Holy Startup! Swedes Convert Former Church Into A Center For Entrepreneurship
Swedish entrepreneurs can now start reaching for truly divine heights as a former Greek Orthodox Church in the city of Stockholm has been converted into a full-blown, multifunctional coworking space for startups.
The Entreprenörskyrkan (Entrepreneurs Church) hosts 300 square meters of open plan office space with two conference rooms, a telephone room and a small kitchen. For 3600 SEK a month (ex. VAT), startups receive everything from basic utilities to furniture, wireless broadband and cleaning, not to mention invaluable help and advice from fellow startups. The church currently houses 15 companies but there’s room for about 30 office slots altogether.
PayPal To Test NFC Payments In Stockholm
According to Mobile Payments Today, Paypal is testing a NFC payment system in Stockholm at two retailers, Alpingaraget and Webhallen. The new app, called PayPal Instore, uses NFC stickers affixed to smartphones to enable purchases. After downloading the app, customers just need to swipe their phone over the terminal to display and confirm the purchase.
Nordic Startups: A New Accelerator Program For Web And Mobile Startups In Sweden
Nordic Startups, a brand new accelerator program for Swedish web and mobile startups, will soon start its operations in Stockholm. According to the accelerator's representatives, the program will be modeled after some of the world’s leading accelerators, such as TechStars, YCombinator and Seedcamp.
Nordic Startups plans to take in six new startups every three months. During each three-month period, the accelerator will provide startups with in-depth coaching, mentoring, office space, and a fun and enriching work environment. The program is largely based on lean startup methodology and includes an investor demo day as well.
Future Female + ArcticStartup Pre-Christmas Party December 1st
Mark it down in your calendar - December 1st. That's the day we will be throwing a little pre-Christmas party together with Future Female. The event will take place in Siltanen, Hämeentie 13B here in Helsinki, Finland. The event is expected to kick-off at around 6pm. Even though, the event is free we'd like you to sign-up with a form that will be provided at a later date. To learn more about signing up to the event, join the Future Female facebook page. This is also the first time Future Female events are open for men.
Notes From Stockholm's 24 Hour Business Camp
This is a guest post by Pejman Dashti (@pejman), Chief Elk of Swedish startup (and Arctic15 finalist) 46elks. Read more about his daily activities at his startup blog.
Sweden is the land of entrepreneurship. Though the population is rather small, the rate of innovation makes it to the top of the list in the world. Over the last five years, the entrepreneurship ecosystem has been flourished much more and now there are more monthly events, mingles and conferences for entrepreneurs. This post is my short notes for one of the famous events called 24 hour business camp.
Rebtel Launched A Lot More Than Just Free iPhone Calling
A couple of weeks ago we covered Rebtel and their improvement to their iPhone application. Little did we know that last week they came out officially with a whole lot more than just free calls between iPhone users, as we titled the post. Rebtel has announced some cool new technologies to their application as well as making the free calls platform independent.
Well Done Arctic Valley!
The startup ecosystem in the Arctic Valley (pardon us for our selfish term) hasn't always been a very well functioning one. Not that it is extremely functioning today, we're increasingly getting more evidence that the world is noticing your startups, your efforts and most importantly - your passion to change the world.
This week Wired UK wrote a piece on the hottest startup cities in Europe. Three of the nine startup cities in the outlined story are from the region; Tallinn, Stockholm and Helsinki.
CityFinder: 360° Visual Tours Of Places
Many apps and browser-based maps help you find your way around a town and discover its attractions. You can always check what places visually look like with Google Maps but that does not (yet) apply to indoors areas. CityFinder from Stockholm, Sweden built a new service on top of Google Maps that offers a 360° tour of indoor and outdoor locations of interest like restaurants, museums, shopping malls, hotels and various other attractions. So far the map has only been built for Stockholm but Oslo and Copenhagen would be covered next.
Stockholm Partners With CrowdCulture To Fund Culture
CrowdCulture is a new initiative in Sweden, which looks to bring a new way of creating culture. The concept combines private money together with public money to fund the creation of culture. It works in a simple way. There are projects in the service, which individuals can fund, the public will then double all the private money in the fund to bring more leverage.
Aalto Venture Garage Launches Startup Sauna
Aalto Venture Garage is launching Startup Sauna, which includes a month long tour around the Baltic rim to promote a new kind of startup acceleration program called Startup Sauna. Startup Sauna is direct continuum to the Summer of Startups program as well as the Bootcamp initiatives the venue organised last year. The program has been put in place to help pre-seed startups succeed through better mentorship of serial entrepreneurs as well as investors. What's best, it's open to all startups from the region.
Alternative To Company Valuation For Startups
Guest post by Andy Cars, the founder and CEO of Seedcap AB based in Stockholm. Seedcap AB help entrepreneurs and start-ups to raise capital. You can read Andy's previous post on the 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Often Make When Raising Capital here. Here Andy talks about an alternative to locking-up your valuation too early.
Many entrepreneurs that seek external capital to finance their startups often find the valuation of their companies difficult. How do I know what my company is worth? Moreover, by its very nature the founder often believes his company to be worth more than what the investor is prepared to accept, which in the end leaves the founder without a deal.
