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.

The event venue is the as before, Obaren (map). The show starts at 6:00 pm.

Our panelists for the evening are:

• Jack Melcher-Claësson, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, Traveas.
  Jack is an Internet loving entrepreneur, a proud family father, a football freak (soccer, that is) and the co-founder of Traveas. Traveas have developed a service called TravelPlanner that automatically provides a traveller with all relevant information about a journey as a personalized mobile itinerary, accessible on all mobile phones. Traveas was founded in 2007, went public last spring in and is now listed on AktieTorget.
  Before Traveas, Jack was the CEO of Torget.se, one of Sweden’s largest E-Commerce portals. After an exit he became Manager for the business area E-Commerce within the European Directories Swedish operation. Before that Jack was Online Sales Manager Nordic for MTV Europe for 5 years, and he has around 10 additional years within media and sales. Jack has also been the Chairman of the jury within TRIP (Travel Industry in Progress) for three years. See our coverage on Traveas.
• Viktor Björk, Spin Doctor and Strategic Partnerships, Cloudo .
  Viktor is the former CEO of The Chimney Pot in Stockholm, Moscow and Dubai. Today, he works at Cloudo with the title Spin Doctor and Strategic Partnerships. Viktor is also involved in the Swedish film camera manufacturer Ikonoskop. Cloudo is a free computer that lives on the Internet, right in your web browser. This means that you can access your documents, photos, music, and all other files no matter where you are, from any computer or mobile phone. See our coverage on Cloudo.
• Hjalmar Winbladh, Founder and Chairman, Rebtel.
  Hjalmar is a Swedish serial entrepreneur. Currently he acts as the Chairman of Rebtel, which he co-founded in 2006, and led as CEO until September 2009. Rebtel offers its users the chance to make low cost international mobile-to-mobile or mobile-to-landline calls. The company also just launched an iPhone application and are looking into other mobile platforms. Hjalmar’s previous venture was mobile Internet services pioneer Sendit AB, which he and co-founder Jonas Lindroth took public in 1997. Sendit was acquired in 1999 for $128 million by Microsoft where Winbladh served as general manager of Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Business Unit until 2002. Rebtel received Red Herring 100 Europe Award in 2007. See our coverage on Rebtel.

How do you get in?
The tickets will become available for booking on our site on Wednesday the 11th of November at 12pm Swedish time.  The event is free of charge, but due to limited space we require you to register in advance.

You can read more on the event at the event page. We’ll update it as the tickets become available.

Sponsors

Our event is made possible by our Sponsors and because of them, we’re able to provide the tickets free of charge. Please, do take some time to get to know them.

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.

Amiando

Amiando is the worldwide software-as-a-service platform for event management and ticketing. Thei platform serves over 70.000 events worldwide with innovative products like amiando Eventsites, amiando ViralTickets, amiando EasyEntry or amiando EventSense®.

Amiando is the official online registration partner for ArcticEvening events.

A symptom of this is the social media consultants of all kinds that supposedly give advice the companies that have been hit to get their head around what the social Internet really means for them. Unfortunately very few of these social media experts advising the companies really understand what a more social Internet means, where it’s going and what’s its real promise for the whole civilization in the long run (more on this in the video below). There’s more to social Internet than creating Product pages for companies on Facebook, telling them they need to be on Twitter and hiring students to become community managers.

Now, in all honesty I wouldn’t be really that concerned if social media experts, PR people or advertising folks don’t understand where the web is going, since it really wouldn’t be the first time. What is significant though, is that developers and startups building on the various building blocks understand the implications and can make educated choices.

I sat down with Chris Messina, a prominent open web advocate, in San Francisco to talk about where he thinks the social web is currently at, what challenges he sees it is facing and where he would like it ultimately to progress. It’s a lengthy video, but worth a watch since the issues Chris talks about are only going to increase in importance for all of us. While you’re at it, see also the seminal piece Chris and Jyri Engeström wrote for ArcticStartup a while back.

The work that Chris started to do in the US starts getting traction also here in the Northern Europe. Probably not least due to the workshop that Chris and Jyri organized in Helsinki a while back. This Saturday (yes, that’s tomorrow!) Mike Bradshaw organizes an OpenWebCamp for all interested (sign up here). I hope we will see the smart people putting up similar events soon across the other Nordic and Baltic countries. Just as Chris says in the video below, ‘all the really good ideas and innovations need to be localized’ and its up to the rest of us to do it in the case of the social web. Finland is starting tomorrow with the workshop. I’m hoping to see similar events soon take place across the Northern Europe.

