ArcticStartup

The Sampo 3D Animation Film Aims Big

Miikka Kukkosuo — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:00:48 +0000

The Finnish film industry is looking more and more lively nowadays. The international successes have not been that many in the past, compared to e.g. the Swedish movie industry focused on strong story telling, like the recent Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Saga. However, in the past few years the Finnish industry has been showing signs of much increased international ambitions. One of the most widest distributed Finnish films ever has been the animation Niko & The Way to the Stars, published in 2008.

The next big take seems now to be The Sampo, a feature length 3D stereoscopic animation film based on the Kalevala mythology by Northern Digital Film Company NDFC Helsinki, founded in 2006.

The Sampo is a magical wealth-generator in the Kalevala, an epic poem compiled from Finnish and Karelian folklore in the nineteenth century. Since its publishing, the Kalevala has been a huge inspirator to the Finnish arts. It has also inspired many foreigners, one of the most famous being J.R.R Tolkien who stated the Kalevala heavily influencing his works like The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

NDFC is currently seeking financiers to gather the needed estimated production budget of approximately 10 million euros for The Sampo. NDFC tells it is discussing with Asian and Russian investors, and a partner in China who could invest a significant part of the budget. Business-wise, NDFC naturally praises that of the worldwide box office Top 10 hits listed in IMDB, eight are adventure and fantasy movies, and the audience for these type of films is rather emotional. Thus the Kalevala-based movie could also very well strike gold.

The production is targeted to start in the beginning of 2011, and the film should to be ready by 2013. NDFC has just completed the first draft of the script, the concept trailer (see below), and first concept art pictures. The firm claims having spent two years in making a modern new version of Kalevala, modernizing its ancient Finnish language and then having that translated into English, with the help of writers, translators, and linguists.

Interestingly, NDFC also plans on creating very extensive and integrated social media marketing experience around the film. In the film there will be a pseudo ethereal character called Aurora Sodnabei Nord, who will ”guide you through the legendary and mythical lands of Kalevala and Pohjola”.

Not only a film, NDFC is actually planning on making Aurora Nord: The Sampo a global trademark, and a massive global online community with Aurora having a personal-like presence on the social web. NDFC has already created a blog for Aurora, and an interactive video blog is said to be upcoming. Later on, community members can engage deeper, remix the art materials using their creativity and even resell these new productions.

What’s more, The Sampo is planned just to be the first stage - a whole film trilogy would be completed, followed by possible physical and digital product universe as well. That’s a healthy amount of ambition I would say – definitely good to aim big and beyond just a single product.

It is great to see all the activity going on in the (animation) film industry, as creative industries are what we need in the Nordics to cope with the more standardized work drifting over to lower cost regions. Along with the game industry, story telling expertise can also create good synergies with multiple other industries, considering story telling is also a key part of branding in general…

Concept Video of The Sampo:

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ArcticStartup’s Vigo Questionnaire

Antti Vilpponen — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:21:24 +0000

Disclaimer: This article is targeted mainly for our Finnish readers. We’re working to survey the effects of the Vigo accelerator program on the Finnish startup ecosystem. Other nationalities will surely find it useful once we release the results.

Vigo accelerator program has been a much debated issue here in Finland. Rightly so. It has been promoted with a lot of noise and much to its cause, it is the biggest change in the startup ecosystem for years. Now that it has been up and running for a while, we’d like to know every Finnish reader’s opinion on the program and what you think and know of it.

We’re doing this in the form of a simple survey, so if you have 1-2 minutes, please take a moment to answer the survey. It’ll be a big help for the whole ecosystem to know how the program works. Please note, that this is purely our initiative and we are in no way linked to the Vigo program itself. Secondly, all answers are confidential – we won’t even know any IP addresses of the answers so feel free to comment your heart’s content.

Answer the survey here.

We’ll be collecting answers until 26th of March. Also, feel free to pass this link to all your friends whose answers could be of value to our questionnaire!

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Alan Wake Set To Release May 21st In Europe, May 18th In The States

Antti Vilpponen — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:27:32 +0000

The Finnish Helsingin Sanomat has interviewed Sami Järvi the writer of the game and in the article they also confirm the release dates for Alan Wake. The game is set to be released in Europe on the 21st of May and in the US, a few days earlier, on the 18th. A while back in a “Predictions for 2010″ -post I predicted that the game will be launched a few months late, but it seems that there is no reason at the moment to delay it. After all, the release date is about 2 months away.

Not a lot of news has been release about the game in the recent months, however a new trailer called X10 was published to YouTube on February 11th.

I must say, the game looks really awesome. I’m sure it will be a huge hit when it comes out.

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Two More Events To Watch: Frozen Rails And Garage48

Antti Vilpponen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:00:33 +0000

A while back we covered this spring’s events in a summary format that ought to interest startups and we further received more events in the comments. If you haven’t checked those out, we strongly suggest to do so. There are also other events in the ArcticIndex events -page, make sure you have a look at that as well. However, I thought of doing a small addition to that list by further promoting two more events that deserve the visibility in my opinion, Frozen Rails and Garage48.

Frozen Rails
Frozen Rails is organised by our good friends at Kisko Labs (disclaimer: we have a business relationship with them) and HHLinuxClub. The conference, held on May 7th in Helsinki, Finland, has a very impressive lineup of speakers. The organizers have managed to sign up half of the Rails core team as well as stars from companies like 37Signals, GitHub and Engine Yard.

According to Akonniemi, co-founder of Kisko Labs, even the creator of Ruby on Rails and 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson commented on the conference, “Strong lineup of speakers.” Therefore, if you’re in the neighbourhood make sure you pay a visit to Frozen Rails if your company works with Ruby on Rails – this is the best chance you’ll have to get to talk to the people behind the language.

Those less familiar with Ruby on Rails should know that it powers services such as Basecamp, Twitter, Shopify, Github and Yellow Pages. Early bird price of 99 euros for the conference is available until 23rd of March 2010 and after that the price is 129 euros.

