Archive for December 2008

Unity Technologies Eases 3D Game Development for iPhone and Wii

by Miikka Kukkosuo, December 31, 2008 — 1 Comment

Unity Technologies is a Danish gaming technology startup. They provide tools for creating visually-rich 3D downloadable, online, iPhone and Wii games, or other interactive content like as architectural visualizations or real-time 3D animations. The company is based in Copenhagen, but has an international team and a sales office in San Francisco.

The company’s main product is Unity multi-platform game development tool, including a 3D game engine, which enables developers to create cutting-edge 3D content supposedly faster and more efficiently than with other tool sets. The Unity editor only runs on Mac OS X, but it can be used to produce games for Mac, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Nintendo Wii, and iPhone. In addition, it’s possible to publish a web game played inside a normal web browser from the same project, the visual fidelity being identical to the standalone version. This is achieved by the company’s own Unity Web Player Plug-in for the most common web browsers. The plug-in is said to be already distributed in “6-digit” numbers.

Over the past couple of years, the company has gotten lots of new clients from indie and small shop developers, and a few high-profile customers including Disney, Sony Motion Pictures, and Cartoon Networks. Unity has been used in games, advergaming and edutainment projects, and technology demos. There is quite impressive a variety of games (latest best).

The company promises to combine usability, power, and platform reach in their tools, and seems there is user support for the claim as well. The framework is said to have built-in fallbacks and workarounds to provide solid support for almost all hardware and software combinations. It also presents features like Live Preview for playing the game exactly as it is and do real-time modification, Click to Publish to build the game with one click and running it with another, even directly on an iPhone. Unity also claims that with their tools the developers get the best out of iPhone, “consistently beating GL ES benchmarks by 30-40%.” However, while Unity has features supporting ease of use, like drag-and-drop, it’s still script-based programming tool, so not perfectly suitable for purely visual designers alone.

Unity Technologies is a technology company by heart, they state they’re “all about building technology, driving it forwards, and supporting it.” The company offers the tool with a standard licensing model, differentiating between small developers and companies with turnover in above USD 100,000.

Unity probably finds the biggest market within smaller indie developers and in different special projects (like WolfQuest and Axe Billions), while the big companies most likely will keep using and developing their own tools. Considering the real mass-market, online web gaming, the web plug-in works neatly, but the biggest drawback is exactly the need for it. It’s not possible to install new plugins in many of the public or workplace computers, even though the installation of the Unity plug-in is quick in itself. Gaming sites offering Flash-based games have become hugely popular due to the fact the Flash plug-in is available in pretty much all main browsers. Breaking into the mass-market will thus be difficult. Also, the market for in-browser 3D gaming is still relatively small compared to casual 2D games. There’s also competition, like Adobe ShockWave and services like InstantAction competing for the hardcore gamers. In iPhone game development, on the other hand, it will be interesting to see what kind of customer base Unity is able to get.

If you want to check out a demo, see Unity’s Tropical Paradise browser demo.

One Did It Aims To Build An Eco-Social Network

by Ville Vesterinen, December 31, 2008 — Leave a Comment

One did it, a Finnish startup specialized in eco-social networking, launched its first product, an ecological backpack which is a tool to illustrate the volume of natural resources we consume. The ecological backpack calculations are based on the MIPS-method, which was developed in the early 1990’s in the Wuppertal Institute, Germany.

MIPS stands for Material Input Per Service Unit.  The method can be used to estimate the environmental burden caused by a product, service, or a lifestyle. The MIPS calculations are based on the entire life cycle from cradle to grave, which translates to extraction, production, use, waste/recycling.

Just from the One did it landing page it’s hard, if not impossible, to see that it’s actually a social network in the making. The ecological packback is the very first bit in what is planned to come an eco-platform.

To put the ecological packback into context, One did it tells us that:

The ecological footprint and backpack both measure the volume of natural resources used by the human community. However, the two methods have a different way of measuring resource use. The footprint takes into account the biologically productive land and sea area required by the human community to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste produced. The unit of measurement is the global hectare. The ecological backpack is used to measure resources used or transferred in the ecosystem in kilo- grams or tones.  The ecological backpack takes into account non-renewable resources in addition to renewable resources.

