Heavily focused on indie bands, Finnish music service Hitlantis raises $1.5 million angel funding from an array of Finnish angels and private investors, some of which are Nokia executives, in order develop a unique user interface for indie music discovery.

The visual interface resembles a solar system with Hitlantis on its core and the artists names contained in bubbles revolving around it. As a certain artist gets shares, liked, or bought, the bubble grows bigger and bigger. These factors also act as a centripetal force drawing the bubble to the center of the universe, growing in popularity.

“With billions of apps, countless numbers of songs and videos, among other forms of content aimlessly flooding the market every day, we need a compelling and engaging way to filter and discover relevant new content, and clearly the Hitlantis visual browsing platform is that solution, which is already proving itself with music,” said Juha Tynkkyen, an angel investor and CEO of T&T Enterprises.

Hitlantis is in a mutual relationship with indie bands, giving the former revenue without royalty fees, enabling the latter to reach more listeners than otherwise possible on their own. The site works pretty much like Myspace, and would have been considered a direct competitor had it not for its recent acquisition of the forlorn network by Specific Media from News Corps for $35 million. However, Myspace is not the only contender in the race. There’s iTunes too, among others, even spilling into the search engine industry.

Hitlantis currently has approximately 1 million users, and has settled a $4 million to $7 million series A funding round intended for the fall.  As a discovery-driven music service, it recently inked a deal with Island Def Jam for their next talent search. Even Universal Music is currently connected with Hitlantis in their A&R Department. However, this doesn’t mean their service ends in discovering indie stars; they also look forward to expanding to other genres, even beyond music, such as apps.

The Nordic area has become a spring board for tech starters recently. Norwegian start up Stay.com recently released version 3.0 of their travel portal which promotes the concept of mobile travel tools to the next level. It was awarded as one of Time Magazine’s top 5 websites of the year last year. We also have Estonian-startup Fits.me that allows for a robot mannequin to adjust its sizes in parallel to that of the customer’s. Getting the wrong fit is the reason why people are adamant to not buy from online stores. With the robot from Fits.me, you won’t have to worry about these things anymore.

And just in case you still don’t know where those relieved Skype engineers went after the company was acquired by Microsoft, they are currently building a startup called GrabCAD using a $1.1 million series A funding from a number of investors. “Our plan is to be the biggest mechanical engineering team in the world,” said founder Hardi Meybaum. There’s been a lot of focus on startups in the Nordic region these days, priming the Summer of Startups, a tech starter-centric event that is filled with fun, hard work, keynotes and competitions.