MindTrek Finalists Have Been Chosen
MindTrek Startup Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The following companies made the cut (in alphabetical order):
Floobs
HammerKit
MahShelf
One Did It
RunToShop
Star Wreck Studios
TripSay
Zipipop
There will be eight finalist in total in the pitch competition and each startup will have 6 minute pitch to present to the high profile jury. Read more about the Startup Launchpad here.
Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!
The free bus ride for startups to the MindTrek and back from Helsinki on 8.-9.10.2008 will depart 8.10. Wednesday morning at 7.15am in fron of Kiasma (the bus has MindTrek sign on it).
The bus will head back to Helsinki on 9.10. Thursday at 4pm departing in front of Hotel Rosendahlin at Tampere. If you want to come along contact Hanne Lehtola at hanne.lehtola [at] culminatum.fi
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.
There should still be plenty of room in the bus, so drop Hanne a mail and come along.
Star Wreck Studios gathering attention abroad
Star Wreck Studios, an open source movie making platform or rather a community of passionate movie loving individuals that produced the Star Wreck, a movie with eight million downloads from all around the world, has been featured in the VentureBeat.
The article is quite thorough in explaining what Star Wreck Studios is doing and it sounds very promising indeed, even though already the first comment to the actual article questioned the long term prospects of the open source movie making model. I am sure all open source models have their own problems and hurdles to over come but just like with the software business I believe the model can be made to work better than most of the industry heavy weights can predict. After all, it is hard to argue with eight million downloads achieved with a mere $20,000.
Regardless of the Star Wreck Studios' operating model's credentials it is absolutely fantastic to see another Finnish startup featured in a media such as the VentureBeat. Now, I suspect that Star Wreck Studios' board member and a personal friend of mine Peter Vesterbacka had something to do with the fact that VentureBeat's reporter Tanja Aitamurto took note and eventually wrote the piece. I'd hope more people that have similar connections to the Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley or even to the Silicon Roundabout in London would recognize the opportunities and contact the promising Nordic start-ups and start evangelize them on their trips over seas or over the canal. If such a culture would born it would benefit everybody, not least the evangelists themselves.
Going back to the article, here's a few tidbits that I found particularly interesting:
Star Wreck Studios isn’t just about collaborative movie making, it’s also about collaborative movie viewing. [...] For example, if you’re watching a horror flick, as a part of the plot, your phone rings, and when you answer, the person on the other end of the line is the main character of the movie.[...]
[Peter Vesterbacka] says that the goal for the project is to wreck the Hollywood model of film making.
[...]
“StarWreck easily generated more than 10 times return. The numbers are small, but the cost, $20,000, was minimal as well”, Vesterbacka says. “And when your movie costs only 20K to make, you don’t need to have an audience of millions or tens of millions to reach your goals. But if you spent a hundred million on the production, the expectations for the size of the audience grows, too.”
[...]
Star Wreck Studios is bootstrapped so far, and the company is hoping to get a first round of funding in a year and some angel led funding in the next few months.
We here at ArcticStartup are fans already and looking forward to Star Wreck Studios' future productions. Let us know if you know any other promising open source projects going on in the Nordics. We'd love to hear what else is cooking on the open source front.