Garage48
Garage48 is a great initiative being put forward in Tallinn, Estonia. It’s a long weekend startup party where companies have 48 hours to build new services. It starts on Friday the 16th of April and continues through to Sunday the 18th of April.

The event is taking place in Tallinn, at the Estonian IT College. The organisers are expecting the outcomes to be mainly various web services and mobile applications. Nevertheless, there is no limit on the products or services.

Garage48 participants have posted various skill sets that they are expecting the people to fit in, if you’re in one of these groups – make sure you participate in the event.

Visionary entrepreneurs and project managers – people with ability to start new business ideas, run teams and deliver results
Designers – mavericks creating visual identity and user interfaces
Web Developers – HTML/CSS/AJAX/JS wizards making the design work smoothly in all web browsers
Programmers – planning technical architecture, writing functional code and testing the outcome
Mobile Developers – building apps for mobile platforms
Marketers and business developers – evangelists and sales wizards making the products fly and reach the audience

At the time of writing this, there are only 7 tickets remaining and they cost a mere 300 EEK, which is about 18 EUR/27 USD.

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Lumi Group Enlightens Our Streets

Hendrik Morkel — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:23 +0000

Having nearly three months of very few daylight hours in winter, it is no surprise that a Finnish company looks at ways to make our dark days more bright. The Lumi Group Oy from Turku has spotted a profitable niche and developed an excellent product, and is now set to profit handsomely from the changes in EU legislation which make our old street lightning outdated and in need of more energy efficient street lights.

The Lumi Group is a spinoff from Oversol Oy and was established in the beginning of 2010, and currently employees three people. They started out as a product development project with funding from Tekes two and half years ago, and launched their finished product, the Lumi R street light, last February at the Jyväskylä Light Fair. Now it’s about marketing their product and getting it installed – the first municipalities across Finland have already bought into the technology and are enjoying energy savings of up to 85% in comparison to the normal mercury street lights.

If that alone is not a sales argument for some communities, then maybe the life time of 50.000 hours – that are over five years of 24/7 lightning! – and saving in maintenance costs are tipping them over. Add in a better quality of light, which lights up the streets evenly, and municipalities and communities should be lining up in order to make those dark winter days safer and more enjoyable. Another plus-point is that the lamps are manufactured in Finland, and that they fulfill the requirements of street lights of today and the future.

The young company has a positive outlook on the future, and estimates that they will sell thousands of their street lamps in 2010 and expect rapid growth in the years after. Their confidence is backed up by a EU regulation which requires mercury lamps to be phased out by 2015, and given that in Finland alone 800.000 street lights are installed, one does understand their enthusiastic point of view.

But not resting on one great product, Lumi Group Oy is developing further street and road light solutions, for which more funding is sought – feel free to contact them if this seems a good venture to you, I am certain the payoff will be excellent. It is great to see this innovation take place in Finland, and talk with companies which are so positive about their future. While there are competitors out there, the Lumi R street lamp is for the time being ahead of them and is sure to win customers confidence and fulfill their demands. LED lights are already widely used and known in other areas, so this is just a logical and consequent development, and I am looking forward to walk through streets lightened up by Lumi street lights.

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From Russia With Leaders – Good 2 Work With

Miikka Kukkosuo — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:00:34 +0000

The Club of Leaders Good 2 Work with seems to be one of the well-kept secrets of Russia (and would have stayed so, had it not been registered on ArcticIndex). Good 2 Work is a virtual place (or sort of a closed social network) for executives and entrepreneurs of different levels and from different industries and countries. It is meant as tool for leaders to learn from and about each other in the field of business leadership. The primary means are professionally pre-recorded video conversations.

The club was established in April 2008 by Yuri Barzov, who was a partner with the executive search companies Ward Howell and Spencer Stuart. Yuri has also founded the 200+ thousands strong Russian learning community of managers, E-xecutive.

It is mentioned the Good 2 Work project got started as it was discovered that competency-based structured interviews, which are normally used for executive assessment, can, with some modifications, and in combination with modern video streaming technologies, also serve as a powerful leadership development tool.

The materials available to the members of the club include videos and transcripts from interviews with VIP participants and guests. More than 200 interviews from over 150 executives are said to be done to date. The interviewees are from major corporations such as 3Com, Allianz, Banque Société Générale Vostok, BMW, Cisco Systems, Citigroup, GE Money Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, HP, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Volvo, and Western Union… Only a third of the material is in English, though, but even so, it is a pretty good bunch. Three fourths of the interviews are with CEOs and business founders, mostly from IT, Financial Services, Consumer Goods, Retail and Consulting.

There are some partial video materials and comments available on the site also without logging in. Anyone feeling like a leader is welcomed to apply for the club if wishing to learn from leaders and helping the other leaders to grow. However, there is an evaluation process in place where the existing members will screen all new applicants and decide whether to allow them join or not.

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Thank You Sponsors

Sponsor — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:00:38 +0000

This is our periodic thank you note to our blog sponsors to describe what they have to offer.

Innovate!100 to Spotlight World’s Most Promising Tech Startups
Microsoft BizSpark is partnering with Guidewire Group in a global competition to identify a group of 100 top Startups from around the world, to be known as the Innovate!100. Winners will get global recognition, media promotion, expert feedback, and access to a variety of resources and opportunities to accelerate their growth. Visit Innovate!100 for more information and to apply.
Check out for the local Pitch Slams, Helsinki – 24 March 2010 and Stockholm 22 April 2010!

EnterpriseHelsinki is an ongoing city initiative for new entrepreneurs and startups. In addition to free basic advisory on starting or growing your business, their mission is to help local startup ecosystem, by organizing and supporting related events, and by providing helpful tools and resources for the ecosystem.

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If you wish to become ArcticStartup blog sponsor, please see more information here. If you are interested in sponsoring our ArcticEvening events, please contact events (at) arcticstartup.com.

