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.

Editorial note: We’re publishing Kristoffer’s report from Seedcamp as they made it to the semi-finals for screening. Depending on the feedback we’ll see if we should make this a habit in the future as well. Please let us know in the comments. Thanks to Kristoffer for an excellent report!

On the left two founders from Uniki, Teemu and Tuomas from Scred and Adil and Anthony from Entrip.

Last week we got fantastic news. Scred had been shortlisted as one of only about 40 companies to be interviewed by Seedcamp’s distinguished panel — a group of prestigious international VCs. Considering that several hundred companies, from all around Europe (and even some from outside) had applied, this was huge for us. In fact Scred is the first Finnish company to make it that far, and was one of only two Nordic companies present.

Read More »

TripSay, a Finnish social travel service that gives its users destination recommendations based on other users’ travels whose profile matches theirs, launches for the public tonight at 12am (Standard GMT+2; Summer GMT+3). Already earlier on they got TechCrunched among other news.

The service has clear and intuitive design and all the features that you’d expect from a such service, thus everything seems to be in place as long as the idea in itself will work. The make-or-brake question is whether TripSay can attract travelers beyond the web savvy kind that sign up to anything and everything new just to try it out and the travel industry professionals looking to fill their own guides.

In the larger sceme of things the success of TripSay like travel services depend on individuals’ desire to share their travel insights. Not purely locations where travelled, but real insights. In other words, whether such social travel services will take-off comes down to travelers’ ability to see more value in the service than they do in the Lonely Planet brigade after the initial Wow. It’s a debate worth having: Whether people in general want to share the real gems home and away, and whether the frequent travelers want to channel the entire Ryanair or EasyJet fleet to that little cozy street cafe that has the best cinnamon rolls in the planet where they like to visit every time they fly via Budabest. In the short term perhaps for while, but long term is tricky.

The service might be good at recommending you destinations (which is nice in itself), but I personally want to know what to do and where to go when I get there. The point is this:  Photos (think Flickr) might increase in value when shared with a close circle of friends the more they comment on them, but a small cafe or a restaurant let alone a secret powdery slope in Chamonix or Whistler hardly will in the same manner; you need the critical mass to benefit from the TripSay’s service since not all your friends have travelled where you’re going and when opened up to the larger public the venues only move from authentic and cozy to touristy and over crowded. Can TripSay draw a balance between not too much and just enough?

If TripSay can pull the trick and get people to come back to share their insights, I will never use Lonely Planet with it’s dedicated editors again. As an enthusiastic traveler myself I am eager to the see the kinds of locations it recommends to me and how the service manages to attract people to do exactly that.

TripSay adds groups to its service, continueing on the strong community path. With groups, users of the service can more easily see what their peers in the same group are doing. Users can also add certain places to different groups.

Juha Huttunen, the CEO, commented groups in the following manner; “We added groups because they are a crucial element for finding people that share the same travel passions. With groups it is now again easier to find tips related to your interest. You can now easily find the places and tips recommended by e.g. fellow surfers or party animals. You can also create your own group with just friends too.”

With regards to their moving out of private beta, Juha Huttunen did not reveal all that much. The list of todo-items isn’t apparently all that long - I’m guessing they are in the final stages of fine tuning code and sorting out the communications things with regard to getting everything in-sync. The launch date is still unsure, but we’re guessing that its set for August.

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.