Do you know how much energy a data centre uses per year? No? Well, let me tell you that a data centre can use up to 40 times more energy than a conventional office building, thus most data centres start to automatically look for ways to cut down on energy costs. To look for renewable energy sources would be a first, smart step for any data centre to cut down on energy-related emissions and become greener. However, today most data centers which claim to be “green” do not actually use renewable energy to run their servers, they do purchase so-called carbon credits. Its a cheap way to claim to be green while not actually doing anything to improve your environmental performance.

Verne Global will differ in a number of ways. For example they plan to use the abundant hydro and geothermal power of Iceland to power their wholesale data center facility. Iceland also offers plenty of free cooling, which the facility will utilize to cool its server halls. They’re building it on a former Nato base, which is relatively save from earthquakes and other natural disasters. The building is being constructed to meet the Golden and Platinum LEED standard, and the company is a member of The Green Grid so all-in-all a thought out concept.

Verne Global wasn’t too open about their clients, but hinted that they will be found in the Fortune 200. Two minority investors, Novator and General Catalyst have invested in the venture, and they’re not looking for further ones at the moment. For those who need to know what Tier the facility will be, it is Tier 3 so if you have very high security needs you need to look somewhere else.

I like the idea of a truly green data center. Iceland seems like a good location with its abundant hydro and geothermal power sources, and the use of natural cooling. While they might be the first truly green wholesale data center facility, there are already a number of truly green web hosts out there. What’s positive is that Verne Global will be able to offer power pricing stability of up to 20 years, and that they can deliver the environmental benefits of the center to their customers at a lower cost than traditional data centers located in cities like for example New York, Berlin, and London. They were also open and told me that currently they only source 20% from geothermal sources, but look to increase that number over time. The facility will go online in 2010, so if you’re looking for a new home for your servers give Verne Global a ring.

Record labels bought a big chunk of Spotify last October for 100 000 Swedish Crowns, which is less than 10 000 euros. This has thought to be the reason why Spotify has been able to sign so many deals with the major record labels, in the end creating a large enough library of music to interest consumers.

While Jonathan from Spotify keeps on stating that “everyone loves music”, it seems that if the bands aren’t able to create a better source of revenue there won’t be much music to listen to in the future.

I talked to Tero Salonen of Dazzboard (see our earlier story on Dazzboard here) and he told me how he first entered the US market and got the first contact there through Finnpro (the Finnish Export Association) and Plug and Play Tech Center, what resources he used and what are the next steps for Dazzboard in getting established in the US market. Not only that, Tero actually broke it down how much it cost him to do all of this. Tero wanted to emphasize to us that even though he happens to be a Finn, there are plenty of startups from other Nordic and Baltic countries at the Plug and Play Tech Center. See the video below.

Even though you could argue that is has taken way too long for the founder Tina Aspiala to monetize the site, it might have been worth the wait. Eat.fi is one of the only Finnish sites that I use regularly when checking out new restaurants and especially while making lunch and dinner meetings. To get an idea of the popularity of the site, Eat.fi iPhone app topped the Finnish App Store and boasts currently about 12,000 downloads (and 2,000 Ovi Store downloads).

I believe that the advertising business model will work great for the advertisers as well as the company itself. The only question that remains is will it scale to make Eat.fi a significant business.

As soon as the company has nailed the business model, its time to raise some capital and expand the restaurant site abroad. Given the strong foothold that for example Yelp has in US, Eat.fi needs to consider markets closer to home. The Nordic countries a likely target for expansion, even though there are emerging some restaurant search and review sites like Ted Valentin’s Restaurangkartan in Sweden (although even that is still in the making).

I can also see Eat.fi to be an ideal acquisition for a bigger media house, since it has one of the most loyal high quality communities that I have seen a site to have. Tina has made extra efforts to make the site extra easy to use and clean all the comments from the reviews that don’t add any value for users. This goes a long way to explain, why no big commercial player can’t just create their own site to compete with Eat.fi. They just don’t have the patience or know how to put skin in the game in building a great online community. You can get an idea of how much such love and care that has gone into Eat.fi’s user interface and overall user experience matter by looking at the graph (on the right) that shows how the number of reviews shot up after the team realized their new User Interface at the end of the 2008.

We eagerly wait to see how Eat.fi fares when it will expand abroad with its new model. That is, if someone won’t acquire the nifty site first.

Fredrik Stenbeck, Founder and CEO Silverbakk

Fredrik Stenbeck, founder and CEO Silverbakk, had given me an early demo of Silverbakk Briefing Room to be, and when launching now it has kept all its promises.

The interface is clear with simple graphs, so as soon as one’s done with choosing the keywords and filtering options, i.e. the important stuff, it didn’t take much longer than a minute before being up and running.

Fredrik has several years of experience in consulting companies within strategy and communication, the skills he’s now brought into his own product. Silverbakk has a clear offering with an explicit pricing plan, easy to understand demo and feature section. To test the product one can set up a 14-day free trial monitoring period for one project. Just the transparent company approach that is both embraced by social media, and necessary in building trust in the new media landscape. While browsing through a list of market actors and competitors, I came across only one other company, Scout Labs, presenting a pricing plan. Maybe not so surprising, yet disappointing.

Competitive offering on a competitive market

“The Impfactor ranking, language independence and easy to read graphs are the biggest differentiator for Silverbakk Briefing Room”

Silverbakk has done its market research by offering both unlimited users and workspaces, real time alerts, as well as being language independent. Each project can have up to five keywords, Gold level containing 10 keywords, with possibility to add free amount of filters to exclude sources or certain words, or phrases, from the project.

“It is your data so it is all up to you what you want to do with it.” All the data will be available for export at any time, and all Gold customers will have access to an API to easily integrate the data into other products or webpages.

The magic sauce in the dish is called The Impfactor, a secret indexing algorithm consisting of more than 50 parameters, calculating how much social activity and engagement there is related to the information monitored.

The big plan for Silverbakk is to go global. With the above mentioned Scout Labs just raising $4 million in a round of funding, and Microsoft recently revealing its proof-of-concept prototype “Looking Glass”, a social media product letting marketers aggregate and monitor social media platforms in real-time, the Silverbakk’s magic sauce certainly needs to taste both sugar and spice.

The game is now available on Steam for $19,95 and the very early reviews of the game are positive. I had a look at the game trailers myself and I have to say it looks good. Nevertheless, a very interesting time for Futuremark for sure.

Especially we wanted to know what their advice would be for the aspiring young startups that try to figure out whether it’s worth to relocate to the Silicon Valley from Nordic or Baltic countries, or whether the whole Silicon Valley hype is just hot air and Northern Europe is just as good a location to build a startup as any.

Here Mia Lewin, a Finn, a former VC and an entrepreneur, talks about the differences between VC firms between Europe and the Silicon Valley, how to figure out where to locate and how Mia herself plans to build her startup and raise funding. See the video below.

Listhings.com is a new Estonian “eco-friendly” online web tool for storing sticky notes about anything from To-Do lists to grocery lists and phone numbers.

The man behind the project is Martin Tajur, also Creative Director and co-founder of United Dogs and Cats (see our previous coverage). Martin has also worked as a graphical and user experience designer at Skype.

Martin told us that the service has gathered a bit over thousand registered users since the beginning of the public sign-up period in mid-September 2009, in about one and a half months. He also continued that the amount of registered users seems to double in about a month’s time, or even faster. It is also possible to use the service without signing up, and apparently many do. Just this week Listhings passed 100,000 saved notes.

According to Martin, the service started from a hobby project. He has been developing the service gradually, responding also to user feedback. Martin also emphasizes that Listhings is hosted in a 100% carbon neutral way, meaning that for all energy consumed to keep Listhings’ servers running, Emission Reduction Credits are purchased. Thus the tagline “store notes, save trees”.

The look and feel of the service is really nice. One can start creating notes right away and writing, resizing, changing color, and moving the notes around all work smoothly. It is also possible to create multiple canvases to get more space and add categorization for your notes. There aren’t too many features for now, but just enough to efficiently do the trick.

There is a lot of potential in the service, and Listhings could a be great tool for creating and keeping track of notes at daily work, also on multiple computers.  But to really unleash its potential and to consider giving up a physical notebook, a mobile app or access is clearly needed. Luckily, Martin has already indicated that an iPhone synchronization app is on the way and available soon.

Finland’s plan to introduce a biogas feed-in tariff is moving forward: the target price for the biogas feed-in tariff is €83.5 per MWh for power production and €50 per MWh when utilizing CHP (combined heat and power). According to the plan, this would only concern plants that produce more than 300 KVA of electricity. This supports fairly large plant sizes, which exceed the suggested parameters and provide adequate return on investments.

Biower, a turn-key supplier of biogas and waste water treatment plants, is a great example of a start-up which would get a boost from a feed-in tariff decision. Biower focuses on combined heat and power production with an annual processing capacity of between 10 000 tn and 275 000 tn.  The company was founded in 2008 and now has reference plants outside Finland, while the home market still seems to be in waiting mode.

Instead of developing entirely its own technologies,  Biower focuses on the commercialization of attractive technologies with system offerings. ”Our strong network of partners and our previous experience of sales, marketing and project management enables us to grow as a global player. Our waste-to-energy solution is based on the dry thermophilic fermentation process enabling improved process efficiency with a dry feed cocktail.”, says Kari Vanhalakka, CEO and co-founder of Biower.

