Startup Norway is proud to be part of the organizing team for the first edition of Nordic Startup Awards. Together with great teams in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden we will celebrate Nordic startups through a series of national events and a Grand Finale.
Nominations open August 31st. In the sidebar you find links to Subscribe, Like, Follow or Circle us to get our quality startup spam.
Startup Summer is a 2 week summer program for startups running in Oslo, Norway. 9 teams will spend two weeks working on their project with free space from Mesh, mentors and coaches and the social commitment of daily checkins and 4-day sprints. Here are the projects they are working on:
Deedly – make charity by practicing your own hobbies
Interested in charity or volunteering work? You can do both in the same time. Deedly is a website which allows its users to make good deeds through the things they like. Users will have a description of their service or product on the website, and interested people will join in and pay a fee for it. The money will go to charity and non-profit organizations. Persons can choose the organization they want to send their money to. “Make a difference, by doing the things you love”.
Hitch – meeting new people with same interests
Hitch is an app developed by team Eliksir, which enables you to find people near where you are, having the same interests as you. Want to go to a festival in another country and none of your friends are available? Maybe someone else is in the same situation. Team up and do the things you love together.
Exhibby - World’s galleries in one place
Exhibby is aiming to help artlovers to discover and buy art, by gathering the world´s galleries in one place.
Hangout – anagraming with friends
Test your IQ and play with your friends a one-to-one game based on anagrams.
Recommendify – recommend services to friends
Recommendify is a platform which offers small businesses the opportunity to promote their products or services and gain new clients through their existing clients. Clients using the app will have a benefit (eg: discount, 2 for 1 etc.) for the next product they will buy, if they will recommend it to someone else. It works in chain, so you will be able to see who recommended what to whom.
Rendra - field management for construction companies
Rendra is developing a field management platform for the construction industry. The solution addresses the need of BIM (Building Information Modeling) at the construction site. Rendra aims to expand the use and participation of BIM by making it available on mobile devices (eg. tablets and smartphones). This will enable more stakeholders to take part in the BIM process from any location. The platform also enables shared screens, video communication and it connects to databases used by the industry.
Share Football – football wiki and youtube
A platform combining a football wikipedia and a football youtube page for all the Euro and World Cups matches in the past, since 1954 onwards. Users will be able to tag events, persons and funny moments in the videos and comment on them.
SkyPen - getting rid of handwriting: taking exams on laptops
Pen and paper? Handwriting? Overrated and outdated. SkyPen is taking the educational system one step forward into the future by developing a service dedicated to universities and schools all over the world. The system will allow students to take and deliver exams on their own laptop, without being able to cheat. Basically, the tool locks all other applications during the exam, limiting the computer to only exam-related tasks and applications.
ZipLog
Ziplog is a tool to create your own mobile apps based on a database. By combining the ability to easily create custom databases with triggers for certain events, you can create custom apps for a wide range of scenarios.
Want to know more about the products? Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/startupnorway
See also (Norwegian page): http://startupsummer.no/
Last year we saw Startup Summer take place at the Opera office in Oslo. About 30 young aspiring entrepreneurs spent two weeks (week as in monday – sunday) on getting their startup projects of to a flying start. The program got great feedback and so this year it is returning with only small modifications. From June 21 to July 5 teams will gather at Mesh to build, tweak, test and market their startup idea. If you want to join as a team there is an application process with a deadline May 11. There will also be a demo day for those of you who are interested in seeing what was done during the two weeks. Follow StartupSummer on Twitter or Facebook to stay updated.
Note: The application deadline is Friday 11. May – so hurry up and apply.
From incubators being the key to startups reaching their potential we have now moved to the age of accelerators. Their ideal is to have lean, fast and pivot ready companies come in to validate their idea and get traction. This is usually done through short and intensive programs usually spanning 3-6 months. The accelerator offers direct mentoring by entrepreneurs, investors and other business people; guidance on business matters; a small amount of funding to live through the accelerator program and exposure through media connections and demo days. For this the startups that attend give away a stake of the company to attend these accelerator programs (up to 10%).
Winter is typically associated with things moving slow, hibernation and isolation. But for Oslo and Norway the last half year has been like springtime for new initiatives that will improve the tech startup community. As curator for StartupDigest, co-host of Startup Beers and Morning coffee as well as organizer of Startup Weekend I am drinking the cool aid, but I hear this from non-drinking acquaintances as well.
The arenas for bringing projects and business ideas are growing in Norway. There are new hackatons and meetups being arranged all over Norway. Startup Weekend which I help organize will in the span of a half year expand from having events in Oslo to cover Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger. These events and meetups make it easier to go from having an idea to realizing a business around it. Connecting the events and spreading the awareness will help reaching the many people that have ideas but don’t know where to go to get support.
As an example of collaboration last week saw the tech community led event Communities in Action taking place. It was an evening of tech talks that drew over 500 developers to topics covering development, infrastructure and methodologies. As usual when there is programmers there is also a lot of pet projects being discussed. With more focus on the business side of it and dedicated time to building them many of these projects could become interesting companies .
Paul Graham has come to the conclusion that there are two components needed to have startups thrive in a city. The first is the mentality that startups are cool to do and the second is to have chance meetings with people who can help you. My gut feeling tells me that 2012 will be the year when both of these components reach a level in Norway that allows us to say that we have an active startup community.