One did it co-operates with the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation and the Wuppertal Institute in Germany.

One did it Ltd is also part of the Finnish digital marketing agency Nitro Group. One did it closed their first financing round in the summer of 2008. Nitro Group is likely to be one of the main investors. In this economic climate it seems a challenge to get more investments in for a social network concept which does not have a clear revenue model in short to medium term. Yes, they could probably sell user data or advertise eco-friendly products, but that won’t support a staff of seven full-time employees, let alone make real money for the owners. The company also states that in the future it aims to be comprehensive, ecological lifestyle brand, which could mean having its own line of apparel and what not, but for the time being we’re just seeing an online tool.

The company does neither own any IPR rights to any measurement technology or scientific methods, since they use the MIPS. This was also brought up by the judges in the Mindtrek Startup Launchpad competition a while back, where the company was challenged to differentiate themselves from Yahoo! Green and the likes. To be perfectly honest, I still can’t see how One did it will differentiate itself from Yahoo Green!, which has already tons of stuff for eco-friendly visitors. Perhaps language versions for each country, but it’s still a long shot.

Regardless of the challenge in respect to the business model dilemma, the ecological backpack tool is fun to use. If nothing else you can see where you rank in respect the EU average. Perhaps a good place to start figuring out what those New Year promises will be for 2009 and to make my lifestyle a bit more eco-friendly.

BarCamp Baltics 2009 Gathering in Latvia in February

by Miikka Kukkosuo, December 30, 2008 — Leave a Comment

BarCamp Baltics 2009 will be held in Riga, Latvia, between 6th and 8th of February, 2009. That’s the place to be if you’re interested in Baltic and Russian ideas, views, and cooperation around mobile and web projects.

BarCamp is an international network of conferences organized around different themes, based on the idea that participants will generate the presentations and discussions for and in the events themselves. BarCamp Baltics brings together social networking and new media specialists, bloggers, podcasters, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, marketers, and mobile Internet professionals and enthusiasts.

The event will feature 5 to 6 simultaneous sessions, including presentations, workshops, messages and discussions, 30 minutes long each. Between 75 to 95 presentations in total will be held during a day. Participants can choose any sessions to attend and also the topics they want to present, and there will be presentations both in English and in Russian. Around 500 to 600 participants from the Baltic States and CIS, Central and Western Europe, and Americas are expected to be present.

BarCamp Baltics aims to to stimulate the development of new IT and media projects in Baltic states and CIS, and enhance networking and provide connections for international commercial and non-commercial joint projects. BarCamp Baltics 2008 gathered together more than 500 people from 23 countries, and was supported by the biggest media in Latvia.

BarCamp’s been arranged also in Helsinki, and there are a few other ones coming up: Odense in January and Århus in March, in Denmark, and in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May.

Eat.fi Shows Strong Traction in Visitors

by Antti Vilpponen, December 30, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Eat.fi, the Helsinki based restaurant review site, has shown strong traction in the last months, according to their blog. Although the figures aren’t that high compared to international web services, 10k uniques a week is relatively good – especialy if you look at the growth rate, they have doubled the uniques in a matter of 2 months.


Oindex.fi statistics for Eat.fi

The uniques have been increasing fairly steadily after they redesigned their site and made the service a lot more usable with new features. The biggest obstacles to overcome in my opinion is for them to create a truly scalable service that does not require them to manually insert all restaurants in each city. The service itself has also a lot of potential to grow in other terms for example, adding menus on to the site and enabling users to specifically rate individual foods – something not many restaurant review sites do.

Eat.fi has also attracted other kind of traction. Tina Aspiala, the founder of the company has taken Asmo Halinen of Apaja fame on board as an advisor. Asmo has also joined the ranks of Grey Area as an advisor.

