Slush started as a "focal point for Eurasian startups and technology talent to meet with top-tier international investors, executives and media," but the 2014 event is being dominated by a former stalwart: Nokia Corporation NOK.
Hosted annually in Helsinki, Finland, Slush is a place for startups to demonstrate their potential. Roughly 1,000 companies attended the event in 2013, including the award-winning BetterDoctor, a site for locating high-quality healthcare professionals.
More than 13,000 people are expected to attend this year's event, which is going on now. Early-stage startups will have the chance to compete for £200,000.
It is highly unlikely that Apple Inc. or Google Inc would attend Slush or any other startup conference unless they had acquired or invested in a new company. Neither firm is likely to attend Slush with the intent of promoting a new product it developed in-house.
The same cannot be said for Nokia. The firm (whose device business was sold to Microsoft) started teasing an announcement earlier this week:
Now the company has officially unveiled an iPad Mini clone that uses Android, not Windows 8. To be clear, this device is from the part of Nokia that remains a publicly traded company.
At any other major tech event, Nokia's announcement might not have received much attention. Here things are different: instead of competing with the big players in technology, it went up against a bunch of startups.
As of this writing, Nokia accounted for half of the Slush 2014 articles appearing at the top of this Google News search. Google's technology section does not currently have a single story about Slush 2014 -- but there is one story about Nokia's new tablet.
Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.
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