There’s a new startup in town called Sofanatics. The company, based in Helsinki Finland, is in its early stages and has nothing but a simple splash screen on their website. Earlier today the team tweeted about this and thus broke the silence regarding the company – at least on the level that who’s on board the startup. The team behind the startup is Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve co-founder managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman.

Early next month we will go to Tallinn, Estonia to hold our end-of-the-year ArcticEvening in co-operation with OpenCoffee Club Tallinn and Connect Estonia. 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 effectively’

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.

The tickets for our next week’s ArcticEvening are now available for booking. Please find the sign-up form for registering to the event below. Note that if you are unable to make it to the event, please don’t sign up. We have a limited amount of space available and would like to get everyone on board. Likewise, if you need to cancel for any reason, please inform us at events(at)arcticstartup.com so that we can reallocate the ticket.

Our second ArcticEvening this year in Stockholm will be held on 18th of November 2009.
The theme of the evening will be Mobile smartphone solutions and trends – how to strategically build business around the different native application platforms and mobile web.

As promised last week, we have opened up ticket sales for our Helsinki event. Please find the sign-up form below for registering to the event. Also, please remember that if you are unable to make it to the event, please don’t sign up. We have a limited amount of seats available and would like to get everyone on board.

Uppspretta is an Icelandic startup focused in social lending. At the moment Uppspretta is only available in Iceland. It was co-founded by Ragnheiður Magnúsdóttir, one of the panelists in the ArcticEvening Iceland. The site works in such a way that it works as a facilitator between people who want a loan and people who are willing to lend some money. For the time being, the site is concentrating on smaller companies and startups as their market.

We’ll be continuing our tour of the ArcticEvenings around the Nordics and Baltics with our next event being held in Helsinki, Finland. Our event will be themed software growth businesses. We’ll be hosting a fabolous panel for you on the 27th of October. It will have some young, but extremely successful local startups from the software sector.

The show will be held in the Dubrovnik Lounge and Lobby from 6pm onwards.
Our panelists for the evening will include:

I’m in Reykjavik, Iceland, hosting an ArcticEvening event for the local startup scene tonight. I thought I’d do a little write up of the thoughts and discoveries regarding the startup scene up here. First of all, to put things into perspective, you need to understand the size of things we’re talking with. Iceland has a population of around 320 000 people and that’s scattered across the island. On the other hand, they’re a relatively wealthy bunch of people, despite the current economic crisis, with a GDP per capita a little over $40 000 USD for 2008.

Here’s a nifty service in Beta. RunAlong.se is a small Swedish startup that came about because its founder, Heidi Harman, wanted to go for a run but figured it would be nicer if she could invite her girl friends to come along. This proves the point, even thought obvious but many times forgotten, how easy it is to build a service if you just pull up your sleeves and decide to do it.

Over the years, as I have worked with several great designers, I have come to appreciate well designed info graphics more and more. At the same time, where I’m not that much of a designer myself but why I can help companies with their products’ user experience is because I am one of the most impatient persons you’ll ever meet when it comes to bad user interfaces – If I don’t figure out right away what’s happening with a given product, the interface is broken as far as I’m concerned.

This is the first post in a series of posts on startups that presented at the ArcticEvening in Copenhagen at the end of June. First up is Nosco, a nifty Danish startup that’s specialized in idea management.

Hoist is one of the many Danish startups we had the pleasure of pitching us at the ArcticEvening Copenhagen last week.

Hoist is one of the many Danish startups we had the pleasure of pitching us at the ArcticEvening Copenhagen last week.

Hoist is one of the many Danish startups we had the pleasure of pitching us at the ArcticEvening Copenhagen last week.

I’ll be discussing about startups and the future of mobile in a panel at ArcticEvening in Stockholm tonight. Feel free to come to discuss after the panel. I’m interested in various topics including but not limited to: