I just recently talked to Petteri Koponen of Lifeline Ventures, who came back from the first SeedSummit that took place in London and was put together by the good people at Seedcamp. It’s a new initiative that twice a year brings together a critical mass of Europe’s most active seed investors to try and establish a stronger, more cohesive network to support entrepreneurs across the continent.

We welcome the initiative. If its needed generally in Europe, the Nordics and Baltics are literally screaming for such an initiative.

The other angel investor coming from our neck of the woods who was present was who else than the other Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engeström. Other angels present included  Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein and Sherry Coutu. A hefty list.

Saul Klein, quite rightly, says that we need to make our geographic distribution and cultural diversity part of our strength. He goes onto state that Seedcamp has spent the last few years very focused on building the beginnings of a network model for entrepreneurs and tried to lessen the constraints and isolation of geography by giving people the best possible access to a distributed network of advisors, funding and investors across our region, who can help them aim high and build ambitious global businesses.

This is a great idea, but again everything is in the execution and its not the first time we hear such ambitions. That said, Seedcamp and SeedSummit in particular are well on their way into becoming established pan-European platforms that work. Now, that in mind, I believe we should also recognize our unique cultural strengths here in the Nordics and Baltics in building companies. To start we should build a our own distributed network of advisors, funding and investors across the Arctic region that can then easily further tap into the larger European SeedSummit network of knowledge and capital.

To our surprise, we have heard some local players and institutions being protective of their ‘lists’ of angel investors to the extent that they don’t want to share them with fellow investors. That needs to change! It needs to change since this is an effort where everybody wins: The entrepreneurs, the investors and the economy.

To take the first baby step and do what we can do, we have included a new category  into ArcticIndex: Angels. This falls under the category of Investors, which list both venture capital funds as well as angel investors. To get listed there all you need to do is create a personal profile in ArcticIndex and tick a box that says ‘Angel investor’. ArcticIndex is a free wikistyle directory of entrepreneurs, startups and investors for everybody in region to benefit from.

It is beneficial for the entrepreneurs and angel investors to find each other, resulting in better and more quality deal flow for angels and better term sheet for entrepreneurs. Not only that, it is also valuable for the investors to know each other, especially in the seed stage where pooling of investments is not only useful, but many times a requirement to make a meaningful impact. Similarly it is useful for angels to share knowledge on best practices on for example how early and later stage investors can work together. Seedcamp has started something great that makes the region potentially better for all of us. Let’s do our part and make it work for all of us.

If there is something you’d like to see added to the ArcticIndex to make it work better for serving the above purpose, please don’t hesitate to comment or shoot us a mail.

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ArcticEvening Tallinn sold out yesterday, but we decided to add another 50 tickets to the event. The evening will be a very interesting one with 3 entrepreneurs in different stages of their company explaining about the importance of marketing and how it is made successful for the company. You can read more about the event in our previous blog post, but just to sum it up we’ll have Martin Koppel from Fortumo, Petteri Koponen (former Jaiku Co-Founder) from Lifeline Ventures and Kai Lemmetty from Floobs.

The venue for our event is Club Marat at 63 Tartu Maantee, Tallinn. The event starts at 6pm, so don’t be late! Get your ticket with the form below.

Sponsors

Hammarström Puhakka Partners
Hammarström Puhakka Partners, Attorneys Ltd is a law firm specialised in business law. The firm has a good corporate practice with experienced M&A advisers acting constantly for domestic and cross-border clients. Specialists provide M&A services to public and private companies relating to assignments concerning private equity and venture capital transactions. The firm is constantly involved with complex transactions in connection with private equity firms and experienced in advising private equity/venture capital investors in divesting their investments.

Estonian Development Fund
The goal of the Estonian Development Fund activates the venture capital market by investing together with private investors into Estonian companies with international ambition.

SeedBooster is EDF’s virtual incubator for preparing early stage projects for venture financing.

