The first-ever Startup Launchpad competition was held today at Mindtrek conference in Tampere, Finland. There were eight Finnish startups pitching their idea to a group of experienced jury.

The jury was headed by Sharon C. Ballard, the founding President/CEO of Enable Ventures Inc. Other members were Marc Davis, Social Media Guru and Chief Scientist, Yahoo!; Tapio Siik, Partner, Nokia Growth Partners; Pekka Pärnänen, Head of Finpro, Silicon Valley, and Henri Rantalainen, CEO, Business Development Advisor, Technopolis Ventures Professia.

The event, hosted by ArcticStartup’s Ville Vesterinen, started with Zipipop introducing their Zipiko service, which is based on “intention sharing”, enabling people to see their friends’ activity plans, join them even for ad hoc events, and for sharing your own plans with your friends anywhere.

Mahshelf was next, who positioned themselves as the Youtube for comics, enabling both user generated and professional content distributed online at the best price.

Starwreck introduced a collaborative film creation platform to enable leveraging community for more cost efficient production and marketing of new films around the world.

Onedidit pitched a platform for community of eco-minded people, offering unique tools for measuring ecological living and tips to improve everyday eco-friendliness.

Hammerkit presented online visual programming tools letting designers build anything online from components in minutes without nearly any programming.

Floobs pitched their solution for producing, managing, and distributing mobile individual live TV channels, targeting the long tail of non-tv broadcasted sports.

Tripsay presented their solution for the challenge of finding personalized traveling recommendations among the loads of unorganized opinions on the web.

Runtoshop concluded with their online service for sharing opinions and finding personal recommendations on any products and services, to find the best one and getting easiest possible way of purchasing it.

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Pekka Pärnänen started the award ceremony by mentioning that while he knows some of the companies and that they are doing a good job, the presentations were not excellent in general. Pekka stated if you can’t explain your business to a stranger in six minutes, you can’t do it in 15 or more either, you have to be concise. Don’t assume that the investors know anything about what you do. Be ready to answer questions also. If you don’t know an answer to something, you have to explain why you don’t know.

Tapio commented that having a business model based on ads is usually a sign that you haven’t though of your business model. If you use the advertising card you have to be able to really go into the fine details when asked.

Marc missed hearing the elevator pitch, stressing it should be between 30s and 2 minutes. It’s essential skill for your success, and practicing it in front of the mirror a hundred times and more. What’s your startup about, why should I care, and what’s in it for me. Honesty is also important - state clearly where you’re at at the moment with your plans. You have to also know by heart why your competitors, other startups, or big companies cannot enter your market with a similar idea and flush you out.

Sharon wanted to hear these four points answered:

1. Your story; sales, can you defend your revenue projections, do you have customers.
2. The opportunity, what can she do tomorrow with your team and skills, that she can’t do today. There has to be a big problem that can be fixed by you and you alone.
3. Management team is important, be ready to tell about how it fits together.
4. Finally, the ability to express your idea verbally - can you be convincing? People only invest in people they trust.

In the end, the jury faced a difficult decision, and went on to give out the third place three times. The third place was thus shared by Mahself, Onedidit, and Hammerkit, who will take a draw for the prizes. Congrats to the winners and all participants, who no doubt all learned a great deal and got new ideas!

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.

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.

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.