Check out our jury:

Oskari Lehtonen, Koppi | Catch

Oskari is a partner at Koppi | Catch, one of the Vigo accelerators. He is a serial entrepreneur and has conducted research in Stanford University, Silicon Valley and Singapore among other places. Oskari is mainly interested in consumer related applications and services and media sector.

Riku Seppälä, Open Ocean Capital

Riku joined Open Ocean from the big data startup Hopper Travel in Montreal. Prior to Hopper, Riku co-founded two startups, Canvious and NHybrid and helped startups at Montreal-based accelerator Bolidea.

Ramine Darabiha, Rovio

Ramine is a French entrepreneur, gamer and blogger. He is the founder and CEO of MySites.com, expert in cloud computing. His past experience is in large scale gaming communities, and recently mentored the Summer of Startups and Garage48 programs. He is also a coach at Startup Sauna. Currently manages R&D at Rovio.

Antti Ylimutka, Startup Sauna

Antti is wingman at Startup Sauna, the leading open-source seed accelerator program in Europe. Having been running it two batches already and preparing for the third, and Summer of Startups once, he sure knows what is needed to get early stage ideas flying. In addition to seed accelerators and startups, Antti has a vast experience from B2C and B2B sales.

Mike Bradshaw, Hammerkit

Mike is community shepherd at HammerKit and a Startup Sauna coach. Also dis-organiser of BarCamp Helsinki and other un-conferences, helps startups with presentation skills, host at Hub Helsinki, co-driver with the Travelling Salesman and organiser of MobileDevCamp.fi for the last three years.

The perks of being a small, volunteer-based organization like us include the sometimes slow speed of upload. We’ve finally gone through the ample video material from Slush 2011 and will go through the harvest in the next blogposts.

Taking place in early November, Slush Helsinki was a two day conference but most of all a startup expo; we had demo startups in the house that made up a lively corridor of new ventures from all over the Baltic Rim.

Pitch till you drop

The most followed part of the expo, however, ended up being the Slush100 Pitching Competition.

Like all pitching competitions, Slush100 was about clarity of the sales pitch, presentation skills and wow factors. We had a panel of investors and startup experts listening to each pitch and selecting the 20 most entertaining, captivating presentations to the semifinals held on the second day of the event.

From a hundred to twenty to eventually the Top 7 that pitched on the main stage on Thursday evening, the two days were packed with dramatic stage performances, addictive storylines, overselling with confidence and entertaining business ideas.

The cream of the crop in 2011 were…

• The winner, Ovelin whose guitar learning app Wild Chords was launched simultanouseously. Ovelin received 10, 000 euros as the first prize of the competition

• Runner up home electricity bill optimizer Asema Electronics

•  Leaddesk

•  SumoPaint

• TangaReef

• Runner up Transfluent, realtime professional translation service

• Zeighted

The rest of the piches can be seen from Aaltoes Youtube Channel.

The trendiest startups of the year

In addition to Slush100 and an Open Mic free form pitching during breaks in schedule, we also invited another category of startups to tell about themselves: Startups on the Rise. What these firms had in common were an interesting product in an interesting stage and well, we just wanted to hear more from them, hence they were invited to join the ride.

• Blaast

• Senseg

• Flirtic

• FAM Sports

• Kiosked

All in all, thoroughly enjoyable pitches – do take a look at them when you get a chance as these are the startups that will rock the world in future, or die trying’ as the saying goes

Thanks for everyone who took part in pitching – we hope you had fun & learned!

Photo: Tuomo Lampinen / Text: Lotta

A pitch is bringing an idea to someone who has the power to do something with it.

You pitch at job interviews, when looking to launch a new software feature, and even when trying to convince your friends on what restaurant would be best to eat at. Most importantly though, you might soon be pitching your next big idea in front of VCs and industry leaders, and so you will want to keep some of the following thoughts in mind.

Change is scary, even for super-humans
Making a pitch means that you are an advocate for change, and I have to tell you, change is scary.  As animals of this world, we are essentially hard-wired to be skeptical of the unknown, and proponents of maintaining the status-quo. Of course at Slush 2011 attracts the most extraordinary (almost superhuman) people who are less fearful than most in the face of change, but this does not mean that a great pitch wouldn’t benefit from being concise, tangible, and executable.

Executable
Your idea must be executable. This means that given the limitations of the world (and yourself), it must bepossible. I have to break it to you, none of you will successfully pitch the idea of making a foldable car which can be stored in your back pocket, nor it’s even more extraordinary associated app – unfortunately, this is just not possible (yet). So before you even start worrying about your pitch, make sure your idea is at least realistic.

Making the abstract – real
Being able to describe how an idea which exists in your head can become some sort of real product requires an understanding of how to make the vague —> specific. Even if it might be obvious to you, any sort of innovative idea requires for it to be grounded and based within a framework of prior knowledge of the people you are pitching to, or else cognitively, it just won’t be understandable. This means you need to be aware of who you are talking to, and consider how your audience views the world.

