Not everyone did so well. Like a certain moderately well known Finnish mobile phone manufacturer, that announced Symbian will be executed in 2012.

But, don’t waste time shedding any tears for Nokia, their future will be bright. So many new tools are there to help them, like Tietoset, a SaaS where industrial buyers are better able to source from the manufacturing field. They could learn a thing or too from Eric Ries about lean startupsas well, since every big company needs some intrapreneurs.

Sometimes, a distraction like some online gaming is all it takes to get the creative juices flowing again. There are plenty around whether your tastes are more intense, like the new MMORPG Hours of War, or casual social gaming like Planteo.

Cars are so 20th century. Use Me Mover, they’re so hot right now.

Google is so 5 minutes ago. Use Azouk, they’re so hot right now.

All you need to know about MetGen and their “enzymatic technologies in industrial processes” is that it’s a $2,000,000,000 a year market. I bet you’re interested now that you’ve finished counting all those zeros.

I can already hear your brain crunching and computing “It does what? I need to do something?” Yes, instead of leaning back and hoping that renewable energies, nano technology, electric cars and enzymes are going to fix the climate we can take the matter into our own feet and propel ourselves to work, the supermarket, the public sauna and home. Back in the day you would have done this with a bicycle, but the year is 2009 and bicycles are so yesterday. In 2009 the modern citizen uses the Me-Mover to transport himselves from A to Z and anywhere between.

Imagine the Me-Mover as a three wheeled scooter which lets you move at bicycle speeds through the urban jungle, protecting you with a Vespa like windshield from the forces of nature, also know as rain, slush, snow and wind. You propel yourself forward with the power of your own leg, like you used to do as you were a child, just that you know can look credible and cool while you relive those memories. Me-Mover describes the driving feeling as a combination of skiing and biking and your able to lean into curves and maintain your speed. Fold the Me-Mover together when you arrive at the office and take it inside, and learn not to worry about getting your Me-Mover stolen.

In case your now excited and ready to get a Me-Mover, you can start to contact the team of Cloudbikes, which is CEO Jonas Eliasson, Chairman of the Board Kim Graven Nielsen and Board members Bo Bache and Pernille Weiss Terkildsen. Alternatively you can just subscribe to their newsletter which lets you know when and from where the Me-Mover will be available and other news about the company.

My quick caps review: Good idea, but will it succeed? We got bikes and scooters already, and I am not sure if the market is there for another innovation. I haven’t yet seen any real photos of the Me-Mover, so depending on the design, distribution and promotion it may fly and Cloudbikes could grab a slice of the USD 70 Bn market that are human-powered transporters. What I am uncertain about is how they want to convert car and bicycle drivers to Me-Movers. I reckon those people who think about these issues already use the bike or public transportation to move from A to B, and why would they now switch to the Me-Mover? Given that it is lightweight, foldable and offers protection against the elements they might be convinced, but that still leaves the car drivers to convert. And that certainly ain’t an easy task.

Every Friday we will feature an Investment and aim to break it down as closely as we can so our audience will get an idea of where the money comes from.

Sopima, a Finnish company building an online contract bank that aims to enable productivity improvements into the way organizations manage their contracts secured a €1m funding just a while ago.

Sopima is developed for all sizes of companies to keep their contracts in order, be able to manage all commitments made. As a web service Sopima enables you to do this together with your business partners, regardless where they are located. With Sopima every party has the entire contract constantly at arms length, and thus the contract becomes integral part of the daily business.

We dug a bit deeper to see where a web startup like Sopima would get its funding in Finland.

Business Angels brought in €245K and Finnish Employment and Economic Development Centre and Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation) combined €230K, and Etera, a Finnish pension insurance company €500K. The three angel investors were Jukka Kosonen, Pekka Heikkonen and people behind a Finnish company Dealia Oy. The company raised its seed round from the management team and business angels mentioned above, which created a nice cushion to go after the A-round.

During 2010 and 2011 Sopima will be looking into closing another round of €2m to €5m for international expansion.

Later on, Sopima is also planning on building bespoke virtual negotiation rooms, where the contract can be negotiated and assembled from standard pieces. This means that the company does not have to fly their lawyers into the meetings at all, but they do their job when the contract is put together from the various commitments.

Conceptually Sopima feels a bit like Google Docs living in the cloud, but this time it is a legally binding contract. This should make the whole process of conducting business easier, faster and safer.

Sopima is currently in closed Beta and will be launching during December 2009.

