Finland is quite a paradox. One would not think that a country with only 5 million people, plunged into darkness for a greater part of the year, would be the inventor of Linux, SSH, IRC, Nokia, F-Secure and MySQL. While the country is known for its technical feats, heavy metal bands, saunas, and educational system, it's less known for its startups.

Success stories include Sulake, owner of Habbo Hotel (one of the largest virtual worlds, with tens of millions of users, and pioneers of micro-transactions several years before Farmville) and Irc-Galleria, which is the largest social network for Finns.