I’ve been interviewed by Dario Salvelli for Wired Magazine about Finland and the recent announcement (1st of July 2010) of the legal right for every Finnish citizen to have access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection.

Finnish web design solution provider Hammerkit has launched a closed beta of the new version of its cloud-based web design tool with revamped UI and features. The company’s tool allows web designers to implement even complex websites on their own, without need for help from programmers. Traditionally web designers have build mock-ups and wireframes, and then transferred these over to programmers to implement and weave in database connections etc. dynamic functionality.

The Estonian Fits.me, Virtual Fitting Room, has launched. Heikki Haldre, the CEO of the company, has been at work with his team on the concept for quite some time, winning pitches in Tallinn and overseas.

Limited Partners or LPs, the people or institutional investors who invest their money in venture funds, are pulling away and the European investment climate is going from bad to worse. This is on one hand because of the dismal returns that the funds have generated and on the other hand because of the bloated management fees that some VCs collect without working much for their portfolio companies or for new deal flow.

Sulake Corporation, the creators of the popular teenage social network Habbo Hotel, have reported very strong financial figures for their first quarter of 2010. Between January and March, Sulake’s revenue grew by more than 25 percent compared to Q1 in 2009. Sales for the first three months of 2010 were $20 million (€14.7 million).

Silicon Valley Journey – Experience of Finnish IT Startups from Dot-Com to 2010 is a new book published just recently that delves into the secrets of Silicon Valley from the Finnish perspective. It’s written by Raija Rapo and Marita Seulamo-Vargas, two Finnish business journalist residing in the Silicon Valley. Pekka Pärnänen of Finnode had also his fingers in the pie in making the book happen.

We have a great lineup for you guys in Tallinn on June 1st. This time around, we decided to organise our event around a few strongholds: a panel as well as some very interesting company presentations. We won’t disclose the companies yet, but there will be plenty and very interesting cases around. They’re also pitching clear needs or opportunities they may have for you so all investors, mentors, advisors, possible co-founders, etc – make a note of next week’s event in your calendars!

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Aalto Capital, a Finnish investment bank, has launched a market place, Privanetanti, for startups and investors to find each other better. It is a very welcome initiative as early stage financing has commonly been noted as one of the largest challenges in getting growth companies off the ground and growing.

Swedish startup Anyfi Networks has come out of stealth mode and announced Anyfi.net, a new Wi-Fi roaming solution. The solution allows Internet service providers (ISP) offer consumers the same automatic Wi-Fi user experience both at home and on the go – users can automatically and securely always connect to the same Wi-Fi access point.

TripSay announced a couple of days ago their partnership with Helsingin Sanomat, the largest daily newspaper in Finland, on their hotel search. Helsingin Sanomat is using TripSay’s hotel search as part of their travel pages targeted at Finns.

Red Herring has announced the 2010 Top 100 Europe Finalists. Among these finalists, there are 36 companies from the Nordics and Baltics. There are 6 from Denmark, 3 from Norway, 12 from Sweden, 1 from Lithuania and 14 from Finland.

Nervogrid, a Finnish cloud computing company, announced yesterday (in Finnish) that they have landed a 700 000 euro investment from a variety of Finnish investors. The company has been founded in 2004, but in the last two years its sales have exploded dramatically. In 2008 its revenue was 240k euros and last year they managed a 1.2 million euro revenue – showing clear traction and demand for their services.

Gigswiz, a Finnish startup founded by Juuso Vermasheinä with the ex-Floobs duo Kai Lemmetty  and Joonas Pekkanen, has just launched in Beta. The service aims to enable bands and artists to better tell where they have fans who’d be willing to come and see them play. The team hasn’t wasted any time as the beta launch came just months after they started to work on the idea in this February.

We’ve made some more progress with the setup of the ArcticEvening Tallinn, including some really attractive prices for getting to and staying there for the event. First of all, we will open ticket registrations for the event on the 25th of May. Mark it down in your calendar. The ticket registrations will open at 8am Tallinn time (GMT+3).

Spotify has just announced that it will expand its service offering to Netherlands. Netherlands is the seventh country Spotify is available. The other countries are Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK. Dutch people can now sign up to the service using the link on their website.

Meniga, the Icelandic personal finance management service, has signed Applicon as its partner in Scandinavia to offer its service to banks. Meniga is an Icelandic startup founded in January 2009 with a very similar plan in mind compared to the famous US company Mint.com.

Datamarket is a new Icelandic startup that has just launched their service – a website that gives people access to structured data from private and public data sources. At the moment, they have data only available from Iceland, but they are looking to expand to other countries and areas as well. They have 6 employees and the company was founded in June 2008. The service took 18 months of development before they were able to launch.