Next up was the main panel, featuring no less than Rebtel founder Hjalmar Winbladh, Traveas founder Jack Melcher-Claësson, and Cloudo evangelist Viktor Björk. Hjalmar talked about Rebtel’s dual targeting strategy, focusing on immigrants and expats around the world as customers and entrenched operators around the world as enemies. He slyly added, about his enemies pricing strategy, that “50 öre for an sms is a fantasy price.” Of course facing down operators is no easy challenge, especially when companies like AT&T are constantly whispering in Apple’s ear about which applications should be approved and which should not.

Viktor, with his trademark zeal, discussed the clear mobile future of Cloudo, and made very sure not to use the term “OS,” since Cloudo is a horizontal platform, and won’t try to make you give up your gmail. Ever. He promised. Lastly, by virtue of sitting on the right of the panel, Jack illuminated the ways in which Traveas tries to make travelling print-out free, on everyone’s mobile, EVEN people without iPhones. Shocking.

Miikka then wrapped up the panel, and I passed out more drink tickets, as handshakes, back slaps, light hearted insults, and heavily considered strategies were discussed into the night.

Their service works in such a manner that companies looking for a batch of certain industrial goods leaves a request to the service with specific details on the parts, delivery schedule and price. This request is then passed on to the network of manufacturers who are able to send a quotation on that request, depending if the buyer has made the request open or directed it to certain manufacturers only.

The service is free for buyers to a certain point, but manufacturers pay monthly fees to use the service. The fees range from less than 100 euros a month to a few hundred euros, depending on what kind of a package they want. While these may seem high for a web service, you have to remember that this is a business critical service. Manufacturers are able to attract more business through Tietoset.

While the service is not the finetuned with the latest user interface solutions, it works well and is a profitable business. The biggest obstacles in selling, according to Siiskonen, are the deeply welded ways of doing business in Finland. Buyers of industrial goods rarely see the value in putting their partners in a competitive position to get a better outcome. Tietoset has also faced challenges that the owners of manufacturing plants did not understand the value in marketing your service through a network like this, not many are that business savy.

So while the service works and there’s a lot of upside to it – it remains to be seen how far Tietoset can go with the current generation of marketing averse metal industry.

Ben Smith of TheReallyMobileProject reports that Nokia will let Symbian go in 2012 and focus on Maemo. All high-end N series multimedia devices will be running the Linux OS by 2012, even though X series and E series devices will continue to run Symbian OS. That is, until Nokia will decides Symbian should be banned altogether.

I hope the Finnish Giant will be on a roll with smart decisions and it will start putting more focus on the developers and especially the startup community that resides in its backyard along with the focus on Maemo. Nokia has been close to invisible in the local startup scene for past few years, but we hope this will change soon and knowing some of the cool cats inside the company, we have faith it will. More than anything the company needs fresh blood and the older guard to understand to step down. The fresh blood is not only needed in respect to talking to the startup community, but to everything that Nokia does. We give massive respect to the team that made Nokia what it is, but now the smart thing is to understand to step down and make sure the next generation will have a tools to kick Droid’s ass. We want nothing as much as see all the cool cats in the scene to buzz about the next Nokia handset and fill up YouTube with videos when they are unpacking it. It would also not hurt if the phone would be a delight to use and develop for.

It hurts, but just as your economics teacher taught you, you should not calculate sunk cost when planning for future investments. Unfortunately this also applies to mobile phone manufacturers.

MetGen, based in Turku, is focusing on enzymatic technologies in industrial processes (meaning simply industrial enzymes) trial to increase energy efficiency in industrial biofuel production.  The core customers include the pulp & paper industry, which have realized the potential of creating significant value from the current by-product/waste streams. In Finland and the Nordic countries, several industry leaders have ongoing R&D projects to convert industrial waste or wood waste into energy and cellulosic ethanol. MetGen, still at the development stage, has several interesting R&D projects in the pipeline in this segment.  The company develops enzymes useful in areas such as biomass treatment for energy conservation in the pulp & paper industry, and bioethanol production.

“Planeto takes quiz gaming to new heights. Now you can experience unprecedented quiz fun together with millions of players around the globe.”

Swedish startup Planeto is going after the wealth waiting in virtual goods and social gaming, besides from the modest goal of world domination in gaming. Planeto Quiz claims to be the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online Quiz (MMOQ). The game is first to combine elements of online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online with the accessibility and instant thrill of traditional quiz games.

Planeto’s been all hush hush from the beginning, even the names of the private investors of the company are still to be kept secret. But, as of today, we’ve got a little preview of what’s in the making!

How does Planeto Quiz work
Planeto Quiz is a free-to-play service and will initially be available as a web game, mobile platforms and consoles coming later. The web game works standalone but is tightly linked with Facebook, thus recommended to use to gain the full gaming experience.

