Also, if you can come up with an easy, but efficient way to bring the updating of the list into the public domain, please comment below.

The List of Finnish Web Startups

• Apprix -Edugaming
• Blyk -free mobile phone network
• Comex.com -Create & share funny picture messages in web or using your mobile phone
• ConnectedDay -communities for daycare centers
• Dopplr - Share your business travel plans
• Eat.fi -Find and rate open restaurants near you
• ENCA -Coin collecting social network
• EveryPlay -Stealth social Gaming startup
• Floobs -Build you own online tv-channel
• Fruugo -Trusted 3rd party of E-Business
• HammerKit -Web-based development platform
• HappyWakeUp -Smart alarm clock on mobile phone
• HappyWise -Educational and serious games
• Innofile -Online file transfer service
• Ironstar Helsinki -Developer of cross-platform social games, such as MoiPal
• JoikuSpot -Turns your phone to a mobile WLAN HotSpot
• Kuneri -Mobile software based on Flash Lite
• Leads House -Sales leads community
• Lumo Flow -Social Workspaces
• Mahshelf -YouTube for comics/books
• Mobile Advertising Solutions, MAS -Advertising on mobile games
• Moogo -Easy creation of web sites. By Ideakone
• Muslix -Muslim Online Community
• MyCashFlow -Easy to use web shop software
• MySites -Online desktop for multimedia
• nCore -Embedded localisation and user interface products
• NewsToScreen -News and ads delivered via a screensaver
• Norfello -E-invoicing (laskulle.fi) and web-based sending of letters (postita.fi)
• Numcore -Online monitoring and controlling instruments for the process industry
• Oindex -Public listing of user numbers of web sites
• One did it -Test your consumption of natural resources, share the results and reduce it with simple, easy actions
• Petsie -Social Networking for pets
• RunToShop -Social recommendation service
• Scred -Community-oriented cost balancing tool
• Senseg -Touch interface technology
• SoftColor -Online image processing
• Supponor -Digital billboard ads for broadcasting
• These Are My Brands -In stealth. By Kisko Labs
• Timalaya -Social shopping space. By Gemilo
• Tripsay -Travel information organizer
• Tweehouse - social gaming solutions for large brands
• VerticeTree -Innovative platforms and applications for the internet and mobile devices
• Whatamap -Mobilize your maps
• White Vector -Social media monitoring
• WOT -Free web security browser add-on
• Wreck A Movie -The future of film
• Xiha Life -Multilingual social network
• Zipipop -Develops web-based services for making everyday life easier.

Floobs, the Finnish startup that enables users to create their own live TV channels on the web or mobile has integrated its services into Kotisivukone.  Kotisivukone is another Finnish startup who make creating websites really easy (Their name is Finnish for Home Page Machine). Their users can now easily add Floobs channels to their pages through a component.

The integration is done through Floobs’s API that is designed to make the integrations easy. Earlier the API has been used to integrate with Petsie, a social network for pets. Floobs will continue to focus in integrating their service to other sites. The API is open to the public and so far has also a custom module for Content Management System Joomla.

Six weeks ago I read an article in the NYT about Google becoming a media company. I wanted to contribute to the discussion about Google emphasizing their own sites in search results. So I created Google minus Google, a search engine that uses Google to get the search results, but filters out all links to Google-owned sites.

The site has found quite an audience and yesterday Google minus Google reached 100000 visits, which is a whole lot more than I thought of when creating the service.

The visits come from around 80 thousand or so unique users and in total there has been more than 128 thousand searches. After all of the huge PR the service got (NYT, Lifehacker, CNET, the Register, Nu.nl and more than 300 blogs), the daily number of visitors has declined, but the usage per user has been increasing all the way.

It’s not a surprise that many people who enter the site for the first time have tried it if the service really works, therefore most of the top searches relate to Google. In total there have been 55 000 different queries. It’s interesting that a huge portion of those are names, which could mean that people are really interested only in themselves.

20 most popular queries on Google minus Google

Please try Google minus Google, if you haven’t tried it before.

SIME Finland

I’m not quite sure if anyone got anything concrete out of Scandinavia’s top internet conference’s endeavour into Finland as the presentations were quite general. But if they’re organizing it again next year, I’ll definitely be there. As I will be in Stockholm in November, too.

A recap of the presentations can be found at the SIME Blog.

Photos of SIME Finland.

P.S I was supposed to do some semi-live-blogging from the conference, but the curse of all conferences, crappy wifi ruined my plans.

I thought what they accomplished was great and must have done wonders for the company. Until I just read Seth Godins post: the myth of launch PR, in which he reminds that great companies do not need big launch PR. He list such companies: Apple, Nike, Wikipedia, Google and Microsoft. In fact, chasing after PR might distract a startup from more important matters.

I think Godin has a good point: in the long run, startups don’t need big launch PR. But in the short term it might help in getting investors and new people to try a new service.

This is the first in my Interviews of Finnish startups using Twitter. The idea is to keep things simple: One Tweet per answer, no editing.

First up is Ramine Darabiha from MySites. The method of interviewing through Twitter needs some more practice and some of the answers were more than just one tweet, but nevertheless a good concept that I will definitely continue using in the future.

