To continue from our partnership with the Nordic Venture Forum we have partnered with the European Venture Summit to bring more visibility for Nordic and Baltic startups among the investors in the region.

European Venture Summit is two day long conference in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1st and 2nd December that will give some of the most promising companies from Biotech & Industrial Biotech, ICT and New Energies the opportunity to grow their businesses across borders by facilitating contacts to an experienced and international network of venture capital and corporate investors, strategic partners and expert advisers.

Some of the companies present include Qrodo (SWE) - Easy to use internet service for live sports events using low cost equipment and infrastructure, Mobispine (SWE) - Mobile Internet and messaging, Valimo (FI) - Your ID online, and Vocab (SWE) - Mobile intelligent learning.

You can register here and choose from different packages the one that’s to your liking. They include everyting from access to company & research presentations to up to 6 pre-arranged meetings from a selection of 15 potential One2One partners.

Here’s another startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum couple of week ago in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

Mobispine, a Swedish startup founded in in 2005, delivers mobile Internet and messaging services.

The company provides services for operators and end-users. The services include eSMS (Executive Short Message System) service enabling users to send messages from PCs to mobile phones and aggregation of news and content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) based news reader.

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Here’s the third startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

M-Brain (FI) - M-Brain is a value-added business intelligence firm operating in the media environment.

M-Brain focuses on media monitoring by delivering filtered, summarized and translated content from the Internet, both editorial and social media. They offer specific aggregated reports from more than 60 countries in 25 languages.

The company claims that it’s success factor is its ‘unique symbiotic combination of technology and human capital’. This stems at least partly from an in-house tech development that is funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Also, members of the R&D team continue to work part-time in the academic EU research projects bringing a wide range of knowledge to the table. M-Brain is also involved in many other EU project which are likely to bring in again new research, and many times also added funding from EU’s budget. Along with a few private individual the company has investments from Veraventure.

M-Brain employs 56 in-house trained staff of which 34 work part-time. M-Brain differentiates itself from its competitors by a ‘business model that is based both on human expertise and state-of-the-art search technology’, where most of their competitors emphasize only one of the two.

The company does not say much about the search technology except that the quality ‘results from scalability of human effort, achieved by replacing the mechanical part by technological means, themselves scalable. Query enrichment tools and interactive means of reorganizing the filtered material transform raw data into normalized information. The process and the representation are optimized with regard to human cognition and customer needs, enabling also broader survey of discourses related to an industry domain, resulting in products such as alerts, ananlyses and recognition of emergent relationships and trends‘ . The only bit I could find out the above I can really say I understood was that the company also employs refined data stream offered by Whitevector and Leiki’s semantic filtering tools. That said, the company states that their R&D investments add up to 15% of turnover, which is a very healthy number.

How M-Brain aims to differ from the Google and other aggregators is by rewriting the content instead of only cutting and pasting or taking a bit of the article and pushing it forward in a feed. In the Nordics M-Brain needs to compete with the likes of Meltwater and Cision, but as soon as you enter for example the UK you can find bigger players such as Libraryhouse among others.

M-Brain might have a killer technology and I hope they do, since their editorial does not seem to offer terribly much value based on their blog (in Finnish) where they claim to ‘observe the social media and offer perspective, opinions and experiences from the web’. The quality of the analysis throws a dark shadow of their claimed ‘human expertise’ which accounts for half of their product offering. For pure information aggregation this might not pose such a problem, but for those looking for in depth analysis I’d look long and hard how much bang I get for my buck.

Currently the company is looking for acquisitions from the old media that work in the media monitoring industry. This would allow M-Brain to integrate their technology to these players’ organizations which are stuck in the old way of doing things, and thus pushing the efficiency and margins way up. This would also offer the company a way acquire new customers in a quick and efficient manner.

Here’s the first startup of a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

Zero Point Software (Denmark) - Zero Point Software is a developer of intellectual properties in the video game space and their offering was two fold:

1. They were looking funding for the game they were developing, namely the Intersteallar Marines.
2. They were also ’selling’ Real Time Voice Porting to the VCs present. Real Time Voice Porting is a technology they had developed specifically for games.

