My Take on Mindtrek Conference 2008

Mindtrek Conference was again held in Tampere, 7-9.10.2008. Although it was already the 12th time, it was the first time for me. Mindtrek Conference describes itself as ”12th international digital media & business conference, leading Nordic social media event” which I think is accurate enough.
At least on this year the whole atmosphere was very fresh and startupish, which is always a good thing. You could notice that semi-old-school and large companies were missing just by looking around the event. I think few topics came up more than others in conversations and other instances.

1.    Global markets – This was clearly most important topic. When you’re a Finnish, Nordic, Baltic or just European based startup, you don’t have the luxury of same kind of home markets that a US-based would have. If you want hit global markets or just want your startup to succeed, you have to pay big attention on going global. If you’re a Finland based startup, global success almost never happens by accident. This point was also emphasized by Finpro’s  Pekka Päärnäinen(Silicon Valley). Go global; there aren’t enough Finns for all of us. Get out, get contacts, use PR, whatever.

2. Lack of Finnish seed money – I think as well that this is a fairly big problem, and some Valleyers and entrepreneurs agree.  Getting the initial money probably isn’t easy anywhere in the world and the institutions in this sector are very limited.  You can see what kind of trend YCombinator started with their “ramen-financing”. Initial funding has traditionally fallen in the hands of high-risk angel investors. Problem is that we don’t have that many angel investors here in Finland or they’re just hiding.

3. Mobile – Alas, mobile and mobile-internet/multimedia/[insert here] has been talked and financed for ages, it still doesn’t work. iPhone is a very good product and it actually solved some problems and ignored the rest, but it still just scratching the surface. And as Matt Maroon and others have pointed out, most people don’t have a iPhone or even a smartphone. Unfortunately as an independent developer or a startup there isn’t much you can do about it. Industry is still much controlled by the manufacturers.

Generally I would say that my Mindtrek Conference experience was good. Speakers and their topics were usually specific but still useful, that you could gain some knowledge or just ideas that you can apply to your own business or interests.