As mentioned before in the summary of events for spring 2010, we will be organising three ArcticEvenings this spring. The show will most likely kick off with an ArcticEvening in Helsinki in April followed by ArcticEvenings in Tallinn and Stockholm most probably in May and June respectively. However, this time I thought it would be great to hear your ideas regarding the events and what kind of events you would like to participate this spring.
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We’ve been looking closely at the startup scene in the Nordics and Baltics for the last two and a half years and I have to say, the amount of events on the market these days is very attractive. There are a lot of different kind of events and I’m sure there’s something for everyone. While these events have their own functions and drive their own agendas, there’s no getting round it – they’re great fun and will surely improve your business if not by any other means than at least by networking with the other visitors there.
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If the writing style of the posts at ArcticStartup.com would be processed and analyzed by an AI algorithm, what would be the outcome? Read on and you will find out the answer and get an update about interesting Swedish startups that are using AI techniques to improve the automated understanding of the ever-growing web content out there. This is the future so be sure to get a grasp of the basics right now. Continue reading »
On Monday night Squace hosted the first of a new generation of Mobile Monday events in Stockholm. The evening featured pitches by 6 young companies in the mobile space, followed by commentary from an expert panel of tech. journalists, investors, and senior members of the tech. community. After the presentation, attendees were asked to vote on the most interesting company, with the winner getting a nomination for the Mobile Peer Award at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This nomination carries some weight, since last years nomination, PopCatcher, went on to win the special jury award.
The following is a quick rundown of the companies that presented last night, and who will be representing Stockholm in Barcelona next month. Continue reading »
The tickets for our next week’s ArcticEvening are now available for booking. Please find the sign-up form for registering to the event below. Note that if you are unable to make it to the event, please don’t sign up. We have a limited amount of space available and would like to get everyone on board. Likewise, if you need to cancel for any reason, please inform us at events(at)arcticstartup.com so that we can reallocate the ticket.
Expect a house filled with like-minded entrepreneurial people, and lots of networking. We will start off with a brief presentation from Jaycut and continue with an interesting panel discussion. See the Stockholm event page for details. If you haven’t been to ArcticEvenings before, have a look at videos from our previous events.
So sign up below and come spice up our wonderful mix of people!
Our second ArcticEvening this year in Stockholm will be held on 18th of November 2009.
The theme of the evening will be Mobile smartphone solutions and trends – how to strategically build business around the different native application platforms and mobile web.
Discussion around delivering content and servics to Android, iPhone, Symbian, and different app stores is stirring up the mobile industry, and there are lots of different views on how to approach the smartphone market. In our evening’s panel discussion, we have representation from three firms: one that provides their service using mobile web browser and SMS solution (Traveas), another that uses a native application to complement otherwise “app-less” service (Rebtel), and third a cloud computing firm making it possible to access your documents and virtual computer on any device over-the-air (Cloudo). Each of the firm will surely bring interesting viewpoints into the discussion.
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Bloglovin’, the Stockholm based startup that is making reading RSS feeds easier, has redesigned their site and added a bunch of improvements while doing so. Mattias Swenson, an active player in the Nordic startup scene and a co-founder of Bloglovin’, got in touch with us and told us about the improvement. Mattias told us that the facelift was mainly done for usablity purposes and I have to agree, the new site looks a lot better and intuitive. The layout of the new site can be seen at the end of this post.
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ArcticStartup with its passion for entrepreneurship is media partnering with the Entrepreneurship Forum in Stockholm, Sweden. The Entrepreneurship Forum initiative, co-founded by Daniel Blomquist at Creandum, aims to promote entrepreneurship and create a meeting place for everyone (students, entrepreneurs, investors) interested in entrepreneurship.
The topic at this second annual event is How to Monetize Digital Content and they’ve got a really interesting set up for panel including absolute top players pushing the new Internet economy forward.
Henrik Torstensson (SVP Stardoll and General Manager Piczo), Sorosh Tavakoli (CEO Videoplaza) and Ted Valentin (annonskartan, sushikartan etc.).
More reading on Stardoll, Videoplaza and Ted Valentin here at ArcticStartup.
Ville is coming over to moderate the panel so get ready for some good time and great insights!
See you there!
TechCrunchTalk Nordic was held yesterday in Stockholm. The event was sold out and gathered many familiar faces from the startup and VC communities for panel discussions, presentations and pitches followed by drinks and networking.
