Helsinki Xmas Party

Helsinki Xmas Party

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 first speaker, Marko Ahtisaari, introduced the wifi operator FON, which is currently bolstering its Finnish and Nordic launch by offering free wifi routers to those willing to share their wifi networks with other FON customers.

“This isn’t in competition with ISPs,” Ahtisaari said.

The next speaker was Staffan Ljung, Ericsson’s manager of entertainment solutions. Ljung is one of the five authors of “Mobile Media and Applications — From Concept to Cash”, and he graciously offered a stack of the books to be raffled off at the end of the evening.

Pasi Ilola, of Sulake, no stranger to MobileMonday Helsinki, spoke about Habbo’s growth worldwide, and how the company is trialing a mobile version of the virtual community in Finland.

Petri Talala of Futuremark presented the company’s benchmark results for several smartphones currently on the Finnish market (see: Faster phones for Christmas). The results were first published on MobileMonday Global.

While poor Jari Tammisto had to leave early to catch a flight to Hong Kong — in MobileMonday business, no less — I dare say he wasn’t the only one who’s evening ended all too soon. I guess this could be chalked up as an early present from the nice barkeeps of Stockholm: their punctual closing of the bar saved the morning after of the Helsinki mobile industry.