Take this as the ground-up approach; start with a concrete example that everyone will understand, and build your ideas from there.
Remember, a roof becomes only a funny looking hut without a house attached.

Shorter than an elevator speech
Think of your pitch as being in 3 parts with each part building upon the last:

1) 5 seconds. You should firstly be able to pitch your idea in a single sentence lasting no more than 5 seconds. This means you need to be able to streamline your ideas down to their most essential components and deliver them in their most concise form. Refine, practice, refine again – and get feedback from honest friends. This will form the base of your pitch, and serve as an invaluable tool when working the room at Slush. No idea is too complex to state in a single sentence – not even yours.

2) Elevator ride – 30 seconds. Yes, the elevator speech is an important one, building off your 5 second sentence and elaborating on the two or three most important aspects of your idea and its execution.

3) 5 minutes – the amount of time you are given at slush. After successfully streamlining your ideas in step 1 and 2, being able to fill up 5 minutes talking about something you love should really be a piece of cake. Make sure though to remain concrete, focusing on how you will execute your idea given the money and resources you are requesting.

Be authentic and listen
Of course we all wish we were as charismatic as Bill Clinton, but you likely are not. Instead of trying to fake it, go for being yourself instead, just speaking about what your passionate about in a room of people who are dying to listen. And more important than just speaking, be ready to listen; you are likely to gain great insight if you keep your ears open and more likely to have useful responses if you can hear what is being asked.

And lastly, as cliche as this will sound, believe in yourself, because if you don’t trust in your abilities, nobody else will either.

Happy pitching

After just a few hours sleep, ignoring the jet lag, we spent most of the day at the conference pitching Startup Life to about 80 startups and Startup Sauna to 10ish VC`s. Generally, the feedback was great and it seems our region is able to generate some traction at the moment. Startup Life was particularly well received generating lots of interest from e.g. Eventbrite and Posterous. Having said that, the conference was an excellent source of perspective and some humbling realisations.

Are you good or are you “valley” good?

Firstly, the pitches at TechCrunch Battlefield were stellar. The confidence and professionalism with which startups pitching here present themselves is at a whole other level from what any of us have seen before, with the superstars setting a whole new standard in our minds. However, while the median level of startups here is easily above what we see back home, a vast majority of our rising stars can and do compete with the best of them, which brings me to the second realisation of today:

The range of startup-quality that get funding here is very wide

Some of the startups we saw in the Startup Alley showcase today were, in our opinion, less than stellar. However, stalls in the alley were very expensive (premiums at $ 30 000) meaning most of these startups were, none-the-less, well funded.  This is a striking observation and shows the necessity for improving conditions for private risk capital in Finland, as many of our really good startups that receive little or no funding would likely be well funded if they were founded and operating here.

All in all a very productive and interesting day.

Signing off,

J, R, N & J

P.S. Shout out to Kristo et al. for your awesome work evangelising. Lots of people recognised you and Aaltoes.

We have just wrapped up our first week back after the Winter Break. Drinks, pizza and pitching – the very first Aaltoes Open Mic gathered some 40 people to share their ideas and build upon others.

Jens Sorensen and Ville Simola opened the event with a brief introduction to Aaltoes and idea generation from Steve Sammartino.

The lively discussion in Aaltoes Open Mic was something that we were especially proud of.  Store reviews, task management, digital paintings and Shanghai train among others spurred some very interesting roadmaps for the ideas. Pick a target group, speak to the users early on, get the team and don’t worry about competition – these were some of the advice from the crowd. Thanks for all the presenters and participants. Hope to see many of the ideas in the future Aaltoes Pitch and Talkoot.

The next Aaltoes Open Mic is going to be organised in TaiK on February 4th, see you all there!

HeiMoi – engaging local activities at the neighborhood of your city

One of the Aaltoes catalyzed startups is the project formerly called Cityard, nowadays known as HeiMoi. Shanfan Huang, a TaiK  graduate, presented the original idea of Cityard in Media Lab Demo Day December 2008.

-  The whole project was incubated inside Media Lab and many Media Labbers  gave me great advices to conceptualize it, Shanfan tells.

HeiMoi is a location based web service that engages local activities in the neighborhoods of the city.

- Since last year Demo Day, I further developed the idea in Dynamic Visual Design seminar and also got support from many workshops arranged in Media Lab. After the Media Lab round I went to Aaltoes Pitch in March 2009, followed  by the first Aaltoes Talkoot in April. I also participated in many training and workshops organized by Aaltoes.

Shanfan has been one of our favourite stories to share as the support she gained from the Aaltoes community has been so tangible. With Tuli-funding  and  a partner found from Aaltoes Talkoot she could further develop the idea during last summer. Shanfan also demonstrates the determination needed from an aspiring entrepreneur: for the first pitching round she practiced in front of the webcam for 40+ times.  Future plans for HeiMoi?

- Now I have a partner, and will continue the product development towards a possibly “incorporated future”.