According to the EU’s climate and energy package, Finland is expected to increase its share of renewable sources from the present 28 per cent to 38 per cent of energy production by 2020. Fulfilling this obligation require a significant increase in Finland’s use of wood-based energy, waste fuels, heat pumps, biogas and wind energy during next years.

We’ve been looking closely at the startup scene in the Nordics and Baltics for the last two and a half years and I have to say, the amount of events on the market these days is very attractive. There are a lot of different kind of events and I’m sure there’s something for everyone. While these events have their own functions and drive their own agendas, there’s no getting round it – they’re great fun and will surely improve your business if not by any other means than at least by networking with the other visitors there.

Are Nordic countries particularly entrepreneurial? How do our societies perceive entrepreneurship as a career choice?

Guilty as charged. We sometimes need a helping hand from a copy editor here and there, because we are not native English speakers, but want to write in English just because its the global lingua franca. Now there’s Wordy, a Danish startup, to help out. We saw Wordy already present in Copenhagen back in June at the ArcticEvening event we held there. Back then they were still in closed beta and only now have opened up.

Nikolaj Nyholm, a Danish serial entrepreneur, who stepped down as Polar Rose’s CEO just recently will join a Nordic venture capital firm Sunstone Capital as Partner in the Technology Ventures team on January 1.

We visited Lahti Cleantech Venture Day a few weeks ago and were able to talk to Richard Youngman of Cleantech Group. Richard is based in Cleantech Group’s office in London and is responsible for the company’s global membership offering – its industry-leading data, research, and conferences – as well as driving the growth of the group’s activities in Europe, India and the Middle East.

Upsido is a Danish startup providing a web application for Nordic private investors that focus on fundamental analysis, as opposed to fast and real-time day-trading.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_analysis
Upsido claims to offer the most comprehensive and fastest updated and most accurate financial information, tools, and news on Nordic public companies, to allow private investors to make sounder long-term investment decisions and track the performance.
Upsido have recognized a global trend of banking customers losing confidence in their bank’s investment advices.

Electric cars are all the rage currently and in many ways its also the holy grail of Detroit and thus plays a disproportionately large role in the US politics. To get an idea of how big a role cars alone play, the federal program paid individual car owners up to $4,500 to replace their current vehicles with new ones that get higher-mileage. Whether this was just an indirect subsidy to Detroit or a real environmentally responsible policy is another discussion.

• Online PR: What role does it play in takeover bids? via @KrishnaDe - Adage + great point by Krishna De
• Internet-Manifesto - How journalism works today.
  

Mentory is a new global mentorship community from Denmark, targeted for match-making between mentors and protégés. In addition to matching people for the traditional one-on-one mentoring relationships, the web service allows for open “mass-mentoring” among the whole network. The key target users are businesspeople and entrepreneurs.

Via Venture Partners, a Nordic venture fund, is to invest € 2.65 million in 
Swedish mobile marketing company PlusFourSix. PlusFourSix offers the mobile telephone as a marketing tool, making it possible for clients to create a mobile initiative for their marketing, without having to invest in expensive infrastructure.
According to Niklas Stålberg, the new PlusFourSix CEO as of 1 August, the money is raised to speed the company’s expansion in Sweden and across the Nordics.

AktieTwits.dk is a new Danish service for Nordic professional and private stock investors sharing investment tips or seeking stock information on Twitter. The idea is to bring all information flows together and structure the content, with the aim to ease real time monitoring of the market.

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.

Piipl is a Danish web service focused on improving the innovation processes of enterprises, government agencies, and researchers by facilitating user-driven innovation. The service could be used for product or service improvement, change management, user research, or any similar process benefiting from interaction of and input from multiple persons.

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.

Here’s the first startup of a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.
Zero Point Software (Denmark) - Zero Point Software is a developer of intellectual properties in the video game space and their offering was two fold:

Nordic Venture Forum 2008 is over and the winners have been announced. Just when I wrote (here) about how skeptical I was about Concilio Networks, they land among the top three companies out of the 50 firms that participated in the Nordic Venture Forum.