrek website: The first prize that includes two tickets for an international conference (max á 1300 €), should read "like Le Web08 in Paris (December 9th – 10th)", not 'LeWeb3 that was held in Paris last year on December 12th and 13th.
Start-ups taking over MindTrek
As hinted earlier ,we're organizing a trip to MindTrek Conference with Culminatum, Sombiz, Floobs and the guys at MindTrek.
The idea is to rent a bus and take off to Tampere together from Helsinki with a bus full of start-ups. Spend the Oct. 8th and 9th at the Conference and give the start-ups a possibility to pitch at Startup Launchpad competition.
The competition will have a worthwhile set of prizes, which without going into too much detail yet include face-time with some big names in the industry and tickets to one of the most notable Internet Conferences in Europe. We will announce the jury line-up as well as the prizes as soon as they get confirmed.
To enter the Launchpad competition you need to:
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Fill in the online form that you will find on the website (here)
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In the form you will be required to provide basic information about the company and founders, a description of your service/product and why your company should win.
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In addition to this, an optional maximum 2 minutes video uploaded to YouTube (or other server accessible for us) describing the company and the product would be highly appreciated. You can put the link on the form.
- Proposals must be submitted in English.There is no fee for registering your company in the MindTrek Startup Launchpad. If your company is selected, to confirm your participation, you will have to register to the conference. So those who are presenting the startup company must register and pay the registration fee.
- A maximum of 7 start-ups will be carefully selected from the submitted applications, and will demonstrate in front of a panel of expert judges in a room where any conference participant will have access to, on Thursday, October 9th.
The jury as well as the audience may ask questions during the Q&A session which will follow each presentation. The jury will also give feedback after the presentation.
If you're a start-up and you'd like to come along and reserve a place in the bus, first you need to register and then just let me know you want to come along by dropping me a quick mail at ville [at] arcticstartup [dot] com.
There is no fee for registering your company in the MindTrek Startup Launchpad itself. If your company is selected, to confirm your participation, you will have to register to the conference. So those who are presenting the start-up company must register and pay the registration fee, but you do get a 10% off by using STARTMIND-08 code when registering. Naturally, if you do register the bus ride to Tampere and back is free of charge thanks to Tommi at Culminatum.
Second SDG on August 27th
In support of other startup activity, we'd like to promote the second Startup Developer's Gathering being organised on the 27th of August in Korjaamo, Helsinki. The event is organised by Kai Lemmetty from Floobs and it was said to be success last time, so expect some good discussions this time as well (I hear Kai's skills with regard to software development exceed his skills in graphical design - yes, the logo was made by him :) ).
The topic will be alternate object persistent systems. More on the topic in the SDG blog. Feel free to join the Facebook event to show if you are arriving.
Tonight: Arctic Startup and Social Websites
Last minute reminder to all those who are in the Helsinki region tonight; get yourself down to Dubrovnik, Eerikinkatu 11, at 6pm tonight.
The event is sponsored by Mysites.com and Floobs. On the panel we have Asmo Halinen from Apaja, Jani Penttinen from XIHA Ltd and Kristoffer Lawson from Scred.
We have about 70 people marked showing up through Open Coffee and Facebook. There are people I know are coming as well who haven't signed up so it's going to be a full house for sure!
Looking forwards to meeting everyone there tonight!
Startup developers gathering
There will be a special startup developers get together event in Helsinki on May 22. The purpose of the event is to exchange knowledge about technologies and conventions touching startup developers, and also to demonstrate students "how cool it is to run and work in a startup".
There's quite a good bunch of startup speakers participating, including Lare Lekman, CTO of Star Wreck Studios, Jani Luostarinen, System Administrator at Floobs, Joakim Achren, founder and CEO of Ironstar Helsinki (MoiPal service), and Taro Morimoto, CTO of Zipipop. After the afternoon event there will be an evening party as well, place to be declared later.
The event will take place on Thursday, May 22, starting at 1pm at HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science in Helsinki. Check out the detailed agenda and enrollment on Yahoo upcoming or Facebook.
If you can't make it, you can see the live stream from Floobs. Sponsors are also sought after, so if you're interested, contact Kai Lemmetty @Floobs.
Arctic Startup Events continue 8th of May
Mark the 8th of May down to your calendars - we're hosting another meetup in Dubrovnik Lounge and Lobby to discuss social web applications. We will have a panel discussion with Asmo Halinen (from Apaja Online Entertainment), Jani Penttinen (XIHA Ltd) and Kristoffer Lawson (Fishpool Scred). These guys have first hand experience in running social web services, so don't miss out!