Amiando
Amiando is the worldwide software-as-a-service platform for event management and ticketing. Thei platform serves over 70.000 events worldwide with innovative products like amiando Eventsites, amiando ViralTickets, amiando EasyEntry or amiando EventSense®. Amiando is the official online registration partner for ArcticEvening events.

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Early next month we will go to Tallinn, Estonia to hold our end-of-the-year ArcticEvening in co-operation with OpenCoffee Club Tallinn and Connect Estonia. The event will take place on 3. December and focus on startup marketing. We will hold a panel under the ‘What is marketing for startups and how to do it effectively’

Yet again, we have a solid lineup coming: An experienced serial entrepreneur that have a several exits under his belt and two young guns who are on their way to their fist big hits. See our list of panelist below and figure out who’s who.

The ticket sales are open and the price is the only right one, the tickets are free. Go get yours while they last! We will announce the venue in due course once we get them confirmed.

If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, we suggest you take a look at videos from previous events.

Venue

The event will be held at Club Marat at 63 Tartu Maantee, Tallinn.

The show will kick off at 6pm on the 3rd of December.

Programme

The theme of the evening is “What is marketing for startups and how to do it effectively”. We want to highlight the importance of marketing your startup. Each panelist will give a 10 minutes outline on how they see the marketing in startups and tell about their experiences and best practices. Subsequently we will host a in depth panel that delves into the art of startup marketing. Be prepared for a surprise startup pitch!

Panelists

Martin Koppel, CEO, Fortumo
During the past years Martin Koppel has been involved with sales, marketing and management in different web based start-ups and worked as project manager in IT company.

Martin believes in customer oriented business ideology and is practicing it today as CEO of Fortumo.com – the world’s most open mobile payment platform. Read more about Martin and see our story on Fortumo.

Petteri Koponen, Co-founder, Partner, Lifeline Ventures
Petteri Koponen has founded five companies and successfully exited two. Prior to Lifeline Ventures, he founded the mobile microblogging pioneer Jaiku with Jyri Engestrom. After Google acquired the company on October 2007, Petteri spent two years working in Google’s mobile product and new business development teams in Mountain View and London.

In 1997 Petteri founded First Hop, the leader in mobile value-added service management solutions. Petteri worked as the CEO, CTO, VP of Professional Services and, lastly, board member until the company was acquired by Airwide Solutions on January 2008. Before Jaiku, Petteri was first an adviser and later, being in charge of technology and operations, a member of the initial team of four that bootstrapped Blyk, world’s first ad-funded mobile virtual network operator. Read more about Petteri and see our coverage on Lifeline Ventures (here and here).

Kai Lemmetty, Co-founder, Floobs
Kai Lemmetty has 5 years experience on running technology startup. In addition to his work in startups he likes organizing events like Startup Developers Gathering, Mobile Dev Camp and Slush Helsinki 2008. Kai is also a frequent visitor at numerous industry conferences across the globe and knows the ropes when it comes to guerilla marketing and networking with a shoe string budget. Read more about Kai and see our coverage on Floobs here.

Tickets

Please register to the event using the form below. If you are unable to come, don’t hog the ticket as we have limited amount of space available and we really want to allow everyone to come who wants to come.

Sponsors

Hammarström Puhakka Partners
Hammarström Puhakka Partners, Attorneys Ltd is a law firm specialised in business law. The firm has a good corporate practice with experienced M&A advisers acting constantly for domestic and cross-border clients. Specialists provide M&A services to public and private companies relating to assignments concerning private equity and venture capital transactions. The firm is constantly involved with complex transactions in connection with private equity firms and experienced in advising private equity/venture capital investors in divesting their investments.

Estonian Development Fund
The goal of the Estonian Development Fund activates the venture capital market by investing together with private investors into Estonian companies with international ambition.

SeedBooster is EDF’s virtual incubator for preparing early stage projects for venture financing.

Amiando
Amiando is the worldwide software-as-a-service platform for event management and ticketing. Thei platform serves over 70.000 events worldwide with innovative products like amiando Eventsites, amiando ViralTickets, amiando EasyEntry or amiando EventSense®. Amiando is the official online registration partner for ArcticEvening events.

