Arctic Startup

Last but definitely now least, at the end of the 2009, we will go to Tallinn, Estonia to hold our end-of-the-year ArcticEvening. The event will take place on 3. December and focus on startup marketing. We will hold a panel under the ‘What is marketing for startups and how to do it effective...

Norwegian mobile caller ID search startup Mobile Nordic has changed its name to Numo Solutions. Accordingly, the firm’s mobile phone number and SMS search products, previously with country-specific localized names, will be branded as Numo Finder and Numo SMS Preview, respectively. The chang...

Startups are startups and it takes more than consumer web companies to make the world go around.  In fact, one of the most ambitious startups in Sweden at the moment, in the hyper competitive fashion industry, is Noko Jeans. The cleverly narrated video on their website tells the story: from an id...

During the recent ArcticStartup and AES trip to Silicon Valley, there was an interesting lesson to be learned. It was commonly talked that it is not so much the countries competing for startups, but cities that are wanting to build ecosystems enabling growth startups to be founded and prosper. Th...

Spotify announced yesterday that is has added support for Symbian smartphones. Symbian is used by Nokia, SonyEricsson and Samsung. This has been a long awaited release as Symbian is still the most widespread phone OS around, thus dramatically increasing the potential for new Spotify users. While ...

Recently, we have seen increasing investor interest in the Finnish cleantech market, which closed a total of €40-50m worth of investments in Q3 including those in companies such as European Batteries, a large scale lithium ion battery manufacturer, Nokia spin-off There Corporation, a sub/smart me...

To kick off this week I want to take things to macro level regarding entrepreneurship, politics and media. It is a topic we seldom talk about while we promote entrepreneurship here at ArcticStartup from the bottom of our hearts each and every day. I want to stress the importance of growth compani...

It was a rollercoaster of a week, with some companies going up, some down, and some upside-down. Take Sopima, the Finnish online contract “bank,” this week they took €1m to the actual bank. Or Voddler, the Swedish “Spotify for movies” company that got 35 million kronor fro...

Bringing you the latest in cleantech, we look today to Denmark, where in less than three weeks the United Nations Climate Change Conference aka “Hopenhagen” will start. But instead of letting our incompetent politicians decide about our future, lets take matters into our own hands &#8...

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...

Last night a hundred of Stockholm’s brightest and best in mobile services got together to talk about future challenges, opportunities, hopes, dreams, and tearing down the old order to build it again. The event got started with a short presentation by Jaycut CEO Jonas Hombert, who just migh...

Tietoset is a fascinating Finnish company, some 4 years old, building a SaaS-based service where industrial buyers are able to do better sourcing from the manufacturing field. They currently work with the metal industry and have been thinking of taking the model to other industries as well. I kno...

Until today the Finnish Sisu and some rather big sunk costs has prevented the world biggest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia to admit they have been going down a wrong path already for a while. This wrong path is called Symbian. It seems that Nokia has started to use their own Nokia Maps and turne...

By chance, I have met recently several Finnish companies operating in the new but growing cleantech segment of industrial enzymes for biowaste-to-energy applications. Enzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions and that can be used as new materials for renewable energy solutions. The gl...

“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 ...

Yesterday, Swedish steaming movie startup Voddler announced 35 million kronor in new funding to help “develop the service.” It was also announced that Bertil Villard of lawfirm Vinge would be taking a board position at the company. It was not announced who the money came from. So, how...

Exactly a week ago we had a privilege to have Eric Ries here in Helsinki to discuss The Lean Startup and what it means for startups. In short, The Lean Startup is a way to get product/market fit fast and agile.More particularly, The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing ...

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 ...

Google is our answer to everything be it writing a Master’s thesis, looking for a new car, a new job, doing your homework or putting together an analysis on a fortune 500 stock. I, for one, use Google every single day to get to the bottom of which ever startup I’m writing about. Yet, ...

A new version of the game Hours of War, the MMORPG war game being created by Sauma Technologies, has just been launched. The game has not been out for very long and without any major advertising they have been able to add some 20 000 registered users on board already. We wrote in January that Sau...

The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship hosted an event today ambitiously titled, “Good Morning 2019,” that plays on their 10 year anniversary by investigating what the world will be like in the next 10. Arctic Startup readers will be most interested in the presentation by Li Gong, C...

The common picture we have of wind turbines are the ones which stand on tubular towers and have three rotor blades, varying in different sizes. The design is very much similar to the windmills of old, which were used to pump water and grind grain. However, Risto Joutsiniemi had already developed ...

Reporting from the second day of MoneyTalks, being held here in Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland I bumbed into a new innovative music startup called Hitlantis. I talked to one of the co-founders Timo Poijärvi about the concept and what they are doing. Poijärvi has worked in the music industry and with so...

The other day I saw Chris Dixon’s Tweet, where he was tweeting about his company’s new nifty little widget that let’s you learn about your blog’s readers (and lets them learn about each other). I instantly thought how I’d like to share it with ArcticStartup readers, ...

Estonia has previously enjoyed a relatively high reputation among startups and international high tech companies due to its friendly and very incentivised tax environment. Well, if a new law regarding the different kinds of income goes through we might have to say good bye to that reputation. Bal...