Kari has over 20 years experience of project management on a global scale and his target is to keep Biower on a very rapid growth path over the next few years.” We hope that the new feed-in tariff enables us to test and develop the business practice in Finland with concrete projects.”

Second stage of the program is aimed at running Internationalisation Camps, which are open to all companies in the digital content and services industry. More specific themes regarding international growth are studied and solutions to these challenges are developed. Potential themes include, but are not limited to marketing, foreign accounting standards and growth funding.

Finally, the third stage of the program is aimed to arrange practical internationalisation concepts to the companies which show considerable potential for international growth. Special consultants are harnessed to help in finding funding as well as help through the partner negotiations to really establish themselves in the global markets.

So how do you get to be part of all this?
Simple. Apply to be a part of the international clinic here in Helsinki at the Slush conference. You should enroll by sending an e-mail to Timo at Somebazaar with your details. Please note that to be eligible for the 10 000 euros prize money, you must show significant willingness to internationalise and also be willing to invest 2 500 euros to the coaching.

It’s worthwhile to note that while not everyone will win the prize money for the coaching and services, the participating companies will gain quite a bit from the contacts and advice given by the very highly appreciated jury. Jury members include Taneli Tikka, Burton Lee, Greg Franklin and Andreas Weigend to name a few.

For more details, contact Raija Velez at Culminatum by e-mail or at +358 50 555 8908. Also, visit http://www.digibusiness.fi/ibp for more information.

The story behind the company isn’t a quick one, but it’s a solid statement of how a successful company is built. Seppälä started the company in 1992 when he was just 16 years old. Today, the company employes more than 300 people and has been known to disrupt the home electronics market every now and then. For example, Verkkokauppa.com launched a set-top-box of their own during the transformation to the digital signal broadcasting here in Finland and the price for the box was considerably below 50€ beating all the other boxes on the market. They also claim that they now have 25% of the GPS market in Finland with their own model.

From these points of view and with this background. I can only congratulate Rite Internet Ventures for a great investment. While Seppälä is set to become a self made millionaire, he could have earned a lot more in the IPO they’re planning in the near future. A 20 million euro valuation for this kind of a company is well below the fair market value. Nevertheless, having to battle with these sort of issues with yourself only is never easy and I bet Seppälä has had some sleepless nights thinking which way to go with the offers for the company stock.

To go back to square one, Mikko had been thinking about creating website development smarter for the large majority of people out there. At the same time, his friend from all the way back in upper school, Antti Ala-Ilkka had similar ideas since they were both involved in small scale website projects and knew the amount of repetitive work that had to be put in. Starting their business in 2005 was a clear way through as they both had entrepreneurial experience all the way from the turn of the millenium.

Naturally, building a company this fast and successful is not easy. I asked Mikko about the challenges in doing this and he mentioned that while financing was not a challenge, despite the first year, they did see recruiting as one of the largest obstacles they needed to overcome. They have had difficulty in finding java developers and thus slowing down their R&D efforts. Current and future challenges include internationalisation, but in a fun and interesting way according to Mikko.

So what makes their service so powerful and attractive? Simplicity and a very scalable business model. According to Mikko their target audience is the tech averse population in general. For these, simple use and ease of adoption are key elements – also for the success of Ideakone. Their business is built on automated processes and scalable server resources from Amazon S3.

With the help of Moogo and Kotisivukone, over 200 000 homepages have been built. Half of this is from Finland and the other half overseas. Despite this, most of the euros roll in from Finland. They recently hired three new people to work on Moogo solely and their task includes new language versions and the development of overseas operations.

I asked Mikko which countries are the most notable ones at this point. “While the English speaking countries like UK are always interesting, other countries have shown interesting growth as well”, he replied. According to Mikko Brasil has shown some strong growth recently and this has lead them to look at Spanish and Portuguese speaking nations more closely. Russia, Poland and other Eastern European countries are also interesting, but they haven’t put in too much research on those yet.

It seems that building SaaS-model businesses is a huge hit these days and a very profitable approach as well. Moogo has three different price groups for users with different needs. There’s always the free user alternative, but the commercial versions are priced at $4.99 US and $14.99 a month depending on your needs. I had a quick look through the comparison chart and to me they seem very fairly priced with a lot of good value bundled into the packages. With prices like these Ideakone has thousands of paying customers, which very much confirms their value prop for the consumers.

I’m honestly very happy to see companies like Ideakone flourish and grow in a very healthy manner. Also, if you think about it – the solution isn’t rocket science, it’s just a lot of thought being put into constant improvement through a very simple service.

I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys are one of the brighest stars to come out from the Finnish startup scene in a few years time.