As part of my ‘Date With Hermione‘ series, I’m getting loads of interesting date scenarios for interviews including a request from four entrepreneurs, Nils Paajanen, Juhana Nurmio, Riku Lindholm and Juho Kokkola (from left to right), from Finland who wanted to talk about the Finnish tech scene and startup accelerator Startup Sauna.

They suggested we set up the video in a sauna and do it in traditional Finnish style, which means, no clothes, but being tech entrepreneurs our laptops were around to save our modesty.

One of Finland’s biggest, recent success stories is gaming app Angry Birds and as startup fever hits the world I wanted to talk about some of the hottest startups coming out of Finland.

Startup Sauna is a seed accelerator program run in Helsinki, Finland. It gathers the best teams from Russia and Northern Europe for a 6 week long intensive program. The teams receive funding as well as coaching and mentoring to develop their ideas further. The best of the companies are brought here to Silicon Valley to meet investors and customers and lean Valley culture.

The startups mentioned in the videos are Ovelin who do WildChords,  Stereonic (Fluescent Nanoscopy),  Blaast (apps for feature phones) and StreamDialog.
There have been 80+ startups gone  through Startup Sauna so far. Finland is putting on a startup conference this year;  Slush2011, aiming to be the biggest startup conference in Northern Europe.