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.

I’ve lately had many discussion on how the break from the Nordics & Baltics and make one’s service or product really global. Just recently I had this discussion here at Nordkapp where I work, so it does not only concern software products but equally all the service provides with international ambitions.

Slush Helsinki is taking place in two weeks time on 24th November at Korjaamo, Helsinki. The event is a collaborative effort from Helsinki startup scene aiming bring together Helsinki’s startups, past and current, and showcasing some of the more interesting startups in the region.

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.

To continue from our partnership with the Nordic Venture Forum we have partnered with the European Venture Summit to bring more visibility for Nordic and Baltic startups among the investors in the region.

Saplo’s founder and CEO Mattias Tyrberg tipped us that Saplo, the Swedish semantic text processing technology firm, and a winner of Seedcamp, is going to participate in two VC events in California (previous coverage of Saplo). While in the area, Mattias and Fredrik Hörte from Saplo will also visit a few big firms like Google and Facebook, and look for other potential partners, customers, and investors.

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

I’m playing with the Nokia’s new service Nokia Fried View as I type this. I downloaded the software on my phone this morning and been using it through out the day.
In short the service wants to be a location aware microbloggin service.

Here’s another startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum couple of week ago 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.
Mobispine, a Swedish startup founded in in 2005, delivers mobile Internet and messaging services.

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.

Slush, an event for startups by startups in Helsinki, Finland, is this month (24th November) and deadline to submit your idea for a startup is closing in. You will have until 7th November which is this Friday, so better hurry up if you don’t have submitted your ‘next big thing’ yet.
You can read more about the competition and submit your idea here.

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.

This is a reminder that ArcticStartup and Nordic Mobile Media Conference are looking for the “most interesting Nordic/Baltic mobile startup”. The winner startup will get 2 free passes to the event in Tallinn, Estonia on December 3-4th. To apply, please tell us why you should be selected by sending mail to mart.kikas [at] aspiro.ee and info [at] arcticstartup.com.

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

Avatars United is a Stockholm Sweden based service that enables you to connect to your in-game friends or avatars. The service resembles pretty much the basics of any other social network, except in this case you are using your in game person to connect to others.

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.

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.