The Twinterview with Ramine Darabiha from MySites

startupbin @mysites So, here goes: What is MySites?

mysites MySites is the world’s first Social OS. This means we create social equivalents of the apps on your computer, but for the web!

mysites We enable hosting, sharing, and viewing any kind of content: music, documents, movies, photos, texts. But we’re creating more ..

mysites .. apps so you can do anything. We spent 1 year creating a full IDE, with service creations tools which we’ll open in 2 months.

startupbin So you allow users to upload and host apps on MySites, not just files?

mysites To clarify: you can host any file, just like on your computer. You can open them with apps created by us or others, like an OS.

startupbin who are your competitors?

mysites Direct: open platforms, which regroup your services in one place: Windows Live, the upcoming Google platform (Android +webapps).

mysites Indirect: platforms that are not open, but might: Facebook, Yahoo. By platform, I mean a “real” place for free dev of any app.

mysites Market-wise, we focus on Europe, especially on young users (gamers+students). We feel it’s a left-out market with huge potential

startupbin what’s the one main thing that sets you apart from competitors?

mysites We have strong ties with markets where large corporations can’t: students, online gaming teams. We will localize in many langs.

startupbin What’s your business model?

mysites We’re going to reveal it very soon (2 months). It will be a -good- surprise. I hate the paths Facebook and MySpace are taking.

startupbin looking forward to hearing more… Why should we all start using MySites right now?

mysites Because it’s the hottest Finnish invention since sauna! Seriously, we’re adding lots of cool new possibilities by the day:

mysites MySites is currently the easiest way to store lots of photos / tunes / files and share them. Our uploader is the best!

mysites Also, unlike others, we respect your privacy, and give you control over who can see your content.

mysites If you’re a student, you can soon throw away your USB key and store your groupwork there. We’re doing 8 student gigs this month.

mysites Lastly, we recently added social votes, friends updates& our first translation. Coming soon: AIR apps, iPhone support, open IDE!

mysites I forgot to mention a full rework of our design, and Safari support (soon).

startupbin that’s quite a lot of reasons. Finally, what’s your view on the Finnish startup scene?

mysites The Finnish scene is unique. I love the mix of experimenting, demoscene, etc. I wish there’d be more visibility for new ideas ..

mysites but things are becoming more and more active I’m hoping to bring some of the things I saw in our tour with Mashable here too.

mysites Finland has a lot of untapped potential: people are very networked, the country has a huge connectivity in both mobile and dsl

mysites I feel Finland has the potential to be one of the leading innovators in tomorrow’s web. The brains are there, the tech too.

mysites On a light note, I think Finland is a cocoon, in many senses. It’s just waiting to become a butterfly

Google minus Google, a search engine that lets you Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube has become an unexpected hit. After the launch on Monday thousands of people from all over the world have used the tool and it has been a topic in numerous blog posts and discussions on Friendfeed.

After the launch, several people have suggested that I should have used Google Custom Search (cse) to do the job. After some hard detective work I have swithed to CSE. Detective work - you ask? Yes, the reason for my initial solution to just use the basic Google search engine and remove the google sites in the query (using “-site:google.com etc”) was not technical. I needed to gather all the domains Google owns before I could use cse.** The list of Google domains in the exclude list of Google minus Google contains more than 2500 domain names. And it needed some work to compile. I’m sure I have missed something, though.

Enjoy the new and more useful version two of Google minus Google.

** For you techies out there: cse doesn’t allow wildcard usage in the top level domain (like google.*), but it can be used in the normal query.

Inspired by an article in NYT about Google becoming a media company, I decided that something had to be done. So I created a way to Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube.

The result is Google minus Google.

UPDATE: Google minus Google has gotten a huge start: 3000 visitors in the first day! The visitors came mainly through a few Finnish IT news sites: Digitoday, that interviewed me this morning, IT-Viikko and Tietoviikko. I’ve also updated the filters to include some Google domains: Jaiku, Gmail and Blogspot

UPDATE 2: Version 2 of the launched. Now built with Google Custom Search Engine.

UPDATE 3: Miguel Helft continued the original story in the New York Times blog with an article about Google minus Google. He had received a statement from Google: “For years, users have been able to customize their experience via the advanced search feature within web search, and we welcome all efforts that help deliver useful information and expand user choice.” So I guess I’m of the hook for now.

TripSay, the Finnish social travel startup, that I’ve covered a few times before has opened up to public beta.  The company has done good PR work, since the launch is covered - among others - in two of the biggest startup blogs TechCrunch and Mashable. The launch story also made it onto Techmeme.

Overall the launch has gotten quite a lot of nice publicity. Most of the reviews have been positive, although some have questioned the business models of social travel sites in general, which was not a problem back in January when I did in my first post about Tripsay (It was called Vailoma back then).

Anyway, Congratulations to Leo and Juha and the rest of the TripSay team for the launch. Too bad I’ll miss the launch party tomorrow. Also remember that the work has just started.

See what other people are talking about the Tripsay launch:

Techmeme discussion
Discussion on Friendfeed
Google Blog search

Open Problem Bank is a project that aims to collect open technical problems into a searchable database for the public to use freely. People are invited to submit problems into the bank. The problems submitted in the bank should be ideas of devices that somebody could design and build. You don’t have to know how the device you have in mind works, you just have to know why it would be needed or why it would be useful.

The company is founded earlier this year by a Finnish Business Intelligence Specialist Nisse Suutarinen who has been very kind in posting a preliminary business plan on their site. The business plan reveals that they are seeking a seed funding of 50000USD, which would give an investor 25% of equity. The same 50k would also cover the costs of getting the service to beta and also running costs for the first year. Doesn’t seem that much, does it?

Good idea, what about the execution?

The idea of the Open Problem Bank is good. The idea was awarded at Cambrian House, a site that is focused on developing crowdsourcing-based companies. I just feel that Mr. Suutarinen is aimed too low in his plans. There should be more effort put into developing a good idea into a successful business than can be found in his plans. Open Problem Bank will probably find its 50k and develop into a modest one man business before fading away into the ever-expanding sea of unsuccesful executions of a good ideas. I hope Mr. Suutarinen proves me wrong. All the luck in your efforts Nisse.