Helsinki

Welcome to the MobileMonday’s famous Xmas Party. Open Mike! This will be first official open microfone program during last few years, but at the same time it will revisit the original MobileMonday sessions at Molly Malone’s. Please contact editor@mobilemonday.net to reserve a two-three minute slot at the mike. The first slot has been reserved for Timo Laaksonen of First Hop. He will talk about the sale of First Hop to Airwide. Doors open 17:30. Food and refreshments served.

Helsinki MobileMonday will focus on mobile marketing and advertising on November 5th. The rich program begins at 17:45 with video from the September Global Summit followed by a Global MobileMonday update by Jari Tammisto. André Chaker, the head of casual games at Veikkaus, will lead the show with his personal experience from mobile advertising. He was CEO of Mobicus, a company that was later sold to Enpocket, now a Nokia company. Thomas Michelsson, a researcher at Helsinki School of Economics, will further help to layout the mobile marketing scene. Presently he is writing a book about mobile marketing with Mika …

Mark your calendars for the 3rd annual MobileMonday Global Summit!

The event will take place on 10 September 2007 at the Wanha Satama Trade Centre in Helsinki. This year, we are combining the summit with a trip to St. Petersburg to meet key Russian companies in the industry.

The fun, informative and networking day will begin with a by invitation only Executive Morning led by a panel of the best minds in the industry. Then we kick-off the afternoon in the same MobileMonday spirit of networking with colleagues and future partners.

The Dudesons will make a special guest appearance at the “MobileMonday presents Mobile Finland” to Eurovision Song contents media.

The group known for its crazy, deathwish humor describes itself this way:

“The long Arctic winters, ruled by ice and darkness, have frozen our brains and the endless summer nights, lit by the midnight sun, have kept us from sleep for months and driven us insane.” See: http://www.dudesons.com

Text messaging and ringtones were invented is Finland. Finns are also behind the world’s first mobile operator offering free calling and also the MobileMonday movement.

MobileMonday opens up Finnish mobility to the international media and visitors of the Eurovision Songfest. The open Mobile Finland session will take place on Monday, May 7 at 15:00-17:00 in downtown Helsinki. It will be followed by a “regular” MobileMonday evening starting at 18:00.

Finland’s broadcast mobile TV is stuck in the quagmire of copyright dispute but the rest of mobile TV is moving ahead at full speed. The EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding has openly sided with DVB-H technology and demands that the European industry lines up behind it by the summer. Finnish operators are working together with the major TV channels to deliver what can be called on-demand-mobile TV over mobile phone networks. And most of the mobile industry is working on bringing internet-style interactivity to mobile TV and content.

The expectations for all kinds of mobile gambling are very high. Juniper Research predicts that the global market for all forms of mobile gambling (casinos, lotteries and sports betting) will grow from EUR 1 billion in 2006 to EUR 12.7 billion by 2011 in terms of gross value of bets placed.

Veikkaus will introduce new mobile products (just in time for Eurovision competition?). This is the department of Helsinki MobileMonday’s excellent MC André Chaker.

Riders of the mobile broadband. Finnish service providers are building wireless broadband with four different technologies: WLAN, 3G-HSPA, Flash-OFDM, WiMAX.

There will be fierce competition for users between operators. All technologies have their strong points but their coverage and functions overlap.

At MobileMonday evening we hope to clarify what are the strong points, where the technologies overlap, what are the drivers for each and what can be expected. We would also like to get an idea how this development is impacting different parts of the mobile community.

Helsinki MobileMonday X-mas Party will take place at Stockholm Diskotek at the same time as ITU Telecom World and 3G World Congress are kicking off in Hong Kong. The “pikkujoulu” (Little Christmas) will be a party with money games, mobile games.

Staffan Ljung, Ericsson’s manager of entertainment solutions and one of the five authors of “Mobile Media and Applications – From Concept to Cash” book will talking about the challenges of consumer marketing. Another speaker will be Juha Hynynen, COO of Finnish gaming rocket Sulake.

With the streets bare of snow, the Helsinki MobileMonday X-mas Party may have been less than Christmassy, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t festive. Some 150 visitors braved the drizzle to attend Helsinki’s 6th “pikkujoulut” (Little Christmas).

With Andre Chaker not being able to attend, Micah Gland took over the MC duties, and kicked off the evening with an overview of the year past — over a dozen new chapters founded this year! — and a glimpse of what is to come.

The November MobileMonday in Helsinki returns to an enterprise topic. This time we will be looking at how Windows Mobile fits the various needs of companies and organizations.

A founder of MobileMonday movement, Vesa-Matti “Vesku” Paananen will open the discussion. He is nowadays Mobility Evangelist at Microsoft Finland.

Peter Wissinger, Business Group Lead, Microsoft Nordic, will explain Microsoft’s mobile strategy and Windows Mobile.

Another familiar MobileMonday face will be Reidar Wasenius. Last time at MobileMonday he spoke about Visual Radio for Nokia’s behalf. This time he is speaking as marketing manager, Samsung Finland. He will discuss his company’s offerings for enterprise users.

“Acquired! What next?” turned to be an interesting topic even if Telcogames/Fathammer was able to send a speaker and Marc Norris of SliceWireless/Oplayo was stopped on the way when he ended up assisting in an accident.

About one hundred people had registered for the event where Artturi Tarjanne of Nexit Ventures and Ari Viitanen of Cboss Finland gave very interesting talks. The evening was MC’d André Chaker of Veikkaus who had his own “acquired experience” when Enpocket bought his Mobicus.

Tarjanne approached the topic from Finnish society angle pointing out that in the US venture capital is responsible for ten percent of jobs and sales. The number is quite a bit lower in Europe and even lower in Finland.

The biggest reason for this is a lack of proper exit possibilities in Finland and even in Europe. Exits are seldom done through IPO’s in these days. More common exit strategy is large company acquiring start up.