The week’s been way too busy and apologies for the lack of writing from me. However, I’ve been following the scene and been meeting people over lunch from the startup scene. I’ve heard a few interesting facts this week that I’d like to share with the readers here.

• NewsToScreen has been growing fast despite my earlier bashing. NewsToScreen is an aggregator of different feeds and activities that can be used to transmit information to large crowds. They now have 80 000 members and transmit 5-10% of Finnish online video and approximately 66% of Finnish commercial video. I also talked to their founder and CEO Marko Parkkinen about the usage of the product and he confirmed that they have slightly shifted the focus and are taking different approaches in capitalising it.
• RunToShop, the social shopping recommendation service, now has over 400 partners. We previously wrote about 150 partners in their network so the growth has been nice. Despite still having a long way to go to successfully integrate the service with these partners I’m glad to see companies also focusing on the commercialisation of their innovation.
• The Deloitte Fast 50/500 Finland list for 2008 is out. A familiar company is topping the list with a growth percentage of close to 3000% - Futurice. Futurice is a web and mobile production powerhouse located in Helsinki, Finland. Second on the list is OpenBit, a mobile payment provider we have covered previously as well.

I’ll do some more digging into the Deloitte’s list as there are a lot of interesting companies that need to be uncovered in terms of interviews.

Combine marketing people with a possibility to launch a product online and you get a service where you have to pay to see advertising - News to Screen. In short, News to Screen is a seperate program you have purchase for 29 euros a year to get the news you can get online for free.

In the program you have your normal news headlines, the area where you read the news and a video banner where you will be targeted with advertisements. They company has also had a very hungry start in terms of PR. During the doping scandal of the Finnish Biathlon Association, they were the only company that actually started a sponsorship deal with the skiers left in the association.

There’s enough competition out there in the market with regards to free RSS newsreaders that you really don’t need to build barriers of adoption to your product, like putting a price on it. The company has 13 employees at the moment, of whom 4 to 5 are technically oriented. I wish them all the best, but somehow I just don’t see this product taking off.