Posts Tagged ‘slush’

It’s cold, dark and there’s slush on the ground in November in Finland. Still, lots of cool new startups will be meeting on November 3rd and 4th 2009 in Helsinki at the Slush Conference: Slush! is an event organized by startups for startups, aimed to motivate people to start their own businesses and to support networking. Tiburon-TV’s Viktoria has interviewed one of the co-organizers of this cool event: Antti Vilpponen from ArcticStartup, the leading blog on Nordic and Baltic startups.



Slush! features a showcase area for around 40 startups as well as a startup developer track for information sharing among developers. “The Slush made me do it!” sessions are about all the major Finnish Internet era success stories – check out Viktoria’s interviews from Slush 2008 featuring Petteri Koponen from Jaiku, Sampo Karjalainen from Habbo Hotel, Ilkka Paananen from Digital Chocolate and many more Scandinavian tech entrepreneurs.

There’s a Slush Seven Startup Competition based on the Slush Fund that offers winners seed funding as well as support from the brightest Finnish minds. Click here to be kept informed about the latest updates from Slush. Tickets will be going on sales soon!

And please remember that this is not Southern France, so you better take some warm clothes…

Antti Vilpponen has co-organized the SLUSH event with ArcticStartup, the leading weblog on Nordic and Baltic startups, founded by Antti in 2007. Since there were also a number of startup companies involved in the organization of the SLUSH, Antti finds „it is a great show of talent to have a startup event organized by startups themselves“. Antti „fell in love with small companies and organizations“ after he graduated and started working for Apaja, a Finish gaming company. He finds working for a startup company „is a way of life and it’s about enabling things and creating new stuff.“ According to Antti, „Arctic companies are slowly becoming more like their Western counterparts, more aggressive in marketing and product launching. At the grass-roots level we are doing relatively well, but we need to embrace the whole ecosystem from the governmental side with bigger organizations embracing startups as well.“ That is why ArcticStartup wants to facilitate connections: „We need to create a strong online community to form companies and share ideas,“ says Antti. „It is also crucial to see more knowledge sharing from the ones who have IPOed. That way we can produce success stories even faster.“ ArcticStartup helps create „a radically optimistic entrepreneurial culture in the Nordics and Baltics“ and wants „to grow the blog larger and incorporate it into a company relatively soon in order to have a true market-based business.“ Furthermore, the ArcticStartup team wants to facilitate the internationalization of Nordic and Baltic internet and mobile software startups: „You just can’t break free from the Arctic regions without connections“ stresses Antti. „Also, the language is a big barrier – that’s why we blog in English.“ Anybody interested in the Nordic market should contact ArcticStartup, says Antti. „We’re more than glad to help!“ Please also notice that as of now, Antti will cover the Nordic startup scene on www.tiburon-tv.com in a regular report.

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Eat.fi is a Finnish restaurant search and review site, that opened in September 2008 and has been founded by Tina Aspiala. Eat.fi works with Google maps and time-based, dynamic features so users can see immediately if restaurants are open or closed at any given time. Eat.fi already has a very active community that updates restaurant information themselves using the site’s wiki-like tools to write reviews, adding photos and top ten lists. With 800 registered users and 1500 daily visitors, Tina finds that „Eat.fi’s page impressions aren’t enormous, but growth so far has been very organic, steadily rising all the time.“ She is „very confident that it’s going very well.“ The site currently covers only Finland, but Tina had discussions at the SLUSH event with regard to internationalization: „There are quite a few people interested in white-labeling our system.“ Tina points out that „Eat.fi’s system is ridiculously easy to use for all kinds of things. It could be used for anything that has an opening sign.“ Eat.fi is privately funded, but is still looking for government funding in Finland. Eat.fi’s owner Tina, who holds a BA from Yale University and had her now three-month-old daughter with her at the SLUSH event, finds it „kind of funny“ when people come to her start-up booth and ask her if she’s the „booth babe“. She encourages women to get over their fears of being not qualified enough: „More men are willing to do things they aren’t ‚technically’ qualified for. Get over it and just do it. Those who say you can’t be doing it should get out of the way of those who are getting it done.“ With regard to starting a company, she strongly advises that „if you are going to hire people, make damn sure you hire the right people! You need to listen to your gut very, very much. Even if someone is very qualified and you have this gut feeling that something is not quite clicking...if there is any nagging doubt – do not hire them. Wait, because it will be a waste of money in the long run.“