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This not such a big jump as Petteri worked at Google in a wide variety of roles that gave him an ideal view into what was happening in the market. First Petteri worked at the Android product team and subsequently on Google’s New Business team, which continuously searches for and works with startups that partner with Google. It’s exciting to follow how the Vigo program evolves. At least Lifeline Ventures seem to be already hard at work. Petteri told me that they have already done some investments even though the whole program is just coming together.

Jyri on the other hand told me that after rather intensive three years, first with Jaiku and then with Google, he will use the opportunity to reflect and take his time before the next adventure. Along with traveling and spending time with his family, he told me that he will be helping out a few startups and considering doing some angel investing. He will also be helping out her wife Ulla-Maaria Engeström with her startup, Thinglink, that operates in the design space. (see our story here). Jyri also organized an Open Web workshop here in Helsinki, Finland just recently, bringing Chris Messina with him to Finland to talk about the developments in the Open Web arena. Read their thought provoking article here.

We wish the best of luck for Jyri and Petteri in, as Jyri put it, making meaning and welcome the guys back home to the Arctic region.

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Petteri Koponen

Along with Koponen’s nomination Aito Technologies announced also the nomination of Antti Viitanen to its board of directors.

Both members will be involved in board activities immediately. Other board members are Daniel Blomquist, Jari Mieskonen and Henri Rantalainen. Jorma Heinonen and Carl-Henrik Wallin will step down from the board but will continue as advisors to Aito management.

It is great to see Koponen again active the Finnish startups scene sharing his knowledge and insight by building and scaling companies.  The Nordic scene in general and the Finnish startup scene in particular is missing one ingredient above everything else to rival the general European startups scene let alone the Silicon Valley one. That’s serial entrepreneurs active in the scene who form one of the corner stones of a functioning ecosystem. Koponen’s new post is one step closer towards a healthy Nordic startups ecosystem. Congratulations Aito and Koponen for making this happen!

See Viktoria’s (Tiburon-TV) interview with Petteri Koponen at Slush (below), where Petter tells Jaiku’s story and how it compared to Twitter in the early days when both services launched.

Photo by tanais (CC)

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3. What’s happening to Jaiku today?

Soon after Jaiku community stood up for their service the Jaiku team also woke up and already the next day feeds were back up, even if still a bit slow, and today SMS was also reactivated. The community effectively made itself heard and it worked at least to some extent.

There’s also new feature’s coming for example regarding the API that supports OAuth, but the gravest of the concerns’ has yet to be answered by the Jaiku team, namely when are we going to see these changes happen and especially where is the service going.

Jyri Engeström commented in Jaikido blog way back in August when Jaiku was being ported to Google App Engine, “We appreciate your patience and can’t wait to open up Jaiku to everyone”, but is Google’s corporate wheel too slow to turn and is Google’s silence policy regarding it’s products development slowly pushing the Jaiku community’s patience one step too far?

The same Jaikido blog entry talks about how 3rd party developers will have greater control over the system and can write applications that provide richer features to their users. This clearly shows that there are plans for the future. One could even speculate that Google has all along had a clear plan on what they are going to do with Jaiku. As Antti Akonniemi speculates, ” Jaiku’s location based and phone profile features pre-installed on Google phones could change everything.”

Now, if one wants to see this happening one easily could: Petteri Koponen has been working especifically on Android in Google’s London office, while Jyri Engeström is in Mountainview working on Google’s strategy for the social web. Has Google just waited until Android is ready to ramp up Jaiku development? Then again, last April Teemu Kurppa told (In Finnish) the Finnish crowd that Jaiku was being developed on the Google’s infamous “20% time”. Google would hardly make developers develop the corner stone of it’s mobile strategy on their ‘extra 20%’. Or would it? Jyri’s silence despite the lively conversation and many requests regarding an update on what’s happening could indicate that something’s up.

This is not a new idea, but could the time start to be ripe for the launch as Jaiku’s porting to Google App Engine is nearly finished which allows a rapid uptake of new users, and as Android is fully functioning and just starting to go after market share?

