Blyk, the free Finnish born (but operates only in UK) mobile network for 16 to 24 year-olds funded by advertising, has signed a frame agreement with Aito Technologies, a Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution provider, for the delivery and implementation of its Business-Driven CEM software product, Aito, to UK market. This follows a successful 3-month pilot installation, which began in May.

Last Friday, Microsoft launched a new program called Bizspark that offers startups of different ages and stages tools to take care of their software and hosting requirements. Technopolis Ventures, Veraventure, The Finnish Software Entrepeneurs Association and Venture Cup has partnered with Microsoft in Finland to accept participants into the program.
Startups must meet the following requirements to be accepted into the program:

Estonian Fortumo and Finnish Kuneri have won a free pass to Nordic Mobile Media Conference in Tallinn, Estonia on December 3-4th. Both companies will also get an exhibition stand in the event.

Fruugo is preparing to come out tomorrow afternoon in a keynote (titled maybe a bit exaggeratedly “Meet the most ambitious start up on the planet”) at SIME in Stockholm. Fruugo will explain where the company is coming from, what markets and product categories they will go after, and what are they’re next steps.

Sami Leino, one of the founders of Spinlet, got in touch with us about their new visual search engine Nuemo. Nuemo is one of the products they are creating to democratize search.

ArcticStartup and Digibusiness Helsinki Region are organizing a trip for Finnish startups to LeWeb which takes place in Paris on 9th and 10th December.

There’s a number of gossips around the big stealth mode Finnish startup Fruugo currently. The rumor has it they are firing a lot of their employees, their product is late from launch and it hasn’t been that well received by potential customers.

Despite the difficult times, Blyk and Xtract are promoting advertising (at least in a sense) as a revenue model. Blyk’s business model is built around advertising as a source of revenue. Blyk confirmed they are going full steam ahead with internationalisation in a recent blog post about entering the Dutch markets in the first quarter of 2009.

Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone giant, has announced to shed 600 jobs.

Floobs, a Finnish video streaming service, has shifted its focus to niche audiences by starting to work with local community sports associations. The service covered many sports already from the get-go, but now they have made a conscious choice to put all their weight behind the local-community-sports strategy.

Today I had the pleasure to do a keynote session about Social Media - New Tools for New Innovations.
During my presentation I talked about the second Internet generation we are living in and what will define tomorrow’s network. The bottom line was about how applications built for collective intelligence can support and optimize the innovation process.
Audience: The Finnish regional managers that invited me + external audience (the event was free and open to the public)

Valimo, the Finnish mobile identification service provider, has signed agreement with the second largest Finnish mobile operator Elisa. The agreement allows Elisa’s 2.5 million mobile customers in Finland and another 340 000 in Estonia to use mobile phone as everyday electronic identification method. With Valimo’s solution the customers can login to internet services with a single PIN code, and also digitally sign documents.

The user can record TV programs from all the most common Finnish TV stations, namely YLE TV1, TV2, FST, Teema, MTV3, Sub, Nelonen, Jim, Urheilukanava and The Voice. Thus, the service enables the user to watch her favorite programs whenever she likes. Not only that, the user can also watch the programs wherever she chooses, since you don’t need any hardware, just a working Internet connection. That is TVkaista. In effect, TVkaista is your normal time shifting TV which you can watch through your PC or Mac whether you run Windows, OSX or Linux.

ArcticStartup is partnering with TechCrunch UK and Slush Helsinki in organizing a brunch for start-ups, entrepreneurs, investors and key industry players the day after the Slush event. Slush will take place on the 24th November and the brunch on the 25th.

Here’s the third startup in 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.
M-Brain (FI) - M-Brain is a value-added business intelligence firm operating in the media environment.

Last Friday I announced the fastest growing company in Finland according to Deloitte and I decided to dig a little more into these companies in terms of finances. So the breakdown is as follows: Company rank on the Deloitte list (2008), company name, growth percentage (from 2003 to 2007), turnover in 2007 (000’s €), turnover in 2003 (000’s €).

The good guys at Scred are offering 2 free tickets to Alternative Party organised in Helsinki this weekend. You have a good chance of getting these two VIP-level tickets by telling a story of a digital adventure you have had or alternatively - why you’d deserve these tickets. Please comment at the Scred blog, if you wish to participate in the competition.

PiX ‘n’ PaLs, a new Finnish startup, offers web based application to create collaborative photo galleries around shared events. This is a new take on the ever popular photo sharing since it brings events into the center of photo sharing activity.

Spotify, a Swedish startup offering a lightweight software application enabling on demand streaming of music, has opened up its service for public.

Fraced is a relatively new, Helsinki based, social networking service. They themselves state that they are a user centric location based social network. The basic features in the service include a map based view to your network, a dashboard view to activities in your network, message center, photo sharing, video sharing and blogging.