Finland Times

 

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The third Midnight Pitch Festival is on its opening day in the Oulu city theatre focused on startups business, 3D & gaming expo. 

 

Midnight Pitch Fest ry has organised the June 11-12 event with collaboration of Business Kitchen, BusinessOulu and Oulun Yritystakomo. The event also involves partners and investors such as Nestholma, Butterfly Ventures, Kaleva, Palvelumuotoilu Palo, LähiTapiola, and the City of Oulu itself.

 

On the opening day, starting from the early morning, startup businesses were pitching in four categories: apps & services, tech & services, games & entertainment, health and sports. A pitch in the event is essentially a 3-minute speech given by every participating startup business trying to convince investors to invest in their business idea. 

 

The ideas presented on the stage included a research on nano technology, an energy conserving and house fire preventing charger for electronic devices called “ASMO-charger” and an innovative new secure cloud storage solution. 

 

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Aside from pitching, the festival featured speeches, presentations and keynotes from speakers such as Jaakko Kylmäoja from Fingersoft and Ola Sundell from HUB13.

 

The event venue also features a 3D & gaming expo. One of the highlights of the expo was a 3D cave that showcased virtualisation of a 3D environment. The virtual experience is implemented with 3D glasses and Oculus rift virtual goggles.

 

Although the Midnight Pitch Festival and 3D Gaming expo feature mostly Finnish businesses, both the events attracted visitors and startup businesses from diverse nationalities:  from Kazakhstan, China, Japan, United States, Germany, Canada and Norway.

 

Jason Brower of elfCLOUD took part in the pitching and shared afterwards a few thoughts, “Too bad we did not get to progress to the final round! At least we got to share our ideas. We had something that nobody had heard of before. In regards to startups and internationalisation, in Oulu there is now a huge flood of new ideas and projects. Some of the foreign entrepreneurs staying in Finland are not under the umbrella of the Finnish welfare system which puts high pressure on them and in turn they are highly motivated in their business ideas.”

 

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Aliya Alzhanova and Gulhzas Mailybayeva took an 11-hour flight from Kazakhstan to Finland to represent their business ideas for the investors. “For both of us, it is our first time in Finland. We like it very much here in Oulu.”

 

One of the visitors was Zara Zhang, founder and owner of HoHot, an Oulu-based local boiled fast food-serving restaurant, who saw the event as a great opportunity for networking and searching out business partners.

 

At the end of the long opening day, Midnight Pitch Festival culminated in an evening award giving ceremony. Deep Content Company, Glome and Monidor, these three of the 44 accepted startup businesses made to the top. Deep Content Company was awarded the grand prize of 10,000 euro by the festival association.