Interstellar Marines is a AAA science fiction First Person Shooter video game aimed at the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms. The game is positioned in a highly competitive but also equally profitable segment. According to the guys behind Zero Point Software PC and console sales passed $30 billion dollars in 2007, of which shooter games accounted for approximately 10 percent.

Real Time Voice Porting for it’s part is a patent pending technology. It makes the gaming experience that much closer to what it would be in real life. For example if you talk to other users in a virtual bathroom while playing the game, you will experience how the reverberation affects the sound of your voice. In a similar fashion, shout your lungs out in a virtual valley and you will hear the echo of your voice.

In addition to the Interstellar Marines game itself and the patent pending technology Zero Point Software wants to rethink the game distribution model: the company aims to sell Interstellar Marines directly to the consumers without the need for a publishing deal. Whereas now a consumer pays about 75euro a game, the company wants to push this all the way down to 30euro a game.

The company also aims to build a social network around the game. It hopes this will reduce the investment risk by creating proof of market, ensure great quality through large scale focus testing and generate early streams of revenue. It aims to do this by letting the users play bits of the game along the way its developed, thus trying to get the gamers hooked and come back for more while at the same time creating a buzzing viral word-of-mouth.

The founders also emphasized that the game needs to be easier to access than pirated games, which would mean a user could play first 30 minutes for free and only after that she would have to pay if still interested.

The game trailer looks as good as any, even though it’s a long way from blockbusters such as Halo3. Similarly, I have no doubt that the patent pending technology can be a success. What I doubt though is whether you can bypass the publishing houses as Zero Point Software is planning to and still reach a wide enough audience for the game to take serious market traction. Whatever you think about the big publishing houses, they still play a critical part in the marketing of the games and thus creating the awareness among the bigger gaming public. You’d need to have a hell of a game if you plan to be the next Halo3 (or a bigger hit) just with a viral word-of-mouth. That said, the startup is not just talk and no action -The Interstellar Marines trailer has already passed two million downloads and gotten an average user rating of 9.2 on GameTrailers.com. Nice going!

Many of the facts and figures are from the good people at Nordic Venture Forum.

Nordic Venture Forum 2008 is over and the winners have been announced. Just when I wrote (here) about how skeptical I was about Concilio Networks, they land among the top three companies out of the 50 firms that participated in the Nordic Venture Forum.

Nothing delights me as much as company proving me wrong when I’ve been critical of them. Here’s the top 3:

• Concilio Networks (Finland) - Mobilizes and monetizes VoIP and internet community services
• NsGene (Denmark) - Developes novel cell and gene based products for the treatment of neurological diseases.
• Inmold Biosystems (Denmark) - Develops sterile polymere products with biomolecules immobilised into the plastic surfaces.

ArcticStartup congratulates the winners!

While talking to Concilio Networks’s CEO, Kristian Järnefelt, in Copenhagen he showed me exactly how the company allows users of normal existing handsets to import their internet contacts from social networks. The user experience is much smoother than I’d expected -I could start chatting with a friend with two clicks: First I chose my contacts and then I just jumped into the relevant contact name as I do with any Nokia phone and I was ready to start chatting. Whenever I have my phone on it shows as ‘active’ in all the networks I choose to use, for example Google Chat or Skype. As soon as one of my contacts decides to start chatting with me I receive a SMS for every comment. Easy and simple.

I actually pulled out my Nokia N95 and fired up Fring to show Kristian that such a solution already exists, but just as Kristian told me, it takes ‘forever’ to wait the Fring to load and connect via WiFi or 3G. That said, I still believe it’s an up hill battle to sell this solution to the telcos. This Kristian also admits.

All in all, I have to give this round to Concilio Networks. Kristian showed me how easy and effortless their product is to use. Not only that, It makes the world of difference where there are no 3G or WiFi networks in place, which would make it an ideal for South American market or even for Africa. Kristian told me that this might be the case, but that Concilio Networks has found out that to win the telcos’ trust they need to find the proof of concept closer to home.

I still believe that iPhone might give them a run for their money, but even if that happens in some markets there are still nearly 3 billion other mobile phones to work with. ArcticStartup 0 - Concilio Networks 1.

I’ll be writing more extensively on all the companies that I saw presenting in the conference in the coming days. Keep on the lookout for some interesting startups!