Twitter Moving Towards Jaiku?

by Ville Vesterinen, December 29, 2008 — 7 Comments

The latest storm from the world of Nordic microblogging got me thinking a lot about Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed, the microblogging in general and the Open Stack that’s trying to open up the silos, not just in microblogging, but the social web in large. We are looking into reaching the point where, just as Jyri Engeström put it, “[n]o single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform”

Now Many have realized that Twitter, which was competing head on with Jaiku and has won that race for now, should allow the service to develop towards what Jaiku did right when it launched, namely enable conversations. I believe those two services are different and perhaps should remain so and just talk to each other via open standards such as XMPP or an XMPP equivalent. Therefore I am not advocating Twitter becoming more Jaiku-like. Twitter should have its own future trajectory. What I am very strongly advocating is for the heavy users of FriendFeed and Twitter to start using Jaiku, the one service that does what services and apps using Twitter API are increasingly trying to do. TweeTree being the most recent example of that. Do I have a vested intrested in this? You can bet on it! I strongly believe Jaiku is a better service to engage in meaningful conversations and I am in Jaiku, but many people I would like to converse with are not.

Below Chris Messina below outlines his vision on where he sees activity streams going. He notes that activity streams need a “[l]ocation and context attached to or as attributes of social objects that are being created” and not just a lonely tweet which is not connected to anything. As Chris mentions in the video below [8min 27 sec into it], this is where Jaiku started from. Now we just need to get Google to realize the value it has in Jaiku and let Jyri & Co. to develop Jaiku further by incorporating filtering (by actor, action, social object, place, time, etc.), fast feed fetching, opening it up for the world to use and develop and voilá. Compare this to the #hashtags, which is about the only thing you can use to put your Tweet into a relevant context. This is really nothing but a poor hack compared to what Jaiku already can do for the conversations.


Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

Since we are not yet living in a world where all the silos are broken and all the services can talk to each other, I think the Silicon Valley digerati should pull their heads from the California sand, see beyond their Valley bubble and give (yet again) Jaiku collectively a try to realize its value instead of complaining how the Twitter-cum-Jaiku attempts don’t work. Yes it’s closed, but the invitations are unlimited and I’m sure most of the microblogging heavy users already have an account. If not, I will personally send an invitation to anyone asking for one (you can email me at ville [at] arcticstartup.com). Twitter has the critical mass, but Jaiku still kicks its ass any day as a service to have meaningful conversations in. Since Twitter is not going to become Jaiku any time soon we all should give Jaiku another try. Struggling with two services is a drag, but things are changing fast, and once the users are there, Jaiku and Twitter can complement each other until the two services can openly talk to each other – or until a better option emerges.

Jaiku needs its critical mass and it needs to grow to become truly relevant to link people globally. I am advocating people to move there not only because I or some other people are there, but for the purposes of having conversations, it is a far better service than Twitter or FriendFeed. We should see and use the two services as the different services that they are, just as Eat.fi’s founder @Spongefile commented here:

Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.

Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that’s no way to communicate.

So how about it Scoble? While we wait for the silos to come down, shall I send you a Jaiku invite?

Spotify Enables Scrobbling, Makes iTunes Obsolete

by Antti Vilpponen, December 29, 2008 — 1 Comment

This is the best news coming from Sweden since Abba – Spotify has enabled scrobbling. Scrobbling means Spotify now supports integration to Last.fm. This is indeed very big news as Last.fm has a huge community of music lovers that have until lately been left out with using Spotify. I’m one of them and this move has made my iTunes usage totally obsolete.

You can link your Last.fm account to Spotify from Spotify's preferences. Just to make sure, close the program and launch it once more. You're set.
To enable scrobbling, go to Spotify’s preferences and add your last.fm details there. Just to make sure, close the program and launch it once more and you’re set.

Why is this such a big deal? There are at least two reasons. Firstly, Last.fm has a huge music community that love Last.fm and want their listened music to be added to the service to find new music in the future, which is the second reason. One of the benefits of Last.fm is the possibility find new music through your peers by matching your musical taste to theirs and for this you need a relatively extensive list of listened songs.