The panels and presentations had a good mix of representatives from the entire region and discussed topics covering the Nordic and Baltic startup and VC culture. In my opinion the most memorable message sent was by Pär-Jörgen Pärsson from the VC firm Northzone Ventures. He presented some hard figures and facts just to state how the Nordics is the best exit market in the world with 36% exit rate, Skype excluded. So – the startups in the Nordics rock!
The Swedish travel startup Traveas is going public – it will be listed on AktieTorget, the stock exchange for developing companies. They will be offering Traveas stock for the public between 7th of May and 25th of May. Trading with Traveas stock will begin on 26th of June. Traveas pre-money valuation is at 17,5M SEK (1,65M €)
We had a brief chat with Jack Melcher-Claësson, co-founder of Traveas about the listing. Jack told us that there are basically two factors in why this new stock emission is interesting. Firstly, as we told in the title Traveas will become a public company. Secondly, the reason for them gathering up money is the need to be able to run faster in the European market. Their press release tell us that they are looking for an investment around 3,5 M SEK (330k€).
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Update 4.5. at 16.20: After publishing the post on TestFreaks we heard that the company might have recently let several people go and currently run on ‘founder team’. We contacted the company to clarify and got the following response from TestFreaks CEO, Kristofer Arwin:
Testfreaks, a Swedish based product reviewing site has slowly been gathering attention. It caught our eye from ArcticIndex. Testfreaks can be summed up to be the aggregator of review sites. It pulls in material from more than 4000 sources from 27 markets and aggregates those into one rank – Freak Score.
I had a chat with Honour in the ArcticEvening Stockholm in the beginning of April and got interested in their solution for a pretty regular mobile data use – e-mail. While many studies have shown that e-mail is the most popular mobile data use, there are still millions of people outside mobility of e-mail.
I decided to share this with you and resorted to their domain and did an e-mail interview with Honour after I got back to Helsinki. If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments section – I’ll let Honour know there are people interested in knowing more.
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Not only did we held a very succesfull ArcticEvening event in Stockholm last week, we are also very exited to announce that Paula Marttila will join our editorial board from Stockholm, Sweden.
Paula is an online strategist who loves Jaiku and all electronics with an Apple logo. A Finn living in Sweden. She’s also survivor of the 24 Hour Business Camp and co-organizer of the Geek Girl Meetup in Stockholm, Sweden. Previously she spent eight years on developing online media and payment services at Aftonbladet, the largest daily newspaper in Sweden. At the moment she’s helping out at Swedish Skincare System.
Paula will direct most of her attention on what is happening in the Swedish startup scene since she knows the ins and outs of the scene. Paula is a great addition to the team as currently we are slightly Finland heavy, but now Paula will balance the game. Warm welcome to the team Paula! We’re lucky to have you.
If you think you have a startup based in Sweden and think you are the next big thing, register your startup at ArcticIndex (here) and then email Paula at info[at]arcticstartup.com and write your company name followed by Sweden on the subject line and she will take a close look at what you’re cooking.
Last week we held our 6th pan-regional ArcticEvening event in Stockholm, Sweden. It was yet again a big success. We had a packed house, an amazing panel on Startups and The Future of Mobile with Gustav Söderström of Spotify, Teemu Kurppa of Huikea and Morris Packer of The Bonnier Group and people enjoyed their time. We want to thank our sponsors for making the event possible: Thank you to our trusted startup friendly law firm Hammarström Puhakka Partners, Sombiz and The Borneo Family.
We also want to thank everybody who showed up and who we met during the trip. We loved city and atmosphere and were amazed by the number of quality people you can met during one night. We’ll be sure to be back in Stockholm before the year it out.
You can find photos of the event here and see the video below. Also find clips by Bambuser here. Continue reading »
Due to a absolutely overwhelming demand we have issued 20 new tickets (here) to our 6th pan-regional event taking place in Stockholm, in the Obaren (map) on the 2nd April from 6pm to 9pm. Taking into consideration the size of the venue we cannot issue more than 20 new tickets. If you have a ticket, do let us know ASAP if you can’t make it and we’ll be able to reallocate your ticket. Thanks.
The evening’s theme will be startups and the future of mobile. Come and hear what’s hot in mobile, where we are going, what’s in store for the future and where does the biggest opportunities for mobile startups lie.
Make sure you’ll show up if you get a ticket (they are free!), or you’ll end up on our black list which means there’s no coming to our events in the future.
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Biovakka Suomi Oy 
BitbarHelsinki, Wroclaw, Oulu, Cambridge