Players can decide to play without creating an account, or login with Facebook, MySpace, Google or OpenID account, as well as create an own unique Planeto account with Avatar, an online persona. Players can then decide to take on quiz challenges alone – playing against the game itself – or together with friends. Answering questions correctly gives each player a chance to receive items, equipment and action cards that can then be used to further enhance the quiz experience. This is also where the money’s to be made, in micropayments of additional game items and equipment. Planeto Quiz is not targeting any specific demographics, thus aiming to reach both male, female, young and old, worldwide.

Challenges of social gaming
To take upon the future challenges the company possesses notable, and well needed, domain competence, led by co-founder and CEO Martin Walfish. Martin himself is the founder and former CEO of Massive Entertainment, one of the world’s premier PC game development studios recently acquired by Ubisoft Entertainment. The team was also recently joined by Sweden’s own Internet guru Joakim Jardenberg as the CMO. If anyone, he gets the benefits of engaging in social networks and of transparency.

As the magic sauce recipe of stickniness factor still remains a secret, though, I’m eagerly waiting Joakim to drop the stealth mode sign, just as Eric Ries, Lean Startups, also recommends, and get into serious interaction.

The challenges, as well as opportunities, Planeto is facing in the world of gaming became very clear while listening to a wonderful panel discussion with Elísabet Grétarsdóttir, Global Strategy and Tactical implementation of EVE Online, among others at the SIME conference held last week. EVE Online  is a hugely successful science fiction-based massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) by Icelandic CCP (See also our previous coverage of CCP). She couldn’t stress enough the importance of embracing the fact that the games truly belong to the users themselves, thus empowering the grassroots marketing engaged in by the players throughout communities and social networks.

Planeto is at the moment doing the dating game as seeking venture capital, so if you’re triggered by success stories like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Stardoll, Eve Online or World of Warcraft, now would be a good to time to make the call.

A team of ten people is working as we speak to get us all hooked up when launching later this year. For now there’s no use of begging for beta accounts, a group of some 50 beta testers are taking care of that. Put in other words, join the Facebook Page and you know it’s time when your inbox is filled with friend requests to join the Planeto Quiz.

Be prepared of the wave.

First, lets look at the facts. 35 million kr is not a lot of money. Especcially not when you consider that Spotify’s A-round was over €15 million, and arguably, both the licensing costs and infrastructure required to stream movies are much, much higher. Second, no venture firm is claiming credit for the investment, and a lawyer is taking a board position and not a ”VC-guy.” This is potentially worrying since even the best connected corporate lawyers fall short of being considered “smart money.” Since thier connections are usually with other corporate lawyers, politicians, and finance types, not the tech and media masters that Voddler will need if they intend to scale and, you know, BE SUCCESSFUL. So, where did that secret money come from, and why aren’t they talking?

There are several possibilities. Given Vinge’s and Mr. Villard, Esq.’s experience with private equity and other assorted M&A stuff, it could be that he’s fronting a group of wealthy individual investors who are caught up in the Spotify hype, or even the general movie and showbiz hype. Hey, it’s happened before. This could mean that Voddler needs money but was turned down by established VC firms, and had to go this route. Not an outstanding sign as far as active ownership is concerned, but could leave the door open for more money later without changing the board.

The other main possibility is that it is real VC money, but there is a conflict of interest with another portfolio company, and so the investment has to be concealed. One of the movie studios themselves could also be the investor, and would surely be backing several different companies, and might not want to favor one over another.

Who’s really behind this little “A-and-a-half” round won’t be known until Voddler has become the “new black” and it seems safe to brag about it. So…maybe never.

More particularly, The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, and lean manufacturing to guide the creation of technology businesses that create disruptive innovation.

As Ries explained, contrary to the general belief, The Lean Startup does not only work for consumer facing Web 2.0 companies. It works just as well for B2B software companies and in fact for any company that is facing a market risk instead of technology risk.

This is probably the one presentation that I would not miss as a startup out all the presentations ever made. Real gold dust! You can watch Eric’s video presentation below.

Big thanks to skilled people at CityVice for the filming and editing, all the Sponsors that made the event possible and Everyplay, Floobs for co-organizing it. If you’d like to see more of the good stuff, go to Eric’s blog at http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

Tomorrow we’ll be having another ArcticEvening event in Tampere. The event will revolve around some interesting startup pitches and a panel with some very interesting industry heavy weights. Last week we went through our procedure to pick three companies available for pitching at the event and the chosen ones are (in random order): Tagregator, Tribe Flame and There Corporation. On the panel we’ll have Jussi Harvela, Otto Chrons and Heikki Halme.

