MindTrek prizes for start-ups a positive surprise

    We speculated earlier on that this year’s MindTrek’s Startup Launchpad prizes would be pretty good, and nice they are.


    The guys at MindTrek have shown that when it comes to getting start-ups on board, Tampere knows what its doing. Here’s what they have on offer quote on quote:

    The winner elected by the jury will be nominated as the MindTrek Startup of the Year 2008, and given the right to pick up the prize first from the basket. The three prizes are:

    • Two tickets for an international conference (max á 1300 €), like Le Web 3 Le Web08 in Paris (December 12th – 13th) December 9th – 10th*
    • Supercoaching training by Sharon Ballard
    • Technopolis Ventures incubation program (12 months contract, worth 3 000 €) and an opportunity to participate in the Money Talks Forum

    In addition, the winner will get two tickets for the MindTrek 2009 conference and one hour face-time with one jury member to discuss about the concept, business model, financing opportunities, markets, etc.

    The company nominated as second will select prize after the winner, and the bronze-medallist will get the remaining prize.

    All companies selected to present their pitches in the conference will be given an opportunity to participate in a half-day pitch training session before the conference.
    On top of that we at ArcticStartup want to offer the winning startup the possibility to put their logo (125×125px) on ArcticStartup front page for one month. Additionally we will also do an interview with the winner right there at MindTrek.


    If the prizes are noteworthy, so it the jury. The jury line up includes Marc Davis from Yahoo!, Sharon C. Ballard, the founding President/CEO of Enable Ventures Inc., Tapio Siik from Nokia Growth Partners, Pekka Pärnänen theHead of Finpro at Silicon Valley and Henri Rantalainen the CEO and Business Development Advisor at Technopolis Ventures Professia.


    But as they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch and even start-ups have to invest real money sometimes as much as it hurts. There is no real registration fee for the Launchpad competition, but if a start-up is selected it will have to register for the conference to get to pitch and be eligible for the prizes. The registration fee is 75 euro (+VAT) for the Thursday when the actual pitching competiton will take place, and if you want join the whole two days you have to pay 110 euro (+VAT) for a two day ticket, ie Wednesday and Thursday.

    To ease the pain a bit, we are co-organizing with Culminatum, Sombiz, Floobs and MindTrek a free bus ride for all the startups to Tampere and back. Regardless of whether you’re pitching or not, you’re most welcome to join the ride. write me at ville [at] arcticstartup [dot] com if you wanna come and I’ll reserve a seat for your team.

    You can read more about the competition and fill in the registration for here. Good luck!

    *Edit: A correction to The MindTrek website: The first prize that includes two tickets for an international conference (max á 1300 €), should read “like Le Web08 in Paris (December 9th – 10th)”, not ‘LeWeb3 that was held in Paris last year on December 12th and 13th.