Edit 17.12.2008 at 3.36pm: Jyri Engeström posted today a new blog post in his blog where he carefully tells us about the future of Jaiku. Among other updates he says that “I regard the Jaiku community as friends, and your concern about the future of the service is legitimate. It warrants a response.”

To indicate what is to come, he goes on by saying that they “[...]plan to open up its development to the user community more in the future.” and that “People should be able to post and follow status updates across servers just like they send email. No single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform.”

The best indication on what’s to come is at the end of the blog post. I quote: “In spite of the decision to not throw resources at building Jaiku into an independent Web brand, recall that the acquisition announcement stated that ‘Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users.’ Of course this statement still holds true, and you can bet your Android that there are completely new Wow!’s in store.”

At ArcticStartup we believe that we will soon see something that involves Jaiku’s microblogging model, Android and the Open Stack nicely mixed into a working solution for those handset manufacturers that decide to take upon Google’s open offer.

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Regardless whether the wording was misleading or not, and I’m ready to pull my weight and stand behind the argument I made, what is true is that even if users are leaving Jaiku the service is not dead by no means given the resistance and passion ArcticStartup just witnessed. The users send a loud and clear message that, the ones that are staying with the service are really sticking up for their tight-knit community despite Twitter’s or anyone else’s international dominance.

This makes me very proud to be a fellow Finn as it probably does make the Jaiku founders Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen. They have all the reason to be proud with a community like this. I have never witnessed the power of online community this close, even though some examples across the Atlantic like Facebook Beacon come to mind. Now we only have to make Sergei Brin and Larry Page to understand what kind of dynamic community they are letting to fade. The only wish that the Jaiku community has is to know what is about to happen to their service. @jyri, do you hear us?

Image by Tambako the Jaguar (CC: by-nd)

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Among the Finnish Jaiku community there was talk about migrating to Twitter, a US based micro-blogging site, already a while back when Jaiku was down but yesterday (Link in Finnish) I saw people abandoning the ship in bigger numbers than ever before.

Why I believe this might really be the kiss of death to the Finnish born Jaiku is because I just recently shifted my own usage to become Twitter heavy without knowing about the mass exodus here in Helsinki. This is not due to one service being superior to the other, but due to something as simple as the network effect I got to witness at LeWeb in Paris. So many of my friends outside of Finland are having conversations that are relevant to me in Twitter that I can not afford to not be there.

Before I was adamant that Jaiku is a better service, but now I have come to believe that it’s just different. Where as in Jaiku the users can have long discussions threads (think Gmail), which makes the short postings just starting points of the long winding conversations, in Twitter you can’t but Tweet 140 characters at a time, making the latter service truly more limited. But the beaty of Twitter, I believe, is exactly the limitation and the fact that since it’s limited it scales as a consumable vast stream of information, which you can mold according to your own preferences. In this I mean you can build your own personal filter for the vast amount of information that is generated daily in the web, thus effectively eliminating the spam and following not just what people are explicitly saying but also feeds from news services, blogs, so on and so forth. Leo Laporte just recently touched on the same topic in This Week in Tech. Laporte was also one of the first Silicon Valley luminaries who declared Jaiku as a better service than Twitter.

The mass exodus in Finland has been mainly attributed to the downsides and difficulties that Jaiku is currently having, for example feeds not coming through and a disabled SMS service, but I believe that the bigger reason why Jaiku would eventually lose the race even here in Finland is the potential upside in communicating with the whole world instead of just with other Finns and the odd faithfull foreigner still using the service. That said, Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen built an amazing service and I still hope I see a mass exodus from Twitter back to Jaiku even though I don’t believe that happens.

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For a technology startup this question focuses many times on the issue of whether they should pack their bags and move to the Silicon Valley or whether they should build a strong user base first at home. Another viable option might be to reach out to London, but then again, many think that will only slows you down in your quest to global market share and you should head straight to the eye of the storm where the battle for the critical masses are fought.

