Norway

InfoShare 2016 is the biggest tech and new media conference in the entire Central and Eastern European region. For the 10th year in a row, the event will take place in Gdansk, Poland, from 18-20 May at the Amber Expo, the biggest expo center in Tricity. This  event brings in over 5,000 worldwide participants and 100 speakers spanning the entire …

Fintech startups from all over Europe were nominated for the European Fintech Awards in Holland.  Now, over 20 of them have been named as part of the “European Fintech Top 100“. This means that the top companies have been invited to participate in the European Fintech Awards on April 14th in Amsterdam, where the top 25 on the list will …

Scandinavia’s biggest awards show for startups, the Nordic Startup Awards, has published their shortlist for the best startups of the year out of 740 nominees. In May, the Nordic startup ecosystem gathers to pay tribute to the biggest stars in the scene.  Promising businesses, entrepreneurs, and community builders are honored with awards such as Startup of the Year, Best Newcomer, …

Drones are all the rage right now, buzzing above our heads with with our without human interaction.  We have all seen scenes shot in birds eye views from flying drones.  Now, a Norwegian company has decided to take drones from the skies to the sea, and build a drone meant for exploring the oceans depths. Blueye Robotics is a Trondheim …

Studies in Sweden and Norway show that students who play computer games do better in school.  And in Denmark, new research shows that playing computer games helps young people improve their social skills and create more friendships. By Tobias Thomasen Computer games have been blamed for many negative things.  Most often, they are thought to encourage violent and boorish behavior …

Every year, over 100,000 children of jaundice, mainly because of lack of access to diagnostic equipment in the poorest parts of the world. A new Norwegian app aims to reverse this statistic. The treatment of jaundice is both simple and painless, but as many as 114,000 newborns annually die of the disease every year, mainly due to a lack of …

You just saw a really cool TED talk on, say lab-grown organs, and want to learn more about it, but you don’t know anything about biotechnology.  Google scholar would be a good place to start – if you knew the right keywords to search for.  Enter Iris.AI. Iris.AI can use the TED talk as input and find exactly what you’re …

Many entrepreneurs believe that failure is the key to success.  Some Silicon Valley based investors will not even invest in startup founders who had not had a failed startup.  It is, indeed, an important skill to learn in the startup world to let go of something that is a dead end. However, as every founder knows, how far down the …

Norwegian startup Haxi has been given the green light to continue operations.  The court has ruled that the startup is not breaking the law, and can therefore continue to run their shared transport service. Haxi has won an appeals trial in the Norwegian Court of Appeals, following a police complaint on the “pirate” taxi company in 2014.  Three of Haxi’s …

A new era is arriving to Oslo.  Equity crowdfunding has been booming, with an explosion of new platforms and regulations. In 2016, crowdfunding is expected to surpass VC investment. With new legislation such as the passage of the JOBS act in the USA, the funding scene is undergoing a sea-change.  While equity crowdfunding is an exciting new funding solution, regulatory …

Iris.AI founder Anita Schjøll Brede has brought Singularity University’s Global Impact Competition to Norway in 2016, guaranteeing the winner a spot at Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program at NASA Ames Research Park. The competition aims to promote ideas that will positively impact the lives a billion people, and help Norway move from oil into innovation and technology. Singularity University was founded …

Magnulf Pilskog and Erik Bakstad, two Norwegian consultants who specialized in visualizing large datasets, felt that they kept repeating the same steps over and over again.  Rather than embrace the tedium, they started Ardoq to save them from bureaucratic boredom. Ardoq automatically visualize business processes, so that an organizations documents, business processes, and dependencies on their IT systems can be …

Sean Percival,  serial entrepreneur and investor, has been in Norway for his project 500 Startups.  Through a $15 million Nordic fund, growth marketing programs, and an accelerator, 500 plans to bring Silicon Valley’s best practices to the Nordic region. Like it’s Nordic neighbors, Norway is famous for Janteloven.  Janteloven, or the Law of Jante, describes a set of social norms …

A tech-savvy Norwegian school is giving its students the option to play competitive video games, all in the name of education. Playing video games might not sound like something that children should be doing at school, but today a growing of entrepreneurs are calling for schooling systems to adopt a game-style of learning,promise that it could help cut school’s costs …

Kristin Skogen Lund, director of the NHO, Norway’s leading business lobby, thinks Norwegians have been in the comfort zone for far too long, and that change in the workplace is necessary. “There are a lot of changes we are now facing, and everything is dependent on how we choose to tackle them.  We are in this epoch of change, and …

Leaders and politicians are constantly touting the need for more innovation.  But is more innovation really what we need? Innovation moves us forward – as individuals, groups, businesses, and perhaps as a nation and civilization. At the same time – innovation is not mundane. Innovation is or leads to change. Major innovations such as the steam engine and the mobile …

Fintech companies have been a hot topic in the Nordics as startups rush to disrupt the traditional financial sector.  Here is a look back at some of the main fintech trends and Nordic companies to watch in 2015.   Bitcoin Bitcoin reached a big milestone in 2015, when it scored a major win in Europe by earning EU tax free …

In the United States, startup companies that are valued at over a billion dollars in the very short term are called “unicorn” companies. Uber and Airbnb are two well-known companies to have received this designation. Now, Norwegian multinational Schibsted wants to build it’s own “unicorns”. In a stock exchange announcement, Frode Eilertsen, of Schibsted’s Media Group’s EVP Strategy and Digital …

Phillip Moehring one of 30 employees at Angellist, visited Mesh in Oslo to give some tips about how to raise money in the Nordics. AngelList was originally a blog started in Silicon Valley, based on the idea of tracking funding and investors for startups.  It is now a home for startups and investors around the world, and has become the …

The real-time publishing platform Socius captures and curates content shared on the social web to create unique and engaging stories. Socius just closed their seed round after 2,5 years of development that includes an accelerated 3 months in Axel Springer’s accelerator in Berlin. There investors include 500 Startups and Raw Invest (Bergen based firm). Their final sum of 1.300.000 Nok …