I ask myself pretty often why there is so much great web innovation coming from Sweden. Really awesome ideas and startups are much less common in my home country Germany, despite a population almost ten times as large as Sweden’s.

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?

The two big Finnish “old media” companies, Sanoma and Alma Media, published their 2009 results yesterday and today, respectively. However, as seems to be the common policy, neither of them was too open about the state of their online business. But luckily Alma still offered some nuggets of information for constructing a picture of what’s going on.

Swedish university students are to begin using a near field communication payments system (NFC) developed by payments processor Payex and secure mobile solutions specialist Accumulate.

As Swedish private equity company Scope has invested a whopping €7m in a Finnish company Footbalance System Ltd.

Already last year there was a lot of talk in Finnish media circles about how Schibsted, who own, for example, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet, is coming and taking a big share of Finnish media’s most profitable products: classifieds and market places. Now the land grab has started and its called Tori.

The company behind Second Life, Linden Lab, has just announced it has bought Avatars United, a Stockholm Sweden online community for avatars (see our previous story here and here).

During the second half of 2009 Sweden held the EU Presidency, and the cleantech businesses of the country asked themselves: “How can we increase Swedish exports of Green Business?” Their solution was to collect companies in one building in downtown Stockholm, close to government offices and city hall, to allow Ministers, MPs, businesses and other interested people to have a look at what Sweden has to offer in cleantech.

One can’t have missed the buzz (to the extent its ridiculous) of Apple’s rumored tablet that is rumored to be unveiled in San Francisco on Tuesday, January 26.
In addition to the Jesus tablet (yes, that’s what some people call it) there are rumors about a similar-ish device from Microsoft, a color tablet device called Courier and of course HTC is cooking one with Google, maybe. At least that’s the word on the street.

Guest post by Andy Cars, CEO of Seedcap. Andy evaluates hundreds of business ideas each year giving him an in-depth understanding of what it takes to succeed in a global market.

The Malmö, Sweden based company who’s facial recognition powered visual search technology is very well regarded, announced on their blog this afternoon that they’ve appointed Carl Silbersky as their new CEO. In a move that seems strangely similar to Spotify’s announcement earlier, the new focus will be on developing Polar Rose’s mobile service.

I talked to Videoplaza founder and CEO Sorosh Tavakoli just last week and Sorosh told me that videoplaza is very bullish on online video monetization. They see that throughout the industry the number of started video streams are up and the number of ads per video are up, on average moving from three to seven. Overall in the video advertising market demand is growing faster than supple and big media companies are waking up to online video.

The Nordic and Baltic startup scenes have come of age and ArcticStartup has grown with them. Much has been done, but there’s still much to do. I will outline some of the changes, improvements and future plans below, but there’s one message above else that should take priority: We are looking for a new member to fill big boots in our team. We are looking for a full-time co-editor for Sweden. This role is a big deal and it will also command equal compensation.

It’s always interesting and enlightening to understand how some of the companies we consider established today have started out. The other day I talked to Mattias Swenson, Bloglovin’ co-founder and one of the more energetic and prolific web entrepreneurs in the Swedish startup scene. Here’s how their startup came to be.

Yesterday, Swedish streaming movie startup Voddler announced 35 million kronor in new funding to help “develop the service.” It was also announced that Bertil Villard of lawfirm Vinge would be taking a board position at the company. It was not announced who the money came from.

Google is our answer to everything be it writing a Master’s thesis, looking for a new car, a new job, doing your homework or putting together an analysis on a fortune 500 stock. I, for one, use Google every single day to get to the bottom of which ever startup I’m writing about. Yet, Google is not perfect and its job is getting harder by day when the amount of information on the web grows. And it grows very very rapidly.

The tickets for our next week’s ArcticEvening are now available for booking. Please find the sign-up form for registering to the event below. Note that if you are unable to make it to the event, please don’t sign up. We have a limited amount of space available and would like to get everyone on board. Likewise, if you need to cancel for any reason, please inform us at events(at)arcticstartup.com so that we can reallocate the ticket.

Our second ArcticEvening this year in Stockholm will be held on 18th of November 2009.
The theme of the evening will be Mobile smartphone solutions and trends – how to strategically build business around the different native application platforms and mobile web.

The Swedish video-on-demand service Voddler, has just announced a number of agreements with different Hollywood studios to distribute their content. In short, Voddler uses an open source XBMC media centre solution to distribute its content, so the user needs a set-top box to be eligible to receive Voddler’s offering. This could be said to be one of the largest agreements in the space of video for a Nordic company.