You can read more about the event on its own page. Want to come? Sign up now, there are still some tickets available. The show will kick off around 6pm at Demola.

This is something that Kristofer Kimbler, CEO of Azouk, has also recognized when he started working on his latest venture. Azouk is a Swedish online service for professionals that provides an alternative way to reach the best content and information and to ‘meet’ top experts. The company’s HQ is in Malmö, Sweden, but marketing and sales in UK and R&D in Poland. Kimbler who was previously at Appium Technologies that was acquired by Aepona Ltd. In June 2007. Appium Technologies developed telecom application servers based on the Parlay OSA and VoIP standards.

I agree that Google is not enough to weed through the information overflow and that a semantic search engine based on a unique expert rating algorithm that searches for expert content sounds promising. But Azouk is completely dependent on network effects to kick-in and based on my brief use, they haven’t kicked-in yet. Not only that, it feels that we already have such a tool, Delicious. Delicious has worked great for me and I’m not sure I want to start building content into a yet another service.

To give Azouk some credit, it has a lot that Delicious or other services don’t. To wrap your head around the service you could think it combines LinkedIn and Delicious, since you can actually create your own expert profile in the service and start accumulating social capital as the expert in any subject. Since Azouk adds also a human expertise and judgment factor to online search it resembles the bet in human edited search that Mahalo has made, even though it’s build differently.

Azouk could be potentially a handy tool for searching information on expert topics. What is especially useful is the ability to filter based on just presentations or white papers. Unfortunately currently it doesn’t have a lot of either in its index. I tried to search for energy and carbon dioxide for another story I’m working on, but these topics did not yield any results. It’s still early days for the service so let’s hope they can pull in a lot more users and content over time. Its just hard to get the one before having the other.

What makes me particularly happy is the fact that they have thought of the commercialisation of the game very early on. This can be seen on the website as advertisements for war bonds. For 29.99€ you get three months worth of premium play time. What makes this interesting is the fact that they are still deveoping the premium account so all the users who have bought the war bonds package already will have to wait for the chance to play the game. Nothing certainly wrong in getting advanced payments for your web service.

I had a chat with Andreas Von Koskull, the CEO of Sauma Technologies, earlier this autumn and he mentioned the fact that they are looking forwards to creating more games in these niches with their platform. It’s certainly interesting to build a game of this sort to a very highly passionate group of people, but as a side product the real value comes in the form of the technology that they’re building. This platform will enable new games being launched even faster to new niche areas where there is already demand.

Being the games geek that I am, I’m personally looking forwards to seeing how Hours of War will develop in the future. With 20 000 registered users trying out your beta is definitely a good sign and an indication of the future potential.

Then we did more of the stuff we normally do, like meaningful investigations of interesting new companies, for example Danish online video site 23 Video or Finnish music site Hitlantis. Of course, we here at ArcticStartup are determined to be fair, but even we’re not geeky enough to meet friends in a virtual bar.

Another thing we’re not afraid to do here is be servicey, which is why we bring you posts with helpful tips on improving the startup ecosystem in Northern Europe, what the former CEO of MySQL thinks about opening offices in Silicon Valley, and, uh, how not to get your throat cut by Chinese competition.

We’re also bringing you the best and most hotness from the Cleantech Sector, stuff like European Batteries, the new lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility in Finland (with €40m in capital!), Windside, the fashionista’s wind turbine, and VIGO, a new venture accelerator that sounds like the bad-guy from Ghostbusters 2 (Or the good-guy from Lord of the Rings).

Danish people sure buy a lot of electric cars. But Estonians might have to think twice, if their share options start getting taxed under the new law.

We have a Hunch who are readers are, but if you answer these witty questions it’ll help us know you more.

Branding for instance, and access to capital. So for the moment, when Huwaei steals $2.9 billion in work from Nokia Siemens, you shouldn’t worry. What should make you worry isn’t what Chinese companies are doing, it’s how they’re doing it. How they’re doing it, is by having so many companies being run by founders, instead of hired “professional” CEOs. How they’re doing it, is by chasing margins, not blue ocean technology frontiers. As Dr. Gong said, “Venture Capitalists hate ‘copy cat’ technology, Chinese companies don’t care.” So, not only are Chinese companies winning on cost, they are also winning  on speed, and out innovating Western companies in their own markets. All the while rejecting Western developed products in China, from companies that want to sell to the Chinese things that were mades for Swedes (or Danes, or Finns).

So, sleep well tonight. But in the morning, start worrying.