I attended the Parteco picnic today, organised by Katri Lietsala and Esa Sirkkunen, who ran the Participatory Economy and Beyond -research project. It was a good event with old media companies slowly turning to social media (which I have to say shouldn’t be done only for social media’s sake).

I also heard some good rumours regarding the Finnish startup scene. First of all, regarding Dopplr - Marko Ahtisaari, Lisa Sounio and Taneli Tikka have left, or are leaving the company to continue to new challenges. Taneli Tikka is currently very active with his new startup RunToShop, which is creating some buzz among Finnish startups. The moves at the moment are not official, but there is a lot of buzz around that.

Juha Huttunen of Tripsay was also nodding towards August with regards to their official launch. Therefore we’ll have to wait a few more months before we will be able to see the service they are coming out with. I understand they are currently making final moves towards the launch.

Last, but not least - rumour or not - the Iron Sky movie, followup to the largest Finnish movie ever distributed - StarWreck, will be launched in 2010. Currently the script is being finetuned for the “investment round” that will be a few million euros and that will begin during the end of this year.

However, there was a lot of positive talk among the startups there regarding various issues and I also received a lot of great ideas regarding our next event.

There will be a special startup developers get together event in Helsinki on May 22. The purpose of the event is to exchange knowledge about technologies and conventions touching startup developers, and also to demonstrate students “how cool it is to run and work in a startup”.

There’s quite a good bunch of startup speakers participating, including Lare Lekman, CTO of Star Wreck Studios, Jani Luostarinen, System Administrator at Floobs, Joakim Achren, founder and CEO of Ironstar Helsinki (MoiPal service), and Taro Morimoto, CTO of Zipipop. After the afternoon event there will be an evening party as well, place to be declared later.

The event will take place on Thursday, May 22, starting at 1pm at HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science in Helsinki. Check out the detailed agenda and enrollment on Yahoo upcoming or Facebook.

If you can’t make it, you can see the live stream from Floobs. Sponsors are also sought after, so if you’re interested, contact Kai Lemmetty @Floobs.