However, there lies a larger possibility here for Spotify. By allowing the usage of third party applications or plugins in conjunction with Spotify, they are creating a healthy developer community that will take the service to new levels. This is one of the reasons why Twitter has been so popular as developers have been able to make use of the service exactly in the way they have wanted to, creating more traction for Twitter itself – something all web companies are looking for.

Apply for MobileMonday Global Peer Awards 2009

by Miikka Kukkosuo, December 29, 2008 — Leave a Comment

As the new year soon starts, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain will only be a few weeks away. Similarly to last year, MobileMonday in Barcelona will be organized the same week of the congress, on February 16, 2009. Also as last year, the event will focus on MobileMonday Peer Awards finals, the largest mobile startup innovation competition on the planet as the tagline says.

It’s now time to register your startup to the competition to your local MobileMonday Chapter (the one in your city, or the nearest one). Hurry up, the registration closes December 31st, midnight your chapter’s local time!

Each MoMo chapter will select their nominee for the finals using their preferred method of choice (email voting, local event voting, founder’s voting, jury, etc.; check your local chapter for more details). An international jury will then select the Peer Awards winner from 20 finalists in Barcelona based on 3-minute pitches.

Each chapter will announce their nominee by January 16, 2009 midnight local time. Notice that if you want to be eligible for the finalist nomination, you must be willing to travel to the Peer Awards in Barcelona at your own expense.

As there are altogether 67 chapters (!) participating this year, there will be an international virtual jury pre-screening the nominees, and selecting the 20 finalists. MoMo is trying to make the selection as transparent and open to the industry as possible. They are thus accepting applications to the finalist-selecting jury from individuals, to select the finalists among all the chapter nominees by online vote during mid-January. The virtual jury members will not need to travel to Barcelona. If you’re interested to become part of the online jury email jury AT mobilepeerawards DOT com with a short bio, your LinkedIn profile, and personal blog and twitter name if you have one.

Merry Christmas from ArcticStartup!

by Antti Vilpponen, December 23, 2008 — 1 Comment

Even entrepreneurs need to rest every now and then. Christmas is probably one of those times that is well spent relaxing and socialising with family and friends – something not many of us get to do too much over the year. We’re going to slow down our blogging for the Christmas holidays and continue again on Monday 29th for a few days before the next holidays kick in.

If you haven’t had time to shop for a Christmas present just yet (or even if you have), consider investing some money into third world entrepreneurs through Kiva.org’s microloans. A steady job and income are perhaps the best methods to pull people out of poverty and what better way to do it, than to loan some money and enable entrepreneurship on a grass roots level. If you haven’t registered yet, do so now. All you need is 25 USD and a few minutes.

Image by CairoCarol (CC:BY)

ArcticIndex Growing Strong. Register Now!

by Ville Vesterinen, December 23, 2008 — Leave a Comment

We released ArcticIndex just two weeks ago and we have already nearly 80 registered startups and nearly 60 registered entrepreneurs in the index.

It’s easy and free to register, just as it’s easy and free to use the service.

We wanted to build the service because we strongly felt that the Nordic and Baltic startups deserve more visibility. I quote myself here:

We at ArcticStartup aim to encourage entrepreneurship and to help create a radically optimistic entrepreneurial culture here in the Nordics and Baltics, and thus have long wanted to bring more visibility to the market and most importantly give visibility to the many kick-ass startups we have here.

Now, we’re excited to announce that we’re are one step closer to our common goal by introducing ArcticIndex. It’s an early beta and we’re are adding features and improving it as we go so please be patient. There’s a road map full of features coming, but we wanted the community to be able to use it as soon as possible.

We are happy to say that we have received nothing but support and ‘thank yous’ from the startups and entrepreneurs all over the arctic region. Still, we hope to build the service a far and wide to give full benefit for the startups and entrepreneurs in the region and to give a stronger standing for the whole arctic startup scene in the global arena.

If you’re a startup or an entrepreneur and you’re not in the ArcticIndex yet, make sure your customers, media and peers can find by registering (here!) and getting a great start to 2009. Thanks!

