TripSay adds groups to its service, continueing on the strong community path. With groups, users of the service can more easily see what their peers in the same group are doing. Users can also add certain places to different groups.

Juha Huttunen, the CEO, commented groups in the following manner; “We added groups because they are a crucial element for finding people that share the same travel passions. With groups it is now again easier to find tips related to your interest. You can now easily find the places and tips recommended by e.g. fellow surfers or party animals. You can also create your own group with just friends too.”

With regards to their moving out of private beta, Juha Huttunen did not reveal all that much. The list of todo-items isn’t apparently all that long - I’m guessing they are in the final stages of fine tuning code and sorting out the communications things with regard to getting everything in-sync. The launch date is still unsure, but we’re guessing that its set for August.

I attended the Parteco picnic today, organised by Katri Lietsala and Esa Sirkkunen, who ran the Participatory Economy and Beyond -research project. It was a good event with old media companies slowly turning to social media (which I have to say shouldn’t be done only for social media’s sake).

I also heard some good rumours regarding the Finnish startup scene. First of all, regarding Dopplr - Marko Ahtisaari, Lisa Sounio and Taneli Tikka have left, or are leaving the company to continue to new challenges. Taneli Tikka is currently very active with his new startup RunToShop, which is creating some buzz among Finnish startups. The moves at the moment are not official, but there is a lot of buzz around that.

Juha Huttunen of Tripsay was also nodding towards August with regards to their official launch. Therefore we’ll have to wait a few more months before we will be able to see the service they are coming out with. I understand they are currently making final moves towards the launch.

Last, but not least - rumour or not - the Iron Sky movie, followup to the largest Finnish movie ever distributed - StarWreck, will be launched in 2010. Currently the script is being finetuned for the “investment round” that will be a few million euros and that will begin during the end of this year.

However, there was a lot of positive talk among the startups there regarding various issues and I also received a lot of great ideas regarding our next event.

I did a video interview of Juha Huttunen of Vailoma.com. Juha also tipped us to some invites they are sharing - if you want to get one to their service, send a request to info (at) vailoma.com.