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El Blog!, Touppi's Super Eleet Blog.
Tuomas Toivonen
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Fri, 07 Mar 2008
Been an interesting and worthwhile first day at the Startup Camp. I'm glad we decided to come over here. This being my first "unconference" I didn't really know what to expect, but so far the experience has been positive. Basically what happens at an uncoference is whatever the attendees bring to the table, so to speak. After a couple of keynote speakers (David Axmark of MySQL and Steve Garnet of Salesforce.com) there was a session to set the agenda for the rest of the conference. Anyone was free to suggest a topic for a one hour slots and there were several parallel tracks running. The person suggesting the topic then acted as a moderator for that session. What was especially good that people who were not experts themselves could suggest topics. Like someone could say that "I'm having problems in my startup with xyz, is there an expert in xyz?" It was easy then for people to volunteer to chair a session as there was a clear demand for expertise.
Perhaps the most rewarding - or at anyrate, the funniest - session I attended was on raising venture capital. The chair was a Finnish guy. We knew that apart from us there was supposed to be a Finn at the conference from a mobile video streaming company Floobs. So even though the session chair wasn't the fellow named in the roster as coming from Floobs I assumed that they'd simply sent someone else. During the session then I was quite of wondering: why did they raise first round of funding in London? I mean, they're a Finnish company after all, based in Helsinki. I was about to ask him why they zoomed on UK-based VCs right away, but confirmed first that you're based in Helsinki, Finland, right? And you're from a company called Floobs? And he was like, um, no and no. Okay, fair enough, but what actually makes this funny is that earlier on he'd talked about how his startup is doing video streaming and that they have mobile applications for that. Exactly what a fellow from Floobs would say. He'd also said how they first focused on the entertainment space, but then moved more on to security applications. And there I was, thinking, seems like Floobs has changed direction since I last talked to some of their people a week ago. Already I was wondering what they were now called. I mean, being called Floobs and doing sort of "mobile CCTV" doesn't quite mix. Oh well. And for what Floobs is doing, and that's in the entertainment space still, their name is catchy enough.