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TradeShift Looking To Further Digitalize Payments

Antti Vilpponen — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:00:02 +0000

There’s a startup in Denmark that went by the name of Porta for a long time. Since then, they have changed their name to TradeShift. TradeShift is looking to disrupt and shatter the oligopolies of EDI between large corporations and banks so that the technologies could be used by anyone – small and medium sized companies included. The founders of the company include an experienced bunch. They are Christian Lanng, Mikkel Hippe Brun and Gert Sylvest. Not a founder, but onboard the project is also Morten Lund who made himself famous by his personal bankruptcy some two years ago.

TradeShift Co-Founder Christian Lanng write on the company blog more about what they are up to after Wired and TechCrunch ran stories on them. He states that while payment processes have been digitized some time ago already, 95% of the payment process remains fully analog and relies a lot of manual work. Therefore, they won’t be competing with PayPal, but with the more traditional giants operating in the industry – the likes of Microsoft and SAP.

In the initial phase the company can be said to be an e-invoicing solution. However, you shouldn’t compare TradeShift to the many competitors out there who already work with electronic invoicing. Christian Lanng further writes in their blog, “we have focused on delivering an open platform where everyone can build apps on top of the original infrastructure (we don’t come pre-bundled with one financial package).” So in essence they are building a new world order for payments and how they are handled – if they are successful.

The core team behind the service is 13 strong in Denmark, but they have people working in locations such as Germany, Sri Lanka and Brazil adding up the total head count to about 50. At the moment, according to TechCrunch, the company is self sufficient financially being nodded forward with a little seed money from investors. TechCrunch believes TradeShift is financing itself with deals it has signed already in Northern Europe and an unnamed city in Brazil. Mike Butcher rightly points out that TradeShift could very well succeed with an emerging nations go-to-market strategy where the needs are present, but money to pay for traditional mainframe systems is not.

I’m extremely interested in what the TradeShift team is cooking up and how they will eventually roll it to the market.

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MyClubCards – Why Do All The Great Ideas Come From Sweden?

Guest Blogger — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:00:03 +0000

I ask myself pretty often why there is so much great web innovation coming from Sweden. Really awesome ideas and startups are much less common in my home country Germany, despite a population almost ten times as large as Sweden’s.

This time, it’s a new service called MyClubCards that caught my attention. MyClubCards offers a mobile application (currently iPhone only) which people who are members of one or more loyalty programs can use to collect points when paying in a store. So imagine you have club cards from three different loyalty programs that you carry in your wallet. Instead of that, you can add those cards to your MyClubCards collection by simply entering the program name and your personal customer number. MyClubCards generates a barcode for each of those cards, which you can show to the cashier next time you want to use your card at a point of sale. Instead of scanning the physical card, the cashier scans the barcode on your phone.

I don’t have a single club card in my wallet, but I know that I’m not typical here. I know many people who have half a dozen cards or more, and for them, MyClubCards could be the ultimate solution to remove some weight from their wallet.

For end users the service is free, so where does the revenue comes from? Since every user of the service has shown that she is fan of the concept of loyalty programs (again, I’m not, but millions of other people are), there is a good chance that they would be willing to sign up for even more programs. With this idea in mind, the company is offering retailers the possibility to become a partner and to include their loyalty program in the MyClubCards application, ready for signup. The retailer get’s new loyal customers (and data about their shopping behaviour), and MyClubCards gets a commission.

Even though MyClubCards will not be of any use to me personally, I’m convinced that with the right execution, this startup could become huge. I’m not sure if there is a similar service somewhere else, at least I have never heard of anything like it; but I’m pretty sure we’ll soon see some other companies experimenting with the same idea.

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Spotify Signs Exclusive Deal With TeliaSonera Finland

Antti Vilpponen — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:48:01 +0000

TechCrunch reports that Spotify has signed an exclusive deal with the Finnish side of TeliaSonera. The two year deal will give TeliaSonera the exclusive rights to sell Spotify Premium in Finland. The announcement comes on the same day as TeliaSonera unveils its IPTV service that is complete with a certain selection of television channels, video rentals and Spotify Premium. Spotify signed a similar contract with the Swedish side of TeliaSonera last year and it seems that the deal was worthwhile as the Finnish side of TeliaSonera also went forward with the partnership.

The service offering from TeliaSonera is a direct competitor to Elisa Viihde, while it does not allow recording of television shows that are available in Elisa Viihde. At the moment Sonera Home Television is available to approximately 300 000 of its subscribers that have Sonera optical connection. The service will later be available to those households that are able to handle 24 Mb/s connections by more traditional means. There are about 1.3 million households that fall into this group.

These deals are extremely important for Spotify to grow its reach into the more traditional consumer base. It remains to be seen how the service is adopted there, but its certainly worth the try in the form of partnerships like these.

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Crowdsourcing Ideas For ArcticEvenings

Antti Vilpponen — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:41:22 +0000

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.

We’ve previously organised events around themes in all of our venues and this time we want to reach out to you well in advance to crowdsource ideas. Those unaware of our ArcticEvenings concepts, they are usually 3-4 hours long being organised in the evenings from 6pm onwards. We have had panels, interviews, company presentations and pretty much everything in between.

Just to plant some seeds for ideas here are some of the themes we’ve had before:

Mobile smartphone solutions and trends
Software growth businesses and how they are built successfully
Startups and the future of mobile
Financing startups

So, send us your ideas through the comments below or through the form here. All comments sent through the form will be anonymous, but if you’d like please leave your name so we can thank you for the ideas.

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Mediatonic Fund I Starts Financing Games and Media Products

Antti Vilpponen — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:28:41 +0000

Mediatonic Management has closed a 5 million euro fund that will begin to finance games and media products from Finland. The fund has been set up by investments from Fennia insurance, Henki-Fennia insurance as well as the Sonera Pension fund. People behind the fund include Tanu-Matti Tuominen and Marko Tulonen.

