Continuing from my first post, I’d like to share my observations from the rest of the Slush Helsinki conference on Monday. The first speakers set a great tone for the day and talked openly about their successes and slipups. Subsequent speakers followed their lead, with Petteri Koponen winning the prize for funniest story: he told us how he was forced to ask his hairdresser for a ride because he was running late for a meeting with a top VC firm. Of course, the fact that a hairdresser was so enthusiastic that he drove Petteri to all his VC meetings across Silicon Valley didn’t go unnoticed, with once firm so impressed that they came out to the parking lot to meet up.
As much as the speakers were good, I especially enjoyed meeting local startups. I had a good chat with the people behind Zipiko (covered here before) and was particularly interested to how how the service has evolved. For instance, one of the popular uses of the personal activity announcement service is the management of deviations from regular schedules by recurring events. Thinking about this, this use makes sense, as a service built around SMS notifications makes passing along updates easy regardless of how late the changes happen. However, the Zipiko team also surprised me: during a panel Helene Auramo, their CEO, declared that she wasn’t worried about the current decline in advertising spending despite running an advertising-supported service. I guess time will tell whether she is right to be so sanguine. (more…)