VCs: Excel And Follow Your Passion
ArcticEvening Stockholm took place last night in Obaren, Sturehof despite being organised on the same date with Sweden playing against San Marino in football. The event was very high profile due to the panelists, having put in energy to come to Obaren from all over the Baltic region.
ArcticEvening Stockholm - 7th of September
ArcticEvening Stockholm is just around the corner! We have a very good lineup for Stockholm in order and honestly speaking, I hope we could have this panel in Tallinn and Helsinki as well.
Our theme for Stockholm will be Venture Capital and its state in the Nordics and Baltics.
Part of the questions will be provided by the moderator, but this time we'll try something new as well. Since we have the top venture capital companies of the region in our panel - we want to open up the possibility for the community to ask your questions as well. Therefore, do leave your questions in the comments of this post and we'll pick the best and most suitable ones.
Crowdsourcing Ideas For ArcticEvenings
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.
Summary Of Some Of This Spring's Startup Events
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.
What Can AI Startups Tell You About Your Website?
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.
Event Report: Mobile Monday
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.
ArcticEvening Stockholm Tickets Now Available
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!
ArcticEvening Stockholm On November 18th
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.
Bloglovin' Redesigns For The Ladies
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.
Entrepreneurship Forum Panel On Monetizing Digital Content
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!
New Startup Faces At TechCrunch Talk Nordic
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!
Traveas Goes Public On AktieTorget
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€).
Testfreaks - What's Your Product's Freak Score?
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.
Interview With Honour Pearson Of MoMail
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.
Paula Marttila, Welcome On-Board
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.
ArcticEvening Was A Blast - Thank You Stockholm!
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.
20 More Tickets To ArcticEvening in Stockholm
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.
ArcticEvening Stockholm Tickets Now Available
Tickets are now available (here) to our 6th pan-regional event taking place in Stockholm, in the Obaren (map) on the 2nd April from 6pm to 9pm. 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. SOLD OUT!
ArcticEvening in Stockholm, Sweden - Startups And The Future Of Mobile
ArcticStartup will be hosting its 6th pan-regional event in Stockholm, in the Obaren (map) on the 2nd April from 6pm to 9pm. The evening’s theme will be startups and the future of mobile which is as topical it gets now when iPhone is pushing the industry forward in everything it does, bloggy.se is gaining ground from Jaiku across the region and Spotify is busy building its mobile version. Come and hear what's where we are going, what's in store for the future and where does the biggest opportunities for mobile startups lie.
Just as before, the structure of the evening will take into account the wishes of participants from earlier events. We have been asked to leave more time for networking, but have a solid panel in middle. Thus, we will have one panel with industry heavy weights and the rest of the evening will be left for networking and discussions between participants. Each panel participant will have a chance to introduce themselves before the panel.
They say best things in life are free and so is ArcticEvening (watch a short video on the event here), but we will still have a sign-up system to the event, which we will be opening on the 16th March at 9am (GMT+1 ie. Swedish local time) . Without exceptions, the tickets have sold out extremely fast, so make sure you are here to get your ticket. We are able to host the event free of charge for participants due to our wonderful sponsors. Our sponsors are presented below.
Panelists
Morris Packer, The Bonnier Group
Morris Packer, born 1962 i New York and living in Europe since 1968, continues to cross borders. With more than 15 years within the media industry he has closely followed the evolution from desk top publishing to the mobile web. With a slightly Faustian relationship to technology he loves print and always has a new gadget to show. Since April Fools Day 2004 he runs the department of Bonnier Mobile Services that provides know-how and technology to all brands within The Bonnier Group.
Teemu Kurppa, Co-founder, Huikea / Ex-Jaiku (Google)
Teemu Kurppa is the co-fouder of Huikea, a mobile startup still in a stealth mode. Before co-founding his own startup he was part of the founding team of Jaiku, a microblogging service that was acquired by Google in 2007. After leaving Google last fall Teemu came back to Finland to found Huikea that he now runs. Teemu is an experienced mobile developer having over 6 years experience of developing end-user mobile applications.
More panelists will be announced in due course.
Sponsors
Our event is made available by our Sponsors. Do take time to get to know them - they are one of the most interesting organisations in the industry. We hand pick our sponsors to bring value to the evenings - these guys are truly worth your time.
Sombiz
Sombiz is a Social Media Business Network of Finnish social media & Web 2.0 companies, research institutions, and other organisations and individuals operating in the field of social media.
Sombiz provides a network for organisations to collaborate, learn from each other, and create partnerships. By connecting business with research Sombiz is stimulating the creation of new innovations. The ultimate goal for Sombiz is to find new business opportunities and help companies to grow and go international.
Sombiz operates as a thematic network of the Finnish Digibusiness Cluster and is a part of the government funded Centre of Expertise Programme (OSKE). In 2008 the building of the Sombiz network was selected as the national “OSKE Top Project”. The project is funded by the Ministry of Employment and the Economy.
The background organisation of Sombiz is Technology Centre Hermia Ltd.
Sombiz is a Finnish-based network operating internationally. The strategy of Sombiz is a “BUGC” approach: linking Business, Universities, Government, and Communities in order to build and boost the social media business ecosystem.
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.
