Events

Design and creativity took free rein at the Maker area at this year’s Roskilde festival, where on Tuesday night makers competed to created the silliest robots. An arsenal of glue guns and soldering irons were snatched up by festival guests Tuesday, who were invited to join in building silly and fun robots.  The building culminated in a tournament on Tuesday …

Realm has taken home the prestigious ‘Startup of the Year’ at the Nordic Startup Awards 2016.  This is no surprise if you have followed the company’s explosive growth over the last 2 years.  Realm has created a mobile database for developers globally to create advanced applications quickly and easily, and is now in the hands of 1 billion users. The …

The Nordic Startup Awards grand finale took place in the Harpa Center in Reykjavik, Iceland, and hosted collaboration with Icelandic Startups.  Attendees from all over the Nordics gathered to celebrate the best startups, accelerators, and investors of the year. Kim Balle, founder of the Nordic Startup Awards, spoke about why the awards are so important for the startup ecosystem. “We …

On June 15-17th, Startup Extreme is inviting an exclusive group of investors, media, connectors, and founders to the small west coast town of Voss, Norway to get to know a selection of the coolest Nordic founders. The twist? Participants will get to know each other while enduring extreme sports in the Norwegian fjords. By having the attendees doing extreme sports …

While the need for a better approach to diabetes management has been well established, healthcare solutions catering to such an approach has always been lacking. It is perhaps for this reason that Medilync not only won the best “IoT startup” award, but also the “People’s  Choice” award in Nordic Startup Awards Icelandic final this year. Sigurjón Lydsson, CEO and Co-founder …

The MyData 2016 Conference is an international event  dedicated to helping people manage and reuse their personal data currently controlled by companies and governments. The conference will bring industry leaders to Helsinki later this summer in an effort to drive forward this important topic. MyData is an initiative led by Open Knowledge Finland  and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology …

On April 23, in packed Münchenbryggeriet in Sweden, Startup Day 2016 through open the doors to the Swedish startup scene.  The event included 10 keynote speakers with a well-maintained gender balance, an Impact Expo offering resources for growing startup,   fintech panel discussion, Nordic Startup Awards, and well done startup pitches. After the hype around the event is gone and …

The semi-finals of the Nordic Startup Awards are now finished. This series of events promotes and celebrates startups in the Nordic region.  Country winners are chosen for each country, and the finalists move upwards to a grand ceremony held in Iceland at the end of May. Winners in Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have been announced in regional ceremonies …

The InnoFrugal Conference acts as a forum for best practices, policy analysis, sharing the latest thinking and highlighting success in frugal innovation. The second annual InnoFrugal event was held last week at Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre in Vantaa, a few minutes north of Helsinki. Co-organised by the non-profit Nordic Frugal Innovation Society and the Ministry For Foreign affairs Finland, …

The world-renowned startup and technology event Slush is set to occur for it’s ninth run in Helsinki, Finland on November 30 and December, 2016.  Register now to join the biggest startup conference in the Nordics and one of the most exciting startup events worldwide. “Our focus is on creating an event that brings the highest value to the startups. We …

This past weekend, Startup Weekend Helsinki took place in the elegant surroundings of the NewCo building in the Kallio region of Helsinki.  Here is our look back at an inspiring weekend. Chris Georgiev, founder of Imagga, was the lively master of ceremonies, supported by a team of purple t-shirted volunteers. Present were seventy participants in their blue, yellow, orange, red …

Startup Fest Europe takes place in the Netherlands from 24 – 28 May and aims to bring the world together and help startups grow faster. With more than 28 events will take place in 14 cities across 5 days, Netherlands will transform into the center of the global startup community. These are the hard facts. The real fun is to …

I had the great pleasure of paying a week long visit to South By South West (SXSW) in Austin, Texas in May 2016. My first thoughts on scene were that the interesting mixture of music, film and interactive events created a relaxed environment for people to present their companies and find common goals in their future business. By Kaius Meskanen, …

Media Honeypot, a “reverse pitching” event for startups and the traditional media industry, was held in Helsinki on April 6, 2016. I sat down with organizers Heikki “Hegu” Rotko, a long time media executive professional and Dmitri Sarle & Jan Ameri from Arctic Startup. Heikki  was recently at SXSW with me as part of the Team Finland Nordic Lighthouse program, …

Many of the world’s most successful companies and organizations are building open innovation platforms and communities and repositioning their brands as part of a global innovation network. As part of Crowdsourcing Week, April 11-15th,  Roland Harwood, co-founder and managing director of 100%Open, shares his tips on how to build your own open innovation ecosystem. By Roland Harwood Building on some …

This coming weekend, 15-17th April, the 7th Startup Weekend Helsinki comes to town. To “Launch a Startup in 54 hours” is the opportunity. Kicking-off on Friday evening, designers, developers, and innovators will pitch ideas to the crowd, form teams and build amazing startups over the course of the weekend. Results will be presented late on Sunday to an expectant crowd, …

Want to help shape the future of green cities and create sustainable solutions to climate challenges on a regional level? Join the Nordic Cities Workshop, held in Malmö, Sweden from the 28-29th of April, 2016. Climate-KIC works to create consistency between private, public, and academic initiatives on climate change. Their goal is to find solutions to environmental challenges through cooperation …

Trip Republic, the Helsinki-based startup based on travel planning and booking, has just secured a €200,000 round,  bringing their total funding amount since starting to €325,000. The startup was featured earlier this year at Travel Technology Europe  in London, where they were the sole Nordic company nominated for the prestigious Travel Technology Disrupt Award. The funding will be used to …

Live from Media Honeypot: I visited the deal room just before lunchtime and talked to Tuomas Maisala from Spinno, who was tasked with overseeing the matchmaking process. Though busy, the large room was running like clockwork.  Tuomas has years of experience under his belt arranging such events and whilst it was mainly an automated process, it still required talented human …

EzyInsights, a Finnish startup that has developed a social media analytics tool aimed at content providers, has launched a new product, the “SoMe Index”, at Media Honeypot 2016. The SoMe Index streamlines how content is accesses across all of the main social media platforms by finding the most relevant content to increase organic traffic. Duane Atkins from Ezyinsights hit the …