The first Startup Talkoot has been successfully brought to a finish. We had a great time, thanks to all the participants, and it definitely taught us a lot about the types of events that we should organize. The biggest takeaways from the Talkoot was probably the contacts we were able to provide for the Startups, and probably the advice the successful entrepreneurs and experts were able to provide them with during the work on the weekend.
I now Arctic Alarms (www.arcticalarms.fi) continued their work until about 1 o’clock in the morning on Monday. I guess that’s the kind of drive you need to have when you’re trying to change the dynamics of a business where the products haven’t changed for a long time. You need to make the attitudes change and you it takes perseverance
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The kick-off for the first Startup Talkoot was held on friday. We had a great lecture by Saku Tuominen, Chief Creative officer of Zodiak. Zodiak is the third biggest television production company in the world. The main question of the lecture was “Where do ideas come from?”. I would not be exaggerating to say that everyone that participated in the lecture really got a lot out of it. It was not revolutionary, but I guess it’s always reassuring to hear that you don’t always have to follow the career paths of corporate giants. If you want to be creative, better have creative lifestyle. What was interesting was that Saku emphasized the importance of time management in being creative. You need to have “time to think”. I’ve always been sceptical about the value of working 16 hours a day. Taneli Tikka wrote about this issue a couple of days ago too! (Taneli’s blog)

Two things I want to remember from Saku’s lecture:

1. Emphasis on the problem to solve and the creative implementation. It’s not only the solution (idea) that’s creative, also the implementation and figuring out the actual problem.
2. Rule #6: Never take yourself too seriously. (And there are no other rules. It’s just rule #6)

On Saturday we had around 50 people present during the day. The day started by presentations by the startups:

1. Cityard ( Shanfan’s blog )
2. SMile
3. Arctic Alarm ( Arctic Alarm’s page )
4. Illtags ( the Illtags blog )

Sachin Gaur Presenting his Idea - SMile - Mobile Social Gaming

After the presentations we got the work started. Experts, entrepreneurs and students all joined the startups in their rooms and started discussing the challenges the startups were facing. Contacts were made and all the startups got some great ideas to move forward with. I was really happy to see that issues were raised that gave the startups an extra spark to start working.

We had a very interesting lecture by Moaffak Ahmed from Veturi Venture Accelerator (they don’t have a website. Very chic.). Moaffak told the story of Trema, and how they were able to grow a business without Venture Capital by targeting a specific problem and creating a great product by working very close to their customer. Actually, they had one customer for which they created the product very cheap, but keeping the rights to sell it forward. A great lecture again by Moaffak. Thank you!

The key point I remember from Moaffak’s lecture:

1. Starting and running a startup is not like moving from point A to point B along the path set in your Business Plan. You have to keep your eye on the goal, but still make adjustments to make it fly. Think of sailing.

On Saturday we also had a presentation by Timo Vuorensola, one of the makers of the Star Wreck movie. They’re now working on wreckamovie, check it out! Gives new perspectives on how to use crowdsourcing.

On Sunday there were a lot less people, and the working style was different. Some of the companies also got into some real tangible work by planning the architecture of their applications… That’s great! TULI and Vera Ventures gave us interesting lectures on their financing options, and ee also got to meet some amazing caes from the Aalto University which have been funded by the TULI program. One could make you taller (although I guess the idea was medical use…) by lengthening your bones. The technology was based on a nail with smart material that could be inserted into the bone and made longer by the effect of magnetics, hence forcing your bone to expand and create new bone tissue. The second technology was a very impressive way to use a mobile. The technology is based on non-visual control of devices. In essence, the technology creates a 3D virtual sound world around you. By moving your hand, or by touching a touch-screen on your phone, you can hear the menus and options around you, then by tilting forward or pressing, you choose the menu. So everything happens without looking at the screen. The demo was very impressive. For example, the presenter (I’ll get the name and the link to their pages) had an iPhone in his hand and by moving it could choose play, next, last, pause etc. For all the options you could hear a sound that guided you… And the coolest thing was definitely “Shake to cancel” =)

AES really got a lot out of this event. We were also working on AES the whole weekend and getting feedback. We’ve been working on our concepts all the time, and I think it’s starting to pay off that we’re keeping ourselves open for different options in terms of events and not always going for the most obvious choices. We want to find the most efficient ways to create more opportunities for Aalto students and researchers to found and join startups. It all starts with problems, technologies and first and foremost, the people.

There was also an article about us in TIVI

Riku Seppälä