Arctic Startup

Kauppalehti, a Finnish business daily, reported yesterday that Sulake’s CEO, Timo Soininen, is planning to take the company public. According to Mr. Soininen the earlierst possible date for the listing would be sometime next year.

Soininen thinks Sulake starts to be big enough for an IPO. Soininen’s comments takes place after Sulake was valued 9th in Alley Insider valuation (at 25 times revenues) for digital startups. Read more on the story here.

Soinen added that Sulake is profitable and aims to a 20 percent increase in turnover this year. Last year’s  turnover was 43 million euro.

Despite the Alley Insider estimation Soininen himself refuses to comment on his company’s valuation.

Eero Aarnio, one of the most famous Finnish designers, has taken his work online to Playforia, the 3D virtual world created by Apaja. He created the timeless Ball Chair in 1963, which has been hugely popular around the world. Apaja, the company behind the casual gaming site, has built Playforia as part of their service portfolio to gather audience from the huge population living in online worlds. According to Asmo Halinen, one of the founders of the company, over 30% of the users in Playforia and Aapeli are over 30 year olds.

Apaja is venturing into the same direction as Sulake, who has done a lot of co-operation with 3rd party content suppliers in their Habbo Hotels. It’s definitely a feasible way of bringing in valuable content and creating that link between the virtual and real world that users normally crave for in some sense.

Disclosure: the author is a former employee of Apaja.

Tekes announced yesterday the opening of Playfinland.fi presenting Finnish companies to the world. Target groups are international media, potential partners and investors abroad — and anyone else interested. The site is produced and funded by Verso - Vertical Software Solutions program of Tekes.

Tekes highlights that in 2007 the amount of financing allocated to the Finnish game industry was thirty times more than the amount of similar funding granted generally in the EU last year. The Finnish game industry is known for many original innovations, as well as high quality products, including both games and related products like 3D graphics technology.

There has been a lot of activity in the M&A sector in the last few years as well, some examples being ATI buying mobile graphics technology company Bitboys, Nvidia acquiring 3D graphics specialist Hybrid Graphics, and a bunch of mobile gaming companies sold to foreign companies. Unfortunately, for the most part the Finnish firms have been on the selling side of the table, mostly attributed to lack of capital available for expansion on their own.

Those interested can also join Play Finland Facebook group, which has been created to connect both Finnish and international players in the field.

More on Playfinland.fi in the press release.

Is game development considered as a “real job” if it’s about developing serious games? Or has the growing game sector in Finland already proven to be business enough to be taken seriously? Either way, HappyWise, based in Oulu, Finland, is all out developing games to corporate training markets and public sector.

The objectives of the games range from introducing new products to education and process training. HappyWise claims games with educational content can be used to motivate learning in wide variety of fields, and in any any group. In essence games show the immediate causality of player’s actions, thus triggering learning. HappyWise is founded in 2006, and announces it’s current headcount to be 10 people. One of