MyWidz is a Swedish startup aiming to create a mobile widget community and taking user generated content to the mobile phone. The service is currently in early Beta.

The company plans to tab into the mobile marketing market that they estimate to grow into a 19 billion USD market by 2012. I am not quite as optimistic about the mobile marketing as such, but if done right via an innovative community approach it might yield better results than what have been more traditional approaches, namely blind spamming.

MyWidz is a community service that takes user generated content to the mobile phone by aiming to make development, sharing and collection of widgets easy. WyWidz widgets can be developed by anyone with simple step-by-step widget wizard and then get them send to one’s mobile phone. More advanced users can use MyWidz unique script language to write their widgets from scratch, or use other users widgets as templates.

Before one can start using the service she needs to install a Java client to her phone. For me the client did not work that well as I only got an error message after a several tries. I will keep fiddling with the client on my Nokia N95 and hopefully get to work on my first widget soon, but so far I’ve not seen beyond the MyWidz home page.

That said I did see lots of potentially useful widgets on that home page including a CNN News widget, an Aljazeera News widget, a Weather-Stockholm widget, a UK traffic information widget, and even a Find McDonald’s widget. When the MyWidz guys can push the service beyond the early Beta they are facing tough competition from the likes of Nokia Widsets and Plusmo.

As a market the mobile widget area is as hot as it can get even during economic times like these. Just look at the Apple App Store growth figures. The question is how you can beat Apple in their own game call it a widget or an app, and whether the app market will develop into a centralized or decentralized one over time.

Last Friday, Microsoft launched a new program called Bizspark that offers startups of different ages and stages tools to take care of their software and hosting requirements. Technopolis Ventures, Veraventure, The Finnish Software Entrepeneurs Association and Venture Cup has partnered with Microsoft in Finland to accept participants into the program.

Startups must meet the following requirements to be accepted into the program:

• Be actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core of its current or intended business
• Be privately held
• Be in business for less than 3 years and
• Have less than 1 million USD annual turnover.

Despite being a Mac fanatic, I have to give it to Microsoft for pulling this off. They are sponsoring a wide range of products that suit many companies working in the internet space especially. Also, the packages being offered are tailored for companies in different stages of their growth and thus are also bundled together with their capability to pay for the software.

For more information, visit Microsoft Bizspark. You can also find your partners in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Baltics through this link.

Fruugo is preparing to come out tomorrow afternoon in a keynote (titled maybe a bit exaggeratedly “Meet the most ambitious start up on the planet”) at SIME in Stockholm. Fruugo will explain where the company is coming from, what markets and product categories they will go after, and what are they’re next steps.

Prior to the keynote, Fruugo’s VP Marketing Janne Waltonen today disclosed a few things to ArcticStartup regarding Fruugo’s positioning and go to market strategy.

First of all, the company will focus on physical products in the beginning, concentrating on the favorite products of online shopping like books, records, games, clothing, electronics, etc. Fruugo is running a closed Beta at the moment with a few tens of retailers and consumers, and they are starting an invitation beta in January targeted to consumers.

The first three online shopping segments they’re targeting will be a) early adapters of social media and online shopping, b) pregnant women and mothers with babies, and c) outdoor sports enthusiasts (say diving, hunting, fishing etc.). The first is pretty self evident, the second two have been selected because of the unique characteristics in their online shopping behavior, based on extensive amount of research and focus groups. Waltonen explained pregnant women and recent mothers value, and are very active with, social relationships, product recommendations, comparisons, and have a huge need for detailed product information on the web. In the outdoor segment there are likewise very active communities formed around certain sports, with the habit of using web extensively for information and purchases.

Fruugo will start from the Finnish and Swedish markets, then expanding to key markets elsewhere in the Central and Western Europe. Waltonen commented Fruugo doesn’t t have direct competitors as such, and most of the players concerned with Fruugo entering their space could actually rather be quite interesting partners (like Kelkoo and other product comparison sites for example).

Regarding the recent rumors, Janne Waltonen set straight they’ve indeed done some adjusting on the cost structure, somewhat due to the economical environment, but much due they being done with heaviest R&D and are moving more into more operational structure now, which has eliminated a few roles. Anyway, Waltonen told Fruugo’s own workforce has been reduced less than 10%, in addition to terminating some consulting and outsourcing contracts. Some of the rumors out there are quite off the scale from their point of view (like their rumored private jet), but they haven’t wanted to spend time commenting all of that before their phase of more active PR starting from tomorrow.

Apparently Fruugo’s got something working already, as Waltonen told he’s actually already bought and received all his Christmas presents using the company’s service. We (and Santa) look forward to hearing more tomorrow.

Saplo’s founder and CEO Mattias Tyrberg tipped us that Saplo, the Swedish semantic text processing technology firm, and a winner of Seedcamp, is going to participate in two VC events in California (previous coverage of Saplo). While in the area, Mattias and Fredrik Hörte from Saplo will also visit a few big firms like Google and Facebook, and look for other potential partners, customers, and investors.

The first event is Mini Seedcamp, which aims to give the startups a chance to meet face-to-face with the local startup and investor scene, and discuss anything from their product to investments. Seedcamp hopes to give the Valley folks better understanding of European startups, and show the participating European startups the US entrepreneurship culture in action, and help them connect with advisors and mentors.

Another event is organized by Invest in Sweden Agency North America (ISA). ISA has gathered a delegation of 20 Swedish early stage wireless, IT, electronics, and internet startups seeking risk capital, and takes them in front of some of the biggest VC firms in the US. The event takes place tomorrow November 11th in Menlo Park, CA. ISA is reporting to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and markets Sweden, its industry clusters, funds and individual businesses to North American companies and investors.

Here’s another startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum couple of week ago in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

Mobispine, a Swedish startup founded in in 2005, delivers mobile Internet and messaging services.

The company provides services for operators and end-users. The services include eSMS (Executive Short Message System) service enabling users to send messages from PCs to mobile phones and aggregation of news and content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) based news reader.

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