Easy Investment April 23, 2008
Posted by Jussi Huotari in : startup , add a comment
Regards from the sunny Barcelona! The European early stage investment forum (Easy) was organized in Barcelona this time and I was here representing TripSay. The forum aims at matching startups with business angels around the Europe to create cross-border investment opportunities. Sounds complicated, huh? In reality the event worked quite well. The organizers had invited a number of investors (mainly angels) and selected 17 companies who were given an 8 minute slot to give their pitch on the stage. Good stuff!
There was also an excellent keynote speaker. Nelson Gray shared his experiences as a business angel in a very unusual way: he used concrete examples of companies and real numbers! It was very refreshing to listen. For example, his first investment had gone bad and he draw some guidelines from the experience. In retrospect he could say that the entrepreneur was not good, the business model was poor and there were no barriers to entry for the competitors. Then why did he invest? He gave an answer and said that he learnt from the mistake. And that afterwards he hasn’t done the same mistake again. Instead he has done 11 other mistakes. 
Well, he can afford to do mistakes as there are more successes than mistakes in his portfolio. If you have a chance, Nelson’s presentation is worth seeing.
Creative Lapland April 6, 2008
Posted by Jussi Huotari in : travel , add a commentI was asked to speak at the Creative Lapland Seminar in Rovaniemi.
The seminar is about experience economy and tourism. In their words:
Although experience has become an everyday buzzword, most businesses do not know how to change the core business processes to render customer experiences. A holistic multi-sector approach is a key for successful experience product development; the best innovations are created by exploiting the broadest creative potential and breaking the boundaries between industries like tourism and content industry or ICT and cultural production.
Sounds good! At TripSay we place special interest in combining experiences with travel. We think that travel is about experiences and not about booking the cheapest flights. We are building a service for sharing those experiences with trusted people.
I’m going to speak about travel industry transition to digital age and travel community building through social media. My presentation title is “TripSay - customer engagement in social media”.
All speakers are listed here. Speakers include C. Michael Hall (New Zealand) whose presentation is titled “Innovation value creation points in tourism firm” and Erik Hedblad (Sweden) who gives an inside view to tourism entrepreneurship in Åre ski resort.
The seminar takes place in the end of April (17th and 18th). I guess there won’t be any snow in Rovaniemi when I’ll be there. Spring will come even to the arctic circle (but not to the south? Heathrow Airport is struggling with the recent snowfall).