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 …

The Button Corporation, which launched world’s first IoT physical push button from Helsinki in the Spring of 2014, has launched a new bttn Mini designed by award-winning Finnish industrial designer, Harri Koskinen, best known for his Block Lamp, a light-bulb held inside two shaped pieces of clear glass, which is exhibited in MoMA in New York City. Harri has designed …

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 …

The UK and Singapore regulators are joining forces to form a so-called “fintech bridge” in a bid to both bolster Singapore’s fintech credentials and strengthen UK links to Asia.  The Nordics, which are competing with Singapore to become the next fintech hub, will surely be left in the dust. In a joint statement with the UKs Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) …

Fintech is one of the biggest buzzwords in tech right now.  Check out the below infographic to see how exactly how fintech is going to disrupt the financial world, including the best accelerators and investors, the leading fintech hubs, and global fintech investments. This article was compiled based on research by Dr.Discount, the Dutch number one source for online coupons …

With virtual reality the next frontier for digital innovation, a growing number of Finnish companies are offering a pioneering look at things to come. Science fiction has always offered far-fetched future imaginings of various shapes and sizes. Sometimes, however, this crystal ball gazing also comes true. A self-driving car? Google now has the answer. Video conferencing? Thanks Skype. How about …

Triin Kask, co-founder and CMO/CFO of Estonian based Greenhouse CI, profiled earlier on Nordic Startup Bits, took the stage at infoShare 2016 to share her experience in handling organizational crisis in different growth stages and how founders must stay humble in the face of exponential growth, which creates crisis and turbulence for a company.  Triin’s talk was based on Larry …

“There are 2 main views, both well qualified.  One is the venture capital situation in the US, which says that VCs do much more than provide capital – they help companies grow.  Another view is that more than 95% of VCs add 0 value to companies, and perhaps 70 or 80% add negative value.” This is how Bakhrom Ibragimov of …

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 …

Peak, the successful UK-based brain training app, backed in part by Creandum, has launched in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden with localised versions to the native languages of each country. Peak is the app that trains your cognitive function with challenging and fun games, exercising skills such as memory, focus, attention, problem solving, and mental agility. They also offer non-traditional games …

With new national strategies focused on increasing digitalization and technical competencies, the Nordic countries are facing an urgent need to innovate within education.  A strong ed-tech cluster can help address this. The public sector has traditionally been lacking in it’s abilities to focus on innovation, which is why often, industry organizations and NGO’s  help pick up the slack.  When all …

The story of Tradeshift has become somewhat legendary in Nordic entrepreneurial circles. The company was “founded on Twitter”, after one of Tradeshift’s founders Christian Lanng responded to a tweet by serial entrepreneur Morten Lund asking about interesting work being done to make government more efficient. Lang tweeted back about some of the projects he was doing with his colleagues Mikkel …