Image by Paul Keller (CC:)

Santa Claus Iphone App

by Ville Vesterinen, December 23, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Since Christmas is coming we also wanted to tune in and bring something Christmasy to our readers on the eve of the holiday season and what can be more timely than Santa Claus Iphone app. A Finnish company, Iconia AE Ltd and Smart Media Factory, have released a Santa Claus ipone app as collaborative project.

The mobile publication consists of 25 articles and stories, a map of the Santa Claus -land, a variety of Christmas related activities and a Christmas calendar. It is only available in English this Christmas from the Apple App Store.

Smart Media Factory specialices in crossmedia products and developing shared platforms. Iconia AE Ltd is a Helsinki based company, which creates and produces creative interactive solutions for a variety of computer and mobile platforms.

The app will set you back 1.59€ in the app store.

Interview With Tõnu Runnel, Edicy (Invites)

by Antti Vilpponen, December 23, 2008 — 5 Comments

One more video from LeWeb for the Christmas holidays. We had a chat with Tõnu Runnel in LeWeb, just after his startup competition pitch. He is one of the founders of Edicy, an Estonian startup, creating a web service to more easily build and design websites. The demo Tõnu gave on stage made the product look extremely cool and easy to use. They have also nicely attracted traction online, so it’s not just us who think they have a shot at making it.

Tõnu has also given us invites to share with our readers so the first to ten to leave a comment on why Edicy could have a shot at making it or in contrast – why they won’t (with constructive criticism) will get a code in the e-mail on Sunday, the 28th of December.

Red Herring Global Top 100 Finalists Announced

by Ville Vesterinen, December 22, 2008 — 1 Comment

During the weekend Red Herring, a global media company, announced 200 finalists of their annual Global Top 100 technology companies competition. The winners, top 100 out of 200, will be announced in January 14-16, 2009.

There are a few Nordic companies listed that were also on Red Herring’s Top 100 European finalists this year, including Floobs, Muxlim and Aito Technologies. Some of the new comers to the global short list include Hammerkit and Ball-IT, which was listed also in 2007.

Congratulations to the finalists and watch out for the monkey business.

Are Web Conferences A Waste Of Time?

by Ville Vesterinen, December 22, 2008 — 3 Comments

There has been lively discussions of whether the many web conferences are really the most effective use of time for a startup. Similarly many people see the value in these conferences very differently, for example people from the United States tend to spend most if not all their time networking in the lobbies and hallways, at least more so than the Europeans are used to. We, the Europeans, on the other hand, tend to pay equal attention to the speakers at the stage.

At ArcticStartup we believe that meeting friends and strangers, as many as possible, is the best way to spend your time in these conferences. But that’s just us. Thus, we wanted to know what other startups think and decided to ask a group of Finnish startups, who travelled to the LeWeb with us, what they think. Here are some perspectives:

Continue reading »

RunToShop Closes Financing Round

by Antti Vilpponen, December 18, 2008 — 1 Comment

Taneli Tikka, the CEO of RunToShop, has just announced on his blog that they have closed a financing round with RunToShop. The investment round was lead by VeraVenture, the Finnish gov’t investment fund. Taneli writes that this is their largest round yet and together with VeraVenture, there were 8 business angels additionally in the investment round.

There is no disclosure on the sum invested, but since RunToShop is able to go through all of next year easily and be backed for the internationalisation of the company – it can be can be considered to be a relatively high one. Together with the announcement, Taneli tells that RunToShop is now hiring concept designers and developers to help them take the idea further.

Despite the economic downturn, this is a very welcome investment round to spark up the entrepreneurial scene here in the Nordics. Perfect proof of the fact that, just as Joi and Saul told earlier, even in difficult times venture capitalists and investors do business.

SoundCloud In LeWeb

by Antti Vilpponen, December 18, 2008 — Leave a Comment

We interviewed Eric Wahlforss in LeWeb Paris about their startup SoundCloud. It’s an interesting company and not your average music startup as they build tools for artists to share that music. SoundCloud has recently moved to Berlin from Sweden and the impact of that move is also covered in the video.

Check out the Cloudplayer here and follow the company in Twitter here.