The fund is a project and catalog fund that will invest in commercial games, television formats and web services. The fund does not invest into the companies in the manner a venture capitalist would invest, but into the rights of the products and services sold. Therefore the fund’s business model is to take a commission from cash flows generated by the products and services sold.

There are a lot of advantages in this model for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs get to keep their independence in running the companies, but at the same time receive the smart money advice from the people running the fund. Mediatonic won’t even take a board seat for the investments.

At the moment the company invests in Finland only. Industries considered in this phase mainly include games as well as different kinds of media companies. They plan to increase their fund size after 2-3 years considerably as well as possibly increase the geographical and industrial focus. While the fund is only 5 million euros in size, it represents a fund of approximately 10 to 15 million euros due to its rapid turnover.

Tanu-Matti Tuominen told us that they have been analysing the investment industry a lot and from many different angles. These view points were the biggest motivators in setting up the company. They want to see companies create more value with their products. One of the issues for example, according to Mediatonic, is that in 2008 the game industry generated revenues of 89 million euros in Finland. According to the amount of sales it should have been about 350 million euros.

My take is that this fund will be very attractive for entrepreneurs due to its nature of not taking a slice of the company. I’m sure they will see a lot of deal flow even though they are focusing in a small niche at this time. Should you be interested in the fund, you can contact the company through their website.

Image by TW Collins

Update (March 8th, 2010 at 4.50pm): The fund is actually 2.5 million euros in size at the moment and Mediatonic is looking to double that so it will be 5 million euros by summer 2010.

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Being Self-Sustainable With Tuulivoimala.com

Hendrik Morkel — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:00:23 +0000

Many cleantech companies are large scale companies who aim to work with the utilities, who require millions in investments for R&D, production facilities, and rolling out their product. Quickly one forgets about the smaller players, and one of those smaller players is Tuulivoimala, who develops and markets wind and solar power solutions to private customers, and who are quite successful with their venture.

While there are some forward thinking utilities around the world, who produce energy from 100% renewable sources, it is for the most part not 100% renewable energy which comes from your electricity outlet if you buy that energy. Not happy about this, there is an increasing market of people who do decide to go off-grid and produce their own electricity and heat, and those people represent Tuulivoimala’s market. The company started in May of 2007 and has delivered close to two thousand wind turbines to date, and their outlook for 2010 is positive with a growth estimate of 20% for this year.

The company offers different solutions for people who want to produce their own energy, from wind turbines for battery charging, heat generation and electricity production to combinations of wind and solar solutions, as well as inverters, batteries and other accessories you need when producing your own wind energy. Their wind turbines produce energy in the range of 200W to 20kW, and their customers are summer cottage owners, SME industrial properties and small real estates. Besides selling wind turbines and solar/ wind small-scale power plants, they also develop an energy control system for wind turbines and other renewable energy sources, which is funded by Tekes.

The wind turbines the company sells through their network of dealers are at the moment made in China, but Tuulivoimala is working with a Finnish wind turbine manufacturer and aims to produce locally as well as in Germany in the not-to-distant future. The company has a couple of investors who have put a few EUR 100k into the company, and they are looking for more VC funds to finance projects with them.

I believe the company is up to something, as there is an increasing number of people want to get clean, sustainable energy while not relying on the utilities to provide it. Providing them a simple, all-in-one package to make the first step to go producing their own energy is a lucrative venture, which pays off for the company and its investors, as well as their users who will be able to save money in the long-term, and even earn money if they feed power into the grid. It shows that it’s not only the big players who generate a lot of dividends and jobs, but also the smaller entrepreneurs who can create value for their investors, customers and society.

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The Game Industry In Flux

Miikka Kukkosuo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:00:22 +0000

Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.

The piece on Universomo is a continuation of bad news for the Finnish game industry, which has suffered from a drop in sales similar to the rest of the globe. The hard time THQ is having is of course related to the traditional Java J2ME mobile gaming market having bad times as well. The high porting costs due to the fragmentation of the Java handset market and inflexible operator-run marketplaces have made it quite impossible to maintain a profitable business for more than a handful of the biggest mobile publishers.

Heard through the grapevine, it seems, however, that the now-ex-Universomo employees are not paralyzed by the outcome, and we might see multiple gaming startups being born, which is definitely a good thing for the industry. Another positive Finnish news are of course Redlynx’s reported success, and that the preorder figures of Remedy’s much expected new Alan Wake are rumored to be rather good.

Nevertheless, the gaming business is changing fast with climbing digital distribution, and browser based web and Facebook games increasing their share of the consumption. Also the much-praised iPhone market has quickly become very much hit-driven, so saturated with new releases that without effective cross-promotion from existing installed base, known brands, or Apple featuring it is hard for developers to make any meaningful revenues.

Another big change is the rise of the Games as Service model, most elegantly demonstrated currently in the social games on Facebook and Myspace. The development is very much according to the rules of agile software and web service development – launch early, launch fast, and iterate the acquisition, retention, and monetization rates based on real user data. Furthermore, as with software business in general, the service business is very, very different to product business.

I am actually somewhat surprised, and worried, that I have not heard about that many Finnish firms developing Facebook games (and likewise for the rest of the Nordic and Baltic countries – if you are a Facebook game developer in any of the countries in the region, let me know!). I hope the lure of the “cool” consoles and devices will not take all the focus. As many game developers are enthusiastic “gamers” themselves, understandably the next generation devices and more “hardcore” games often interest the most. Sometimes the product development decisions are rather emotional and based on intuition as opposed to marketing and business driven, as elaborated in the study done by Pyry Lehdonvirta.

Of course the traditional console game market won’t cease to exist, one can still do business there as well. But the digital games market will explode, and it will not happen on consoles. Facebook is without question the biggest market opportunity available to new game developers at the moment.

