Mobile Summit 2008 will be organized in Stockholm on October 28-29th. The event will be big; so far MobileMonday chapters from almost 30 different cities have confirmed to take part. Lots of the industry’s main players will be present and there should be plenty of chances to network and find business opportunities. See conference agenda for details.

Mobility @ Otaniemi is sponsoring the event and they offer Finnish companies one speaker slot at the main stage, and one speaker slot in front of the VC panel, and also four regular tickets to the event. Regular price for the tickets is 450€ (including VAT). The companies with speaker slots will also be invited to the VIP dinner. If you want to participate, send an email to artur.surov (at) technopolis.fi and explain why you should get one of the tickets. Attitude counts!

Mobility @ Otaniemi is a microclustering project which aims to bring the Finnish mobile indystry together through events, joint activities and concrete actions. It’s organized by Otaniemi Marketing, which aims to promote the 600 firms operating and 40-50 new startups being founded each year in the Otaniemi area. Involved parties include, among others, TKK Helsinki University of Technology, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, Technopolis Ventures Ltd, and the City of Espoo.

Fromdistance Ltd. has won the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards Round Finland, and will represent us in MobileMonday European Peer Awards in Barcelona on February 11. The two other nominees were community-driven live TV streaming startup Floobs, and Intelligent SMS provider BookIT.

Fromdistance is actually registered in Estonia, though founded by a Finn. It was allowed to enter the competition nevertheless. The nomination was based on Fromdistance’s amateur reporting tool called Mobile Citizen Reporter (already available in Finland). The jury found the company to possess the strongest characteristics with an innovative idea, lucrative and high potential market with a global appeal, as well as a good overall presentation. The privately-owned company was founded in 2004, and sells software licenses to large enterprises and media companies.

The participation in the peer awards Finland competition was quite light, though, compared to e.g. Norway, which witnessed the following nominees for the Norway Peer Awards 2008:

• Opera Mini
• Colibria IM
• mBricks
• mobilize by Adactus
• Fluid by Favourite Systems
• Studio1: by Rubberduck MediaLab
• Zizzr
• Dextella by Mobiletech
• SMT Phonename
• Mobile Manager by Touch Mobility
• MobiSearch by ZapDance
• her.no by MobileInfo

According to still unverified news Adactus won with their cross-platform content delivery system mobilize. Interestingly, Adactus also offers a mobile reporter solution, although with not as end-to-end business offering as Fromdistance.

Altogether, despite lacking competition participants, there were some really interesting companies represented in the Helsinki event, which we’ll hopefully have a chance to cover later on.

Next week there are two interesting events, MobileMonday Global Peer Awards Round Finland, and the second annual StratMark seminar.

MobileMonday Helsinki will select a company having the best mobile application or service to represent Finland at the MobileMonday European Peer Awards on February 11 in Barcelona. The European winners will then continue to Global Awards Finals in Malaysia in May. Admission to tomorrow’s Helsinki event is free, just do it now.

StratMark program (all material in Finnish, though, except research publications) on the other hand is focused on improving the strategic marketing know-how of Finnish companies, along with creating an academic research paradigm on the subject. The seminar on Thursday is second of its kind, and unfortunately fully booked by now. There will be lots of interesting people from top Finnish companies, and academic highlights include marketing professor Rajendra Srivastava from Emory University, Atlanta.

I’ll be participating both events, so you can look forward for a report.