ArcticStartup, our overly optimistic startup movement we are building with Ville, Miikka and Karri, has had some excellent home runs in the last few weeks. As I’m writing this, Miikka and Ville are in Stockholm blogging live from the 24 hour business camp. It’s an event organised around a 24h time period where entrepreneurs do everything from company forming to live prototype – all in a time period of 24 hours.

Secondly, we’re also taking ArcticStartup abroad to Tallinn, Estonia with the fabolous help of Jüri Kaljundi and Connect Estonia’s Tarvo Tamm. Fantastic people with big hearts for entrepreneurship. We need more passion like that spread around. We initially opened up 100 tickets to the event, but those sold out in just over 3 days. With over a week to go to the event with many asking for more, we opened up a further 50 slots. These 50 tickets were taken from our hands in about half a day. Talk about demand. I’m looking forwards to next week’s event in Tallinn and meeting all the wonderful people behind the many innovative services we’ve written about.

Furthermore, we’ve signed some media partnerships on top of the 24h business camp. We’ll be one of the media partners in the Plugg conference held in Brussels. On top of this, we’ve been asked to participate in some other events as well. It’s fantastic to be able to support the Nordic and Baltic ecosystem in the way we can.

On top of these, we have some great ideas on ArcticIndex we wanna put forward. There’s so much potential in there, but prioritisation is needed with so much going on – especially when we work on ArcticStartup during our free time from other ventures. Despite all the economic turmoil going on and general slowdown in many sectors – I feel the year 2009 will be the year of startups in two ways. Those that are strong enough, will become relatively stronger as competition dies out and those entrepreneurs who are looking forwards to founding new companies will have the best people available in a long time as large corporations need to slim down.

So there’s a lot of good stuff going on for ArcticStartup this year, thanks to the great team of talented people I have the chance to work with. In the mean time, let’s stop worrying about the recession (as it doesn’t help a bit in the end) and do our best and have a laugh every now and then to keep us going :)