Posts tagged:

mindtrek

Mindtrek’s First Day – Full Of Variety

by Antti Vilpponen, October 2, 2009 — 3 Comments

Jyri Engeström starting his keynoteCheck, check… mike working, reporting from the Mindtrek conference from Tampere where some 800 people are networking, discussing internet and digital media at large. The day has been action packed and there has been a lot of different content to consume. Furthermore, the audience saw some top notch speakers at Mindtrek this year, especially Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström, who were keynote speakers continuing on the post they wrote for ArcticStartup earlier.

The day began with a keynote by Chris Messina. He talked about identity as a platform. Judging on the amount of comments from people on the aisles in the conference, Chris hit top on with his presentation. Although there were some illogicalities, which he admits, it’s always great to hear news from The Valley on the trends that are pumping there.
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BREAKING: Dazzboard Received 1 Million USD Investment From Finland

by Ville Vesterinen, October 1, 2009 — 5 Comments

dazzboardWhile presenting at the MindTrek Launchpad competition in Tampere (Finland), LinkoTech CEO, Tero Salonen, just announced that the company has closed one 0.5 million US dollar first round funding for its Dazzboard product, and is in the process of closing the other half of the round, totaling to 1 million US dollars. The 0.5 million investment comes from Finnish investors.

Dazzboard is branded as an ‘Open iTunes’. Dazzboard wants to become a non-proprietary, web-based personal portal for storing, organizing and sharing (via different of social networks) songs, photos, videos and other media content.

We have our worries with the product and the experience, but I’m happy that Dazzboard team has found believers that are willing to invest in the company. Congrats to the team!

The Web At A New Crossroads

by Guest Blogger, September 11, 2009 — 16 Comments

chris&jyri

Guest post by Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström (thanks to Brynn Evans for editing and Brad Fitzpatrick for comments on the draft)
…………………

Around 2003, things began to change.

Technology was then the black sheep, having left overnight millionaires destitute and without change to afford their $4 lattes. Even the posers had left San Francisco and gone back to suburbia to be office managers at Walmart.

It was a sad time for everyone — that is, except the die-hards and the hackers. The web for them had never been about making money, but about reshaping culture and toppling the old order. 2003, therefore, was the perfect time for a resurgence: the people who kept pushing on in the Valley and elsewhere were a concentrated motley crew of innovators and builders. They cared about technology for technology’s sake and about developing and advancing web culture.

What they didn’t realize, however, was that the services and technologies that they were destined to build would need to be cobbled and sewn together using a system that would fight them every step of the way — not out of spite — but because of its architecture. By definition the network available was decidedly anti-human: in 2003, there was only the document-centric web.
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Live from Mindtrek: Startup Launchpad Winners

by Miikka Kukkosuo, October 9, 2008 — 8 Comments

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!

Tero Sarkkinen of Futuremark at MindTrek

by Ville Vesterinen, October 9, 2008 — 5 Comments

I asked Tero Sarkkinen, the CEO of Futuremark, what the 11-year-old Finnish startup is all about while visiting at MindTrek, Finland.

Tero spoke to me about Futuremark’s work, which is centered on 3D graphics. He also shared his thoughts how the company went through the previous dot-com bubble and on the current gloomy economic situation and how it might resonate for the startups.

MindTrek 2008 coming up fast

by Ville Vesterinen, September 16, 2008 — 1 Comment

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.

Write me at ville [at] arcticstartup.com if you’d like to come along for the bus ride so I know to reserve the a space for your startup. Thanks.

MindTrek prizes for start-ups a positive surprise

by Ville Vesterinen, August 25, 2008 — Leave a Comment
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.
On top of that we at ArcticStartup want to offer the winning startup the possibility to put their logo (125×125px) on ArcticStartup front page for one month. Additionally we will also do an interview with the winner right there at MindTrek.


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

by Ville Vesterinen, August 14, 2008 — Leave a Comment

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:

  • Fill in the online form that you will find on the website (here)

  • 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.

  • 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.

Startup Launchpad @ Mindtrek, Tampere

by Antti Vilpponen, August 12, 2008 — 1 Comment

Mindtrek 2008, the conference that started off as a multimedia competition a decade ago, is once again gathering in Tampere between 7th and 9th of October. Mindtrek will also be featuring a Startup Launchpad, where a maximum of seven startups will be chosen to present to the audience and a group of judges.

The selection criteria and application procedure can be seen on the Mindtrek Startup Launchpad website. Although it is still unofficial, ArcticStartup, will also be present at the conference one way or another. We’ve also heard that the prizes will be pretty good, so think seriously about joining.

More on the conference in the future as things progress.