Floobs has agreed to film the event and stream it online through their service so you'll be able to tune in if you happen to be out of town (however, you'll miss out on the excellent networking chances!).
See this page for more information and do leave your comments on the topics of discussion you'd like to hear!
Update: We're having Jani Penttinen on the panel from XIHA instead of Juhani. Jani is one of the founders of XIHA Ltd. Also, Kristoffer Lawson will be replacing Matti from Fishpool.
Floobs contesting in MIPTV's Content 360
Floobs is taking part as the only Finnish company in the MIPTV's Content 360 pitching competition in Cannes this year.
More precisely, Floobs is one of the three finalists in the "Advanced Mobile Interaction with TV Content" -series, where the two other contestants are Coded Vision, Twenty Six Leeds (UK) and BBC TV Talk, Wyndham-Leigh (UK).
Kai and Joonas let me know via e-mail that they will be sharing some comments from Cannes later on after their presentation.
Finns in the Nextweb Conference
Due to lack of time, I was unable to write about this earlier, but the Next Web 2008 was organised during the end of last week. There were a lot of companies there from Finland as well. I'm counting at least XIHA Life, Scred and Floobs were present.
Timo Paloheimo from Startupbin.com was also there and has some coverage of the two days of activity as well as some photos.
Juhani Polkko from XIHA Life, sent us an e-mail that they released a new language-based search feature in Amsterdam during the conference.
Update: TripSay was present as well, so quite a good presentation from the Finnish startup scene, I must say.
Red Herring publishes finalists for Europe 100 list, suspected tax frauds and financial obscurity in the background
Several Finnish companies have been included as finalists for the 2008 Europe 100 list of the of most promising ventures Red Herring is once again publishing. The companies are Aito Technologies, Floobs, Muxlim, nCore, Severa, Whatamap.com, Widisys, and Valimo Wireless. The winners will be declared at Red Herring Europe 2008 event in Malta on April 14-16th.
While the nomination gives good visibility to the companies, it's worth a note, though, before going boasting around that the reputation Red Herring has is not that good everywhere. There's a whole lot of suspected monkey business going on related to the company. According to rumors (see ValleyWag's posts for example), Red Herring’s CEO and Chairman, Alex Vieux, doesn't pay his bills (nor employees' salaries). In addition, he's got the U.S. tax officials of IRS on his back, suspected of having $2 million in unpaid payroll taxes according to ex-employees. Mr. Vieux has also been said to to have fled French and Swiss police also interested to investigate possible unpaid taxes. A good sign is neither that Red Herring has lost quite a many board members over the last couple of years.
Although not all the rumors may be true, it nevertheless seems the company is in trouble and it's unsure if it's able to turn its course. As a takeaway it's good to enjoy the publicity the nomination brings, but at the same time it's worthwhile to assess what kind of association to have with Red Herring in particular and keep one's ears open.
Floobs video interview
I did a video interview of Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen from Floobs some time in February. I never had time to edit and go through the video, but I finally managed to do so in the Easter holidays. During the editing of the video, I noticed that the add-on microphone was slightly faulty and it only recorded the left channel - therefore the sound quality is quite bad, apologies for that. Nevertheless, I decided its better to release the video late than never - so here it is:
Open Coffee Club Helsinki with Arctic Startup
We've been quiet too long, but we've got something good for you coming up! Next week's Thursday we'll be organising an event together with Ville from Open Coffee Club Helsinki in Dubrovnik.
We will have 4 companies on stage giving you talks about entrepreneurship and how they came up with what they are doing. The companies, some of which have also been covered on Arctic Startup, are Vailoma.com, Floobs, Whatamap and Mysites.com.
Mysites.com is also sponsoring the event. Mysites.com is a new Finland based company which lets its users manage and put all their online content in a single place. They will launch in the very near future, but they wanted to give us a sneak peak behind the curtain next Thursday.
Here's the event in more detail:
Date: Thursday, March 6, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Dubrovnik Lounge & Lobby
Address: Eerikinkatu 11 (downstairs), Helsinki
The event goes more or less as follows:
-Doors open at 6pm
-The presentations will start at 6.30pm
-Each company will talk about 10-15 minute
-And for the next hour and a half we can chat over a cup of coffee or a pint, meet new people and connect
If you want, you can join in on the event in Facebook. See you next thursday!
