Moving Out of Nokia's Shadow

Another tool is called Traveler. It allows a customer to receive, by cell phone, information on stores and restaurants in a city or neighborhood. Tossavainen demonstrated by summoning a list of Italian restaurants in Washington to his new Nokia, which combines a computer, a screen and a phone. (The newest models also play music, like an iPod.) Finnair has bought this to provide for the airline's customers.

A third application is a "pocket language lab," software that helps teach you a language using your phone. It allows, for example, for the user to compare her pronunciation of "Champs Elysees" with that of a native French-speaker. Tossavainen is hoping to sell this to firms like the German company that owns world rights to the Berlitz name.

Tekes also provided seed money for Innosonic -- 100,000 euros. He was able to apply for this grant online. After meeting with just one official from this state committee, they had the money, in the form of a private equity loan. "Our next money will come from our customers," Tossavainen said confidently.

· Sofia Digital is trying to exploit SMSTV, the message-sending technology used by the American Idol television program, for new purposes. One, according to Janne Huovilainen, 35, a manager of the firm, is a technology that allows customers to play electronic games with others on broadcast television, using the new channels created by the digitization of broadcast signals.

Sofia Digital acquired a Finnish maker of electronic games last year. It is backed by a small Finnish venture capital firm (there aren't many of them) and had sales of 1.4 million euros last year, 40 percent of them outside Finland.

· Emfit Ltd. makes a material that converts pressure from a touch or footstep into an electrical signal. The company is principally owned by a former stockbroker named Heikki Raisanen, one of the few Finnish entrepreneurs interviewed here who made no bones about his desire to get rich (something many Finns consider slightly irregular, if not improper). "I want to do an IPO," he said -- an initial public offering of stock in one of his entrepreneurial companies.

He is developing paper-thin keypads from this material, as well as a device to alert a nurse or relation if a patient they are monitoring gets out of bed. A step on an Emfit pad under a rug next to the bed can ring an alarm. It's most useful for keeping track of elderly patients with dementia, he said.

Nukari of the Jyvaskyla Science Park noted repeatedly that Finland represents "just five-tenths of a percent of the global market." Its population, 5.2 million, is smaller than that of metropolitan Washington D.C. (nearly 6 million). But marketing and selling to the rest of the world does not come naturally to Finns. "We are a more technically oriented people," said Tossavainen of Innosonic. Finns like to invent things without asking, "How can we make money from that?" he added. To prove the point, he pulled out his cell phone again to show off a screen that looked, as he quickly acknowledged, like the old-fashioned snow globe, a crystal ball filled with artificial snowflakes that a child can activate by shaking it. What's the commercial use of that?

Nukari has recruited an American business coach named Sharon Ballard, a veteran of Motorola and several start-ups who has visited here several times to help Jyvaskyla's entrepreneurs think of themselves as salesmen to a wider world. Jyvaskyla's business incubator is producing 10 to 15 new companies a year, he added. "This is the second-fastest-growing region in the country, after Helsinki."