Arctic* Development Blog

We have just added an all new events part to our ArcticIndex. You can find it from the top level navigation. The events part works very much like the jobs-feature. If you want to view the upcoming events - just click on them, there’s no need to sign in. If you want to add an event to the section - it’s easy, you sign in to ArcticIndex with your credentials and click the add event button on the front page.

Adding an event is easy - just fill out the pieces of information required and it’s done. Once ready - click the submit -button. If you want to modify the details in your event, you can do this by going to the event page and click the edit -link at the bottom of the page. One important piece of information to remember is that when you’re entering the venue - do put it out as “Place name, Street Address, City, Country”. Remember - we’re an international community of entrepreneurs and like-minded people. Furthermore, this way Google can show the location better and more accurate on the map.

Why did we do this? Well - we wanted to let our community have the tools for sharing information about these sort of events. Why should we be the gatekeeper in an area such as events. Previously we worked through Yahoo’s Upcoming, but that was kind of difficult - now it’s seamlessly integrated into the service and the last 5 events will also be cross-posted to ArcticStartup.com.

Now’s your turn - how did we do? Criticism or praise? What features are missing? Shout ‘em out!

Just around the beginning of April, we added one of the coolest (yet very simple) feature to ArcticIndex that one can think of - Job board. The decision to implement such a feature to the service was simple, there was little possibility for Nordic and Baltic startups to search for talent.

If you look at the available services in each country, they are designed for large corporations and don’t attract the audience the smaller startups are looking for. Secondly, I’m not sure startups would want to pay for the prices many of these larger recruiting services are asking for. Thirdly, many of these services in the market are country specific. This is something we constantly look to break in the Nordic and Baltic way of thinking - we ought to create a Nordic and Baltic market that works together and not separately, thus a single recruiting service for the region.

So where do we want to take the job board?
At the moment its only working one way, meaning that only companies can enlist requirement for talent. We’ve been throwing around ideas that individuals looking for co-founders and startups to work with could also enlist their wishes and through that help the community.

The problems in this are relatively obvious. How do you accomplish this in a manner that does not make the service into just another social network? Our thought on this was that perhaps users could create a profile for themselves in the service and tag the companies they would want to work with, creating a link between them. Furthermore, users who have an idea, but lack co-founders would be able to put on a beacon of somesort to signal this to others in the community.

These are very much work in progress ideas, but we would gladly hear your thoughts on this whether it would be a useful feature or an extension to the service.

ArcticIndex development blog, but why you may ask? We want to put more effort into the service that we call ArcticIndex and this means we want to have a more open and continous dialogue with you the users. What this would in effect mean is that we would probably crowd up the ArcticStartup blog with small pieces of ArcticIndex issues. This would in turn lower the relevance to the majority of the readers and we would only be shooting ourselves in the leg with this.

So why have a development blog to discuss issues? There are many different ways of having a dialogue with ones users and community, but since we want to keep this as open as possible and leave a permanent track of how we create the service, we decided a blog is one of the easiest platforms for this.

We won’t be double posting anything from ArcticStartup here as this blog’s only mission is to share our thoughts and ideas regarding ArcticIndex and where we want to take it. This way you can comment on our thoughts and make yourself heard regarding the future of the service. We want to make the service as useful for our community as we can and this is one way of extending our hand and letting you, our community, be part of the development team.

We hope this will turn into a prosperous venture and we will see the best outcome for ArcticIndex possible. Feel free to comment!