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Five from Finland

Event management

Elevate your event experience with the help of these Finnish industry professionals.Adobe / Julia Bushueva

Whether you are an event organiser or attendee, these five Finnish companies are here to assist you.

Finns are seasoned event organisers, with such grand event venues as Finlandia Hall and Tampere Hall recently receiving some of the most prestigious awards in the field. But even if the scale of your event is quite humble, Finland has solutions to get the most of it.

From choosing the right venue to keeping participants engaged, elevate your event experience with the help of these Finnish industry professionals.

Established in 2014, this online platform for meeting space booking was designed to make the booking process less troublesome and more efficient. Now it lists over 250 000 meeting rooms and conference venues globally and keeps on growing internationally.

Thanks to the MeetingPackage’s unique booking solution, hotels and other venues can offer their meeting rooms online with real-time availability and dynamic pricing, while customers can conveniently choose their perfect meeting locations and manage bookings with ease.

“Our mission is to make booking off-site meeting rooms as easy as booking hotel rooms,” explained founder and CEO Joonas Ahola, who made it to the Forbes 2018 list of European e-commerce and retail disruptors under the age of 30. “Eventually we want to kill off the old-school quote request.”

The amount of work that needs to be done before, during and after any event, be it an international conference or an internal company training session, can cause a serious headache and result in significant chaos.

To tackle the issue that many professionals are facing, this Turku-headquartered tech company has developed an event management software that can be used for any type of event to manage participant data and registrations, handle event communication and feedback, and share information both externally and internally.

Now, Lyyti’s unique solution is used around the globe to organise about 75 000 events annually. Due to growing demand, the company has expanded beyond Finland and opened offices in Sweden, France and the Netherlands.

“We want to be a technology firm that puts service front and centre,” noted founder and CEO Petri Hollmén. “We don’t need to be the biggest, but we want to be the most respected participant data management platform in the world.”

Looking for a more innovative and inspiring space for your next business meeting, workshop or team gathering? This multi-award-winning company operates in Helsinki, Singapore and Copenhagen, and is well on track to expand to all of the top 10 meeting cities in the world by 2025.

Huone offers uniquely designed meeting spaces with themes ranging from wine and vintage rooms to playground and magic rooms. On top of all that creativity come well planned additional services, such as high-standard catering and various activities to make your event impactful and memorable.

“There is nobody focusing on what we are focusing on,” claimed founder and CEO Evon Blomstedt (formerly Söderlund). “Nobody is trying to revitalise the meeting experience as a whole through meeting design. We are not just selling you a space, we are bringing you a solution to maximise your meeting.”

Designed with both event organisers and attendees in mind, Brella is a powerful event networking platform that has already captured the interest of the world’s largest conferences, exhibitions and companies, including Google, Samsung and Microsoft.

After the event organiser has created a profile for the happening on Brella, attendees can start adding their personal profiles, describing what their event goals are, what they are interested in and what they can offer. Then the AI-powered matchmaking algorithm suggests the best people to meet during the event.

With Brella, participants can save a lot of time as they effortlessly find the right people with similar interests or plans, schedule meetings with their matches and meet face-to-face during the actual event. Event organisers, meanwhile, ensure higher engagement rates and greater satisfaction.

“Brella is a new channel for visibility and systematic networking,” pointed out CEO and co-founder Markus Kauppinen. “It helps event organisers to understand what their audience is interested in and how to serve them in the most meaningful manner.”

Founded in 2013 by disco-loving and business-oriented Aalto University students, this rapidly growing booking service defines itself as the “Airbnb for event spaces” and currently lists over 3 500 venues across Finland and beyond.

Booking with Venuu is meant to be easy and fun: searches can be tailored to individual needs, and there is always help available for adding catering, activities and side programmes. The market leader in Finland, Venuu is also enjoying healthy growth across the pond in Sweden.

“Our goal is to create a service platform so good that it can be adapted to almost any country or city,” told founder Jasu Koponen. “Our vision is to make Venuu a more extensive global service.”

By: Zhanna Koiviola
28.02.2020