More and more people will start playing games online when it’s made dead simple to discover games and start playing them (i.e. “installing” and the actual gameplay). Then, pretty much everybody plays, like the stories about grandmas playing Mafia Wars on Facebook demonstrate.

Also, the monetization will likely follow the growth path. Already the Facebook social gaming market estimated to be several hundreds of millions of dollars in size. And looking at the examples of iTunes (music and games), and for example Spotify, people are willing to also pay for content they value when it is made extremely easy for them to do so.

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Aalto Bootcamp, Y Combinator-esque Program For Students And Researchers

Ville Vesterinen — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:00:05 +0000

There’s much talk about the new Aalto University in Finland, which is what came out when Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and Helsinki University of Art and Design were molded into one school to rule them all. A lot of potential I’m sure, but wait, there’s more!

There’s a new kid in town. Many of our readers felt the waves from Aalto Entrepreneur Society last year. The student group headed by Kristo Ovaska hasn’t been resting on their laurels. Now they are coming with a new Y Combinator-esque university accelerator program, Aalto Bootcamp. It’s a five week program for students and researchers to get a feel for the joys of entrepreneurship and build a company. And yes, become a bona fide entrepreneur.

Here’s the spiel. You apply for the program. 10 to 15 teams will be admitted to a five week program. At the end the program up to three teams can get selected. The initial admission just as the final selection will be done by who else but Finnish Vigos. Once a team has been selected it will get coaching from Vigos, up to €55K funding from Tuli program (‘up to’ meaning there’s no guarantees what the amount will be), and a physical space to work in for six months. Naturally, the bootcamp program creates potential deal flow for Vigos and a great opportunity to get on a speed train to success for the young teams. A Win-Win.

How to get on this train. Much like the real Y Combinator, the program has some questions for your team which is the first hurdle to clear if you want in. The emphasis will unsurprisingly be on the idea and the team. The Bootcamp itself don’t have a particular focus, but the startup can be everything from ICT, web and gaming to life science and food processing.

The details are still being worked out, but the plan is to have the bootcamp held up to 4 times a year. The kick-off for the program is April 7th and the application are open. So if you’re a student or a researcher, get your application on!

The most remarkable thing in all of this is not the bootcamp, but how it came to be and especially by whom. It makes me hopeful for the future of this country when I see a group of students working hard to fix a state failure (yes, that’s what I consider this to be) with only having a boat load of passion and big dreams to float the boat. The best way to get approval is not to need it. Kudos to Kristo, Linda, Jori and rest of the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society team!

Photo by Linda Liukas

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Picmeleo Helps Your Users Edit Photos

Antti Vilpponen — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:49:59 +0000

Picmeleo is a new Finnish photo startup that recently got in touch with us. They’re developing a new kind of service which in essence is a photo editing tool, but positioned in the market in a wise manner. The tool itself is sort of an external application that companies providing services online can add on top of their own service, instead of having to come up with their own tool.

The guys have made it dead simple to embed the editor to your website. Let me prove my point. All I did was copy pasted a line of code to this post and you are able to open the service with the following link (obviously you can’t save the photo to our server, but you’re able to play around with the image):

Open Picmeleo editor

I haven’t seen many executions where this has been this easy – and it actually works according to what’s being promised. The smartness of this idea, in my opinion does not lie in the technology itself, but in the way this product has been positioned. Many would think the photo market is saturated to the maximum and it’s true, but there are still opportunities for smaller solutions like Picmeleo to capitalise on the opportunities.

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QAim And TNS Gallup Start Providing Metrics On Most Popular Mobile Sites In Finland

Miikka Kukkosuo — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:00:42 +0000

TNS Gallup, Finnish subsidiary of the biggest industry market research expert TNS Global, has teamed up with a mobile customer experience management startup QAim to provide Finland wide tracking of mobile website usage metrics.

QAim provides the technology needed for tracking the mobile users, and TNS Gallup takes care of the related user metrics service, support, and sales. The firms hope the new service will provide the media industry with a unified, reliable, and independent metrics of the mobile website usage, similar to what is already available for the traditional web, TV, and radio.

As mobile internet usage grows all the time, there is a clear need for being able to track and follow mobile sites’ traffic and visitor behavior. Most mobile service providers have very little clue as to who actually uses their services, where, how, when, and for which parts. Also, without public benchmarks the service providers have a difficult time trying to measure and improve their service and user experience, and to sell advertising. Thus there should be good international expansion possibilities for the metrics service as well.

TNS Gallup comments that it found QAim’s solution the best of the evaluated, while tracking mobile site usage is far from trivial. For QAim the upside from the partnership seems rather good, as not only does the firm get much improved visibility, but the metrics service will also include QAim’s primary CEM4Mobile Analytics with which the metrics service customers can also manage the user experience of their mobile sites much better.

QAim’s CEM4Mobile is a rather groovy product, offering real time analysis of mobile site usage patterns and customer experience, unique user and customer trends tracking (first-timer, returning, active, loyal, dormant, churned), usage paths to and within the service, and how marketing campaigns affect the user behavior. There are also loads of other useful options like tracking handset capabilities, and easy polling for end-user opinions.

QAim has finalized the product development with close to 20 local pilot customers, including mobile operators, service providers and media houses (for example, media house MTV3 Finland, weather service Foreca, and mobile operator Elisa).

QAim Founder and CEO Janne Aalto boasts that integrating the CEM4Mobile components and starting collecting data takes just from 15 minutes up to one hour, depending on the amount of pages in the site. The pilot use has been quite extensive, and so far QAim has collected data of approx five million users from 203 countries, 554 mobile networks, and 3,891 handsets. QAim is now in a strong internationational expansion phase to Europe and Asia with the help of selected integration partners.

The product is delivered with Software as a Service (SaaS) model over the Internet, which allows QAim to aggreate anonymous statistics from different websites and thus provide the geographical metrics service. Janne Aalto commented that originally their team thought a local installation option would be preferred by the customers, but to their (pleasant) surprise they found out everybody has actually opted for the simple SaaS delivery. The customers have in fact been asking for anonymous benchmark data of other services similar to theirs.

