During the last 6 months I have had the privilege to join very different type of start-up and technology events in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. I must admit that the atmosphere in Finland beat the others by a mile. I've been with HammerKit at least to Mind Trek, Slush, FinnMob Lounge, Mobile Brain Bank nights (has anyone else followed their Twitter hash tag #mobb to *weird* black gansta rap corners...) , Arctic Evenings, and in a meeting of IxDA in Helsinki. It's absolutely great how nice and inspiring all these events have been. All have been well organized on a reasonable level, not too polished but simple and good. The little money was normally spent wise in good wlan, sauna (Slush!), and beer, and not in fat cars or fancy scenery. Default language is English so nobody is excluded. We representing young companies have felt important, not just like decoration.

There is a discussion about a national growth strategy in Finland. How can we survive and create welfare today and tomorrow. The best thing for the authorities and other official players to do is to follow the start-up scene and give the Slush/MindTrek/FinnMob etc guys some support for e.g. inviting international speakers. Then listen the outcome and the results but NOT kill them by integrating them into huge technology programs.

The number of women in technology events could also be larger. There are many good reasons to come (in addition to the most obvious ones: lot of young men and no queues in front of the ladies' room), the most important one IMHO is to be there where the future is done and make the teams and crowd heterogeneous. Maija Itkonen from Power Kiss is my hero! Even if you can't code or speak computer, join the party, and the discussion. Sisters, speak out your opinion about usability, services, applications, and hardware! Ask what the acronyms and abbreviations mean and where they come from. We should respect the technical skills of developing and designing software but not leave the engineers alone. Otherwise we'll have more digital products like the kid's protection software for Windows or mobile e-mail clients.