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ENTREPRENEURS IN DENMARK

STARTUP

Ideas to set sail between Denmark and Sweden

A ferry sailing between Helsingør and Helsingborg will host the second annual Startup Weekend Oresund, a 54-hour cruise designed to turn ideas into reality.

Ideas to set sail between Denmark and Sweden
Startup Weekend will take pace in the ferry between Denmark and Sweden. Photo: Startup Weekend.
Board a cruise ship in Helsingør and step off 54 hours later with your own business plan to take over the world. That's the basic concept behind Startup Weekend Oresund, which will set off on Friday, October 23rd and sail between Helsingør and the Swedish city of Helsingborg.
 
The main goal of the meeting is to empower new entrepreneurs, so the weekend boat trip is tailored to kick-start ideas and develop businesses.
 
“This is the second edition; the first one took place in 2014. We expect around 80 to 100 attendees this year,” Jakub Kowalczyk, one of the organizers of Startup Weekend, told The Local.
 
Startup Weekend Oresund is designed to be the perfect atmosphere to grow business ideas. On the ship, participants will pitch their concepts and then assemble teams to bring them to life. A panel of experts will then judge the competing ideas and crown a winner. 
 
“A boat provides a different atmosphere than the office space we are all too used to. You can't just leave whenever you want you, but you can take walks out on the deck and use the sea air to freshen up your tired mind,” Kowalczyk explained.
 
“It is an extremely unique working environment, which facilitates what we want to achieve: providing lifetime experiences,” he added.
 

Picture: Startup Weekend.
 
The event is part of growing efforts to boost the startup scene in what is known as the Öresund region in Sweden and Øresund in Denmark, which encompasses parts of both countries divided by the Öresund strait.
 
On the Swedish side, the area already boats a strong gaming industry. It is the birthplace of games including The Division and World in Conflict and companies such as Ubisoft Massive are inspiring the development of smaller creative startups. The first milk carton, the first artificial kidney, and even the first portable phone also trace their roots back to the region.
 
However the startup scene in Öresund remains much less developed than that in the Swedish capital, which is now second only to Silicon Valley in terms of billion dollar companies per capita, according to a recent report from investment firm Atomico.
 
Startup Weekend Oresund will gather both technical and non-technical entrepreneurs, and in addition to the idea contest, participants can benefit from brainstorming sessions, business plan development advice, and feedback and talks from industry leaders.
 
“The most important thing is the motivation needed to take action and to have a team and the means to make your actions worth taking. Participants provide the ideas and we provide excellent teams and the possibility to make their ideas become reality,” Kowalczyk said.
 
The winning team of Startup Weekend Oresund will be rewarded with a 12-week global startup programme at THINK Accelerate in Helsingborg, Sweden. Winners will have access to an international network of mentors, business coaches, and top investors – not to mention free services worth an estimated $270,000 (1.75m kroner) from Microsoft, IBM and Amazon. 
 
But most importantly of all, the wining team will be able to turn their idea into a viable and real business.
 
The organizer of the event, UP Oresund, is the local branch of a non-profit powered by Google for Entrepreneurs, and most of the organizing team are students at Danish universities. Tickets for Startup Weekend Oresund are available here

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MALMÖ

Is Malmö’s pogo stick e-mobility startup for real?

Cangaroo, the Malmö-based startup offering to hire pogo sticks through an app won viral coverage. But is it for real? The Local tracked down Adam Mikkelsen, founder of ODD Company, the "super-creative PR company" behind it, to find out.

Is Malmö's pogo stick e-mobility startup for real?
Adam Mikkelsen (centre) with the rest of the Cangaroo team. Photo: ODD Company
The Malmö company's innovative addition to the last mile e-mobility sector has been covered by the The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Huffpost, CNN, and our sister site The Local France, although from the start sceptical voices were raised. 
 
At the height of its viral coverage in May, the company put out a public statement insisting that the company was not a PR stunt.  
 
“With a lot of initial questions along the line of 'is this for real?', we feel the need to underline that Cangaroo is 100% real,” it said in a statement.  
 
But when The Local spoke to him, Mikkelsen admitted that the initial idea had been to make a stir and get a point across. 
 
“It definitely started as some statement, I wouldn't say against, but in the micro mobility movement,” he said. “And a lot of things we do tend to divide the crowd, with 50 percent saying 'is this real?' and the other half wanting to try them out.” 
 
He said that articles talking about the company dumping tens of thousands pogo sticks in cities across the world as e-scooter companies like Lime and Voi have done, are “delusional”. 
 
“With the Cangaroo, I would definitely see it as a success even if we only managed to put out ten pogo sticks in two cities and then we're out of money,” he admitted. 
 
“But we're not about making a statement by just making something up and not doing it, because then we might as well announce that we're doing flying cars or whatever.” 
 
Adam Mikkelsen (right) with a prototype Cangaroo. Photo: ODD company
 
If the handful of pogo sticks the company hopes to release in Malmö in August are well received (and that is quite a big 'if'), Mikkelsen claimed he and the PR bureau aim to stick with the company. 
 
“If everything is running smoothly and the demand and feedback is great, then we would absolutely continue to scale and expand like any startup would do,” he said. 
 
The company, like its 2017 'Pause Pod' relaxation tent, have been developed by the company's ODD lab, which it uses for experimental projects that are not for real clients. 
 
The Pause Pod relaxation tent the company released in 2017 raised 960,244 Swedish kronor on Kickstarter and then sold about 2,500 tents before ODD wound the company up. But it got massive media coverage. 
 
In the past the company has created similar viral 'product ideas' for commercial clients, such as the Somersby grass slippers for Carlsberg, or the Hug Trench for the fashion brand Monki. 
 
 
Mikkelsen said that even though both the Pause Pod and Cangaroo were part of the company's ODD Lab, and not for any particular client, the company aimed to use the buzz around Cangaroo to raise the profile of gay, lesbian and transgender charities. 
 
“We are currently in talks with different Pride festivals, so we aims to use the product in the public space to allow people to take stand on something,” he said. “During Pride week our ambition is that if you jump on a pogo stick, you jump for free love.” 
 
“So we're not going to use it as a campaign for a commercial company,” he concluded. “But if you look at charity organizations, they sometimes struggle to get their message out.”
 
So it it for real? It depends what 'real' means. 
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