Aalto described that in one case a director mentioned he actually was embarrassed to go to management group meetings as he had no data to show from the mobile site he was responsible of, while the web service guys had everything you could ask for – talk about a problem with strong personal motivation to solve…

QAim’s business model is based on different product feature packs and the number of monthly transactions registered by the service. The firm is owned by the founders, key employees, private investors and a VC.

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Fits.me, Lumo Research And GigsWiz Make Plugg.eu Finalists

Antti Vilpponen — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:00:55 +0000

Three Nordic and Baltic companies have made it to the group of finalists in the Plugg.eu Startups Rally 2010. In total, 116 applications were left to the competition and of these the 20 made it to the final. Plugg.eu is a very entrepreneurship focused conference organised in Brussels, Belgium and we’re happy to one of their media partners promoting the event. The three companies making it into the final are Estonian Fits.me the two Finnish startups Lumo Research and GigsWiz.

Fits.me is a virtual fitting room helping online shoppers pick the right size of clothing. Something that is definitely a show stopper at the moment in online clothing stores. If nothing else, it can reduce the amount of returns as consumers are able to pick the right size the first time round. I met Heikki Haldre in ArcticEvening Tallinn last year and am sure he has a great momentum going with his company. Last year we wrote about Fits.me closing a 1.3 million euro round.

Lumo Research aims to revolutionise the way people collaborate in enterprises. Last December, we covered them and there’s a lot of interesting new innovation bubbling under their hood.

Lastly, but not least, is the new GigsWiz that has received quite a bit of publicity. It’s a company aiming to monetize concerts in a better way, through better statistics. Some of the publicity has also been brought on board by the ex-Floobs founders who joined the startup right after they announced the Floobs bankruptcy.

We’ll keep you posted on how these companies manage with their rivals in Brussels on March 13th.

Update (2.3.2010 @ 8.35am): Hipui is also one of the Finnish finalists in the competition. Apologies for originally leaving them out, totally unintentional. Hipui is a startup aiming to create the next revolution in mobile user experience by providing technology and platforms to enable rich interaction and context awareness.

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Fuugo Creates A New Kind Of Watching Experience

Antti Vilpponen — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:13:42 +0000

Fuugo is a new kind of television product created by Axel Technologies, a company based in Turku. You can’t really call Axel Technologies a startup as it has been registered way back in 1988. However, Fuugo is a very interesting concept that requires more analysis into it. Fuugo claims to be the next generation TV application for mobile and handheld devices.

The application pulls in content from many different sources to create a new watching experience. It pulls in content from broadcast TV, mobile TV, Internet TV and on-demand video services. It blends all this together with social media services and even includes functions such as recording (at least according to the promotional video).

There are two things in my opinion which make Fuugo a very interesting concept. The first one is that it seems they are able to tap into the advantages of watching television on a mobile device without carrying onward too many legacy factors from other channels. By this I mean that you are able to watch content from any source whenever you wish. Secondly, the point that has already made many television services unappealing is the factor of national borders. Content is heavily restricted on many levels and if Fuugo is able to crack this issue to the favor of consumers they are well on their way to success. They claim the service will be global from the start so you’ll be able to watch what you want, wherever you want.

Fuugo is currently looking for beta testers. They will get access to the service in April and Fuugo aims to become commercially available during the second half of 2010.

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Finnish Media Landscape Is Starting To Shift. About Time!

Ville Vesterinen — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:00:22 +0000

We recently argued that Schibsted will give Finnish media companies a run for their money in classifieds and market places. Now Schibsted Classified Media Finland’s CEO, Jussi Lystimäki, tells us that Tori.fi just passed the one million unique visitor water mark last week. This comes from a firm who just opened their Finnish site in December.

Lystimäki further commented that they are adding tens of thousands of products a month. No doubt, this traffic has not been cheap, but it comes to show that that digital marketing is fulfilling its overdue promise and that ROI is superior compared to the traditional channels. If marketing’s focus is moving online, it should also be the media’s.

Finland is not protected from what has been happening in other markets for some time and it’s high time for the Finnish companies to wake up to reality. I might be overly optimistic here, but perhaps they may even start innovating on their own and who knows, maybe we will see quality content emerge beyond classifieds. Never have Finns been as innovative and performed as well as when the crisis has been the deepest. And deep it is.

We will impatiently wait for Alma Media’s and Sanoma’s counter reaction to the Schibsted offensive. There will be one, right?

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Battery Recycler Akkuser Acts On An Expanding Market

Alexander Lidgren — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:00:08 +0000

You must have wondered what happens to the gazillions of batteries (or 200 000 tons in the EU to be more exact, to quote the Finnish environment minister) that are increasingly used in the things we play around with. Finnish expansion company Akksuer knows. We talked to CEO Jarmo Pudas about the expanding battery recycling market.

What kind of batteries do you handle and why is the way you do it unique?

Basically everything… We handle laptop and mobile phone batteries (polymer), Li-ion, Ni-Mh. We do it without chemicals, without heat and without water. We have our own factory. We have an online sorting system and use dry technology (crushing and gas treatment) to recycle the materials.

How crucial is legislation in driving your markets?

Legislation determines the market for battery recycling and markets are growing now as a result of the EU directive on the disposal of spent batteries and accumulators (note: this legislation aims to cut the amount of mercury, cadmium and lead that is dumped into the environment and covers basically all types of batteries and accumulators). Already put into practice in countries such as Sweden and Finland, this directive is being implemented across the EU and we are being contacted by a lot of those countries.

What markets are you currently serving with your solution?

Our main market so far is the Nordics. We handle as much as 1000 tons of batteries from Sweden and 700 tons from Finland but we see a number of international markets opening up for us.

So not using heat must make the process more energy efficient?

It does. We have received awards mainly for our ability to recycle materials at 0.3 kWh/metalkilo.

