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.

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.

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.

A while back EnterpriseHelsinki invited Tom Keller of TechStars to come and speak at their event in Helsinki on their incubation model, how they get high quality startups emerge from TechStars’ program and whether this could be possible in Helsinki, Finland since it’s possible in Boulder, Colorado, which is mere 100,000 strong town in the Rockies.

Programme Doors open. Networking. Coffee and biscuits. 5.00pm Welcome by Robin Gurney (English) NOTE: All presentations in Estonian unless marked

Partied too hard and lost your stuff? There’s a cool new Finnish startup looking to help you out with your lost belongings – FinderBase.com. The was launched only a few days ago, on the First of May in Helsinki, Finland. The launch was handled in junction with the First of May celebrations, where most of the country goes out to celebrate in parks with their friends. Needless to say, a lot of stuff is lost.

Oncos Therapeutics, a biotech company developing new cancer therapeutics based on its next generation oncolytic viruses, completed a € 4 million ($ 5.5 million) investment from HealthCap.
“This is the first step to turn our Advanced Therapy Access Program results into cancer therapeutics”, comments Pekka Simula, CEO and co-founder.
Oncolytic viruses enter into cancer cells where they aggressively replicate. The replication kills cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

Eat.fi is hands down one the best designed Finnish webservices, if not the best. I love it and use it weekly, but can’t keep thinking it could be so much more.

Veraventure, the government owned venture capital company that works with early stage Finnish companies, has recently become more transparent regarding its investment activities. This is a very good sign and should be carefully noted by venture capitalists and other seed investors not already doing so. With the renewal of Veraventure’s new website, one is now able to go through all the investments Veraventure has made.

Shobble is a young new service that aggregates e-commerce stores (sound familiar?), which lets the user rate and reviews the different stores. It’s based in Helsinki and only in Beta. And it’s build by Jori Lallo – a single student – on his spare time.

Culminatum Innovations is organising as part of its International Business Program an IBP Camp in Helsinki where startups will receive top notch advice and help towards different ways of financing and internationalisation. The camp itself has been hand tailored on the specific needs towards startups and thus it will surely benefit all the participants.

Ticket registrations for our ArcticEvening Helsinki event are open! You’ll find the registration module in this post a bit down the post. Before registering, do take a minute to see what we have in store for you. Like we said before, the topic for the evening is “Investments and things that go with it”.

RapidBue Solutions has earlier been working with proximity marketing solutions that use Bluetooth to offer a wide range of content directly to consumers’ mobile phones at point-of-sales, events, and exhibitions. Now the company has finalized a new product offering and is starting to expand more widely into the Nordic countries.

Sendandsee is a Finnish startup. Not by age, but by ethos. The company is older than most non-startups, but they have never lost the promise of super fast growth if only the pieces would fall into place. Now they might just be about to do that.

A few weeks back we asked the Finnish startup ecosystem to answer a simple survey on how the government backed Vigo accelerator program has worked in favor of the startups and the ecosystem as a whole. The time to answer that survey ended last Friday and we’ve now had a few days time to figure out what the data actually mean and how it could be used to make the program better. Needless to say, there are a lot of areas that need improvement. We’ll go through the results below.

World Economic Forum announced the results of its annual study on how countries are able to leverage ICT as a sustainable, long-term source of economic development. The results show success in general for the Nordic countries, Sweden is ranked first, Denmark third, Finland sixth and Norway tenth.

A US based startup Groupon offers users deep discounts on products and services from local businesses, but you need a minimum number of users to sign-up into a deal before getting the discount. And you have only one day to do this. TechCrunch knows that Groupon is on track to generate $100 million in gross merchandise sales in 2010 of which they take a 30%-50% cut. That sounds like a real business.

The Finnish film industry is looking more and more lively nowadays. The international successes have not been that many in the past, compared to e.g. the Swedish movie industry focused on strong story telling, like the recent Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Saga. However, in the past few years the Finnish industry has been showing signs of much increased international ambitions. One of the most widest distributed Finnish films ever has been the animation Niko & The Way to the Stars, published in 2008.