I attended Slush Helsinki 2010 on Wednesday and Thursday and the team put on another great event. I was going to write a detailed follow up of the two days,  however ArcticStartup have done an excellent job so view their post for a round up of Slush (click logo below). 

The impressive aspects of this years Slush was the improved level of pitching by start-ups, the attendance by a number of high profile venture capitalists including Mattias Ljungman of Atomico, great key note speakers including Mårten Mickos formerly CEO of MySQL AB and now CEO of Eucalyptus Systems which delivers private cloud software, showing how to captivate an audience with an outstanding presentation and the continued openness of those who attended.

During Thursday I had a chat with Mikael Hed CEO of Rovio and Peter Vesterbacka (Mighty Eagle) who are the talent behind the hugely successful Angry Birds game sweeping to the top of Apple Apps and now Android. Angry Birds had just been featured on the front of the New York Times and have been mentioned on their site numerous times including this article.  Great to see a Finnish company being so successful. When chatting to Peter I mentioned we have great talent in Metropolia Business School that would love to intern at Rovio and he was open to the idea (more to come on that). Oh Yeah! Vote for Angry birds on mashable in the category of best mobile game by clicking the pic

A big thank you to Timo Airisto for organising Slush and providing free tickets to a number of our students and staff.

Rounding off Thursday was a Travelling Salesman event by Kristoffer Lawson. Kristoffer has set himself the task of an epic and adventurous journey around the Nordic regions, meeting people, companies, students, startups and entrepreneurs (The trip means driving over 10000 kilometres, visiting every single city in the Nordic region that has a computer science department. That is about 30 cities and 5 countries).  The event was an introduction to the Travelling Salesman journey and a pitching contest by startups to receive some great prizes such as a Nokia C700 and the opportunity to enter for the grand prize for the whole tour which is a set of Nokia N8s for the team members and 5000 euros! Kristoffer needs help contacting and organising the various sections of the trip, updating the blog, twitter, carrying out some digital marketing and would like Metropolia students to join the team.  It is a great opportunity to get a taste of a startup and be part of unique marketing promotional campaign.

I will write a little more about the Travelling Salesman but to get in contact follow Kristoffer on Twitter @TrvlingSalesman or email: setok(at)scred.com