What about the electric vehicle market? Is that something that will increase demand further in battery recycling?

Absolutely, if that market grows as predicted. We already handle Toyota Prius batteries from the EU market and we have a Tekes funded development project to handle the new generation of EV batteries.

What new markets are you looking to expand into?

We are actually getting offers from countries such as the UK, Hungary, Romania and others, but need to expand our operations to grow significantly.

Are you seeking funding to do that currently?

We are in that process now…

Good luck with it and we will be sure to follow your developments!

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Startup Jobs: Equity, Pay, Fame And Fortune

Ville Vesterinen — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:00:58 +0000

Those who say there are no interesting opportunities in the Nordics clearly don’t know what they are talking about. An ideal place to start the exploration is our job board at http://www.arcticstartup.com/jobs/. This is invaluable destination for those who are not yet confortable setting up their own shop, but want to learn to the ropes with a solid team that already know what they are doing, but still want to be in the eye of the storm.

Working in a startup is ultimate experience and much more. You are running against time with too little resources, a boat load of passionate people who just absolutely love every little bit of their product, team, people and purpose. And everyday single day is different, very different. How much more fun can one have while still not breaking the law?

By popular demand, we have enable you to either list a startup job, where you are looking for a certain skill set to join your startup, look for a co-founder for your idea or just leave an open application for startup to join. The best time to start a company is always now and the next best thing is to join one. Nothing to loose and everything to gain. Go!

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Scred Comes Out With A New Focus

Ville Vesterinen — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:00:04 +0000

Scred, a house hold Finnish startup who we have used to seeing tracking debts and shared expenses is now shifting their focus towards more comprehensively managing money.

They start with managing money for different groups such as bands, indie film crews, event organisers and associations. The point is to offer a solution for communities which often don’t have good online financial applications and don’t know about accounting.

Along with the new focus the guy have also redesigned the site. Kudos to the team for learning the design tools as they went along. As Kristoffer from Scred told me “We ended up learning how to do design ourselves as we couldn’t find anyone sufficiently skilled and available to work with our bootstrapped approach”. Whether that was a good choice, I left to the user to decide herself.

The team at Scred also completely rewrote the accounting core, based on the feedback and experience of the old service. The service has now fully integrated with the new PayPal X API — and is one of the first companies to do so. The new Scred allows groups to send out invoices, track and pay expense claims, sell items with an integrated shop, collect registration fees and send payments. The key here is that all the payments are accounted automatically, depending on what activity was involved. Scred can thus automatically generate profit, loss and revenue calculations, as well as get reports on all aspects of the group’s finance. It’s almost like …well, a bank, where you don’t just transfer money (numbers moving from one database to another), but you actually add context with attachments, what it was for, who was involved, what was ordered, where it took place etc.

Scred will be taking a small transaction fee for money moved.

What do I think? I think they are on their way to making the Mint (or Balancion) for small businesses. There are few things in life as boring and as off-putting as doing accounting, yet most of the people running a company need to deal with that in some form. If Scred can enable a firm to manage all its accounting online in one location with a one click submission to the accountant to review the accounts, I think they are onto something. Secondly, small and medium sized businesses are a significantly bigger market than bands or hobby groups, and since Scred’s business is based on transaction fee this means Scred could be a bigger business too.

Scred is also taking part in the PayPal X Developer Challenge with around 50 other companies. You can check out their new focus on video below.

Scred PayPal X Developer Challenge from Scred Ltd on Vimeo.

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Killing Finnish Entrepreneurship With Tax

Ville Vesterinen — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:00:11 +0000

The debate on the tax code for entrepreneurs in Finland is becoming more surreal by the day. The origins of the debate lie in the tax code working group set up by the Finnish Parliament. This group, headed by Martti Hetemäki, is to devise a new tax code for areas such as capital gains, options and carried interest for VC funds. The biggest verbal and rhetorical battle is waged around the double taxing of dividends in non-listed companies.

Just as with any tax code, the more transparent and simple the tax code to understand, the better it incentivizes people to invest in a risky and uncertain future. The tax code should make it easier to see how the future plays out for businesses, not make it more difficult. All the scenarios the working group is considering are rather complex and won’t help the state of entrepreneurship in the country.

Hetemäki Tax Code Variations
The Finance Ministry’s Permanent Under-Secretary and Chair of the taxation task force Martti Hetemäki has so far put forward several different options where every option would increase the taxation on the dividends of non-listed companies. One variation would just double the tax on dividends by taxing all the dividends under the capital gains tax of 30%. Another would let an active entrepreneur get dividends with a lesser tax burden up until €30,000. Of this, 35% would be taxed under the capital gains tax. A third variation would be modeled on the Belgian system, where the nominal corporate tax would be left at 26%, but after a deduction the real tax rate felt would be 22%.

Risk and Reward
Entrepreneurship is all about risk and its management: pulling it through against odds that are stacked against you like they are in no other area of life. It is hard enough to build a successful company if you have the environment optimized for building a company, as many would argue the startups in Silicon Valley have. Finland is not as lucky with regards to the inflow of talent, post-WWII industrial cluster creation or inbuilt culture for risk taking and dealing with failure.

Now, as if Hetemäki’s scenarios for tax code weren’t enough, Anni Sinnemäki, the head of the Finnish Green Party and Minister of Labour, further proposes that Finland should tighten the tax on dividends from private enterprises to fill the empty government coffers and should do it as soon as possible. Currently entrepreneurs can deduct up to 9% of their company’s net assets as dividends up to €90,000 without paying double tax on it (€90,000 only in the case the company has net assets of €1m or more). This amount is not tax free of course, but the company has already paid 26% corporate tax on that capital. Sinnemäki thinks Finnish entrepreneurs should pay double tax, which would amount to around 40% to 50% for every penny they make in return for taking massive risks to build companies in Finland that Finland’s prosperity will depend on once the Nokia effect fades out, which it will when the mobile phone giant moves all the rest of its operations from the country. Again, given our tax policy for companies and the talent they seek, Nokia would only be rational and act in their shareholders’ best interests to eventually move out. It might not be under the current management team, but that time will come sooner than most of us think. Patriotism can only go so far and Nokia is trying to run a business with a global shareholder base after all.