This is more of a ongoing conversation than something that can be answered with a clear Yes or No, but here are some thoughts to start with:

1. If you know which market you want to get to think about getting a board member, an advisory board member or an investor from the market. Instead of trying to bombard firms operating in the given market with a requests for shallow partnerships or just opening an office there, by aligning someone’s interest with yours ie. giving them a stake in your success you can instantly tab into their network of contacts. These people already know who are the people you don’t want to work with, because even though someone might have a nice resume they also might have a bad reputation among the local players, which would make your market entry a disaster. And vice versa: They know exactly who are the perfect partners for you and you don’t end up taking the one you happen to know from a Trade Show two years ago. To get these people on board you need to focus, do your research on who is the right fit with you, work hard, dedicate time to it and make the offer really worth their time.
2. For any consumer technology startup, don’t just visit US and get a sales guy in there. Move there permanently for a few years if that’s the market you aim for. And if you’re building the next consumer web service, that is most likely the market you should aim for to get the traction over competitors. That said, you should still cultivate your network back at home so you can also benefit from that and link other firms from back home to your new contacts. This goes for the time of high growth when you’re just building your product, but especially for the time after you have made your millions. You can have a huge advantage by having a network in both ends whether you start another startup or decide turn into an investor.
3. When choosing an investor, you want to be careful for not choosing some small local fund, because they might actually limit your company to reach its full potential since they’ll hold you back in fearing that they might get squeezed out in the later investing rounds. Also, since cycle times for an exit are growing (what was an exit in 5 years, looks more like an exit in 8 years now) you need a big enough fund that can follow up without running out of money.
4. Same goes for advisory board members: Some people active in the Finnish startup scene have voiced their concern about the quality of people present in many of the more informal investor get-togethers. You don’t want some former technology company middle manager from the early 90’s influencing your vision, because they advice you to take the path they are familiar with which more often than not is something different from going global from day one.
5. Even though Silicon Valley is the epicenter of much of the activity in the consumer technology startup world don’t only look at the US. Do see how fertile ground India, China or Asia might be for your product. When they all start to look good, remember to choose your battles. As a startup you have very limited resources and if you’d like to push through you need to focus your efforts.

What else should a startup consider when trying to go international?

Here’s Jaiku founders’ advice on how to choose between London and the Silicon Valley when building a successful startup (original post here)

Photo by oskay (CC:BY).

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The whole thing started when the Zipiko gang shared a taxi from the Nokia House located in Espoo, Finland with Prashant Agarwal, The director of Product Strategy at Fjord.  Prashant Jaikued about it where it was picked up by the Jaiku co-founder Petteri Koponen who proposed that Nokia is about to acquire the small company.

This was enough to start a chain reaction in the Finnish social media and got it really boiling which eventually reached US and at that point it had already crossed over from Jaiku to Twitter. Co-incidentally the Zipiko servers where down just at the time that US was waking up and checking their Twitter feeds for the morning. All this would imply that Zipiko.com had received enough traffic, ignited by the news from the taxi ride, that their servers couldn’t handle it anymore .

Just a week earlier I had been watching Zipiko lead developer’s presentation on Google App Engine that they are using. Knowing that they use the App Engine lets me figure out exactly the amount of traffic that the service received to go down. Google App Engine manages up to 5 million views per month before letting the service go down. Now, that would be a rather remarkable amount of traffic ignited globally by just Jaiku and Twitter messages.

This makes would make a very interesting story if the protagonist herself, the Zipipop* CEO Helene Auramo, wouldn’t have admitted to me that the juicy rumor was just that, a rumor. Also their service was down from some unrelated reason. So it seems that Nokia is not yet going after this Finnish startup.

But the question remains: What did Zipiko do in the Nokia house in the first place?

*Zipiko is an app made by Zipipop and has part of the company working exclusively on it.

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Yesterday we got our 20 invites and Petteri even replied to his Jaiku announcing those invites as “OK, sounds good. Expect some news shortly :)” – we’re on the lookout!

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