Silicon Valley is no longer the go-to city for tech startups, as European cities blossom (despite the harsh winter) into centers for big data innovation and startups.
Sometimes, something bad has to happen to give room to new possibilities that otherwise might not have occurred. When Nokia made thousands of its employees redundant, it seemed like it was the end of Finland -- after all, Nokia put Finland on the map. However, what the world didn’t know was that more than 200 startups were going to be created in Finland alone by ex-Nokians, giving the country a stronger position on the map of technological wars.
Startup conferences
Technology startup conferences like Arctic15 and Slush -- set up by Peter Vesterbacka, CMO of Rovio, and Mighty Eagle of Angry Birds -- are annual meeting points in Helsinki, Finland, for emerging startups coming from all over Europe. Many of these startups initially lured international investors with their pitches. Today, a good majority of them are young, successful, well established companies walking the path of future technologies and new expectations.
In an effort to support startups, the Finnish government gives incentives such as tax deductions to venture capitalists who invest in small enterprises. For startups, the incentive helps them invest in research and development.
Europe, and especially Scandinavia, the Nordic countries, and the UK, are well on their way to becoming part of a technology hub as important as Silicon Valley. This means young startup entrepreneurs in Europe don’t need to set their sights across the ocean in order to make their world-changing ideas come true. Cities like Helsinki, London, Stockholm, Tallinn, Latvia, and Moscow have become hubs for events where technology is cooked, baked, and served to the world.
Let’s have a look at a few examples of big data startups that have flourished in Europe, despite the snowy, cold winters, and short days:
Central Europe
Coming from Central Europe, Radoop is a big data analytics tool for easily accessing and analyzing Hadoop data. The company is based in Hungary.
Moving to the land of beautiful ski resorts, TerAlytics, based in Zurich, Switzerland, pioneered technology on large-scale data management and analytics. They help the financial and travel industries, among others, gain insight into their data.
UK and Ireland
Time for tea and scones. DataSift, from Reading, England, promises to build your business with social data, providing measured customer engagement, optimizing campaign content, and improving ROI (Return of Influencers).
Hats off to award-winning TreeMetrics. This environmentally conscious big data company based in Cork, Ireland, digitizes forestry data by offering analysis and tools for the forestry industry. By combining both aerial and terrestrial 3D scanning systems, TreeMetrics offers new information on the structure of a forest, saving trees in the process. These guys know about forest intelligence!
Scandinavia
Moving up to Scandinavia -- more precisely, to Norway -- we find AtBrox, a company that provides big data services with search, Hadoop, and cloud computing.
From the land of the midnight sun, Metrify, based in Helsinki, Finland, gives gaming companies easy tools to measure and improve their understanding of game end-users, helping them make awesome games.
London
And last, but not least, one of my personal favorites, sharing the city of London with the Big Ben: Mendeley. Anyone dealing with huge amounts of academic data, and other research papers, will find this app super useful and easy to use, both online and off.
It was hard to choose only a few of these startups because, as you can see, big data startups are increasing at almost the same speed as big data itself. Share your favorite big data startups in the comments below.
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— Susan Fourtané, Science & Technology Blogger
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