If it were not absurd enough that entrepreneurship is seen as being comparable to a riskless investment as the debate suggests, most people taking part in the conversation comment as if entrepreneurs would pay zero tax on the dividends up to the €90,000 mark, when they are really paying a good 26%. Secondly, Sinnemäki is telling us that to counterbalance the tax, entrepreneurs can deduct losses from the tax they pay. I have yet to find an entrepreneur who wants to build a company only so that he can make a loss.

To Sinnemäki’s credit, I do agree that the current tax code has a hole that for example many doctors use when they take out most their pay in dividends instead of pay. That said, the future of Finnish growth entrepreneurs should not be jeopardised because of a badly designed system. Politicians have a tendency to go from one extreme to other and I’m afraid Finnish entrepreneurship could end up paying for this.

More Leveraged Companies
In addition to the very negative message the double taxation would send to Finnish would-be entrepreneurs and the very significant economic disincentive to starting a company in Finland, the double taxation would also likely lead to more debt.

The world of double taxation would lead companies to take on more debt on their balance sheets in order to deduct the interest in taxation. In the light of the de-leveraging which the global financial architecture has been forced to undergo during the past few years, it would be absurd to incentivize more debt leverage in companies. The next time we would hit a rough patch in the global economy, our export focused companies would not even have the small cushion in their balance sheets they had in 2008 to absorb that hit. A lot more bankruptcies would ensue. Have we already forgotten the 1990’s recession and its lasting effect on our entrepreneurial culture? Even without a rough patch in the economy, the companies would build this lack of cushion on their balance sheets into their decisions to hire and would consequentially hire a lot fewer employees knowing they could not carry the cost structure if the sales dipped even slightly.

Politics Aside
Even if Sinnemäki’s comment was pure populism in waiting for the change of prime ministership and the next parliamentary elections, it sets a dangerous example and signals a complete lack of understanding of the role that entrepreneurship plays in a healthy economy.

The Green Party, and any other political entity that considers favoring the double taxation of dividends would be smart to pause and reconsider. Finnish entrepreneurs might not be the most vocal in daily politics since running a company is full time job and does not stop at 5pm, but when put between a rock and hard place we know how to vote. Knowing there are also a lot of smart people in Sinnemäki’s party, I’d hate to see the whole party get a stamp on its forehead for a single lost sheep.

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Startups, BigCo And Politics, A Virtuous Cycle?

Ville Vesterinen — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:00:18 +0000

According to the EU’s climate and energy package, Finland is expected to increase its share of renewable sources from the present 28 per cent to 38 per cent of energy production by 2020. Fulfilling this obligation require a significant increase in Finland’s use of wood-based energy, waste fuels, heat pumps, biogas and wind energy during next years.

This is no easy feat, especially given the rather modest Finnish feed in tariffs in the sector (premium tariffs and investment subsidies amont annually to roughly € 30 million). Nevertheless, the market can be potentially really really big and the need is dire. We’ve already seen some groundbreaking news surface this week in cleantech sector from the US. But make no mistake, Silicon Valley is not the only place where cleantech blossoms. Far from it. This week Wärtsilä came out with news that the world’s first solid oxide fuel cell unit, running on landfill gas, has successfully concluded the first phase of its validation programme.

Wärtsilä is no startup. The company’s core business is marine diesel engines or complete lifecycle power solutions for the marine and energy markets as they like to call them. In 2009, Wärtsilä’s net sales totalled € 5.3 billion with more than 18,000 employees. That’s more red tape anyone ever needs. But just as the Silicon Valley needs googles, ebays and intels, we need our giants to be the ‘universities’ for our entrepreneurs. Without these ’startup universities’ the future entrepreneurs have no place to learn the tricks of the trade. If we would not have such giants, we would not have jobs to quit. We wouldn’t have the bureaucratic organisations to kill the innovation so we can get frustrated and consequentially unleash the innovation after our 30 day resignation period.

I’m happy we have corporations like Wärtsilä. Now least since they are diversifying also into cleantech. In fact, their power generating unit has been operating for more than 1500 hours producing electricity with extremely low emissions to households in Vaasa, Finland.

The WFC20, which is developed and operated by Wärtsilä, is the first of its kind in the world. The unit is run on methane rich gas, originating from a nearby landfill. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas that would otherwise be harmful to the environment. The WFC20 is based on planar solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology, which is supplied by the Danish company Topsoe Fuel Cell A/S. Wärtsilä is one of the world’s leading companies in the development of fuel cell products based on SOFC technology.

The fuel cell unit has been in successful operation for more than 1500 hours. The demonstrated energy efficiency has reached very high levels, exhaust gas emissions are extremely low, and the unit has been able to operate consistently despite the bio gas having low and fluctuating methane content. The fuel cell unit produces an electric output of approximately 20 kW, which is enough to power approximately 10 households in the area. The thermal output of the unit ranges from 14 to 17 kW.

There is a lot of room for startups and the Nordic BigCo co-operate and deepen the existing co-operation. This can potentially yield massive benefits for the companies themselves as well as the individuals involved when these individuals can easily, on one hand join the giants for 2 to 3 year periods, and on the other hand build companies those giants can acquire. Then repeat the cycle. In fact, such cross-pollination should be extended to government level, where having a political career could add value to being an entrepreneur and building businesses. This should be seen not as a negative development, but a positive one. Hard to imagine? Think people like Steve Westly, former Controller and Chief Fiscal Officer of State of Califormia and now the Managing Partner of The Westly Group.

Old path dependent thinking is dead. So are careers for life. When it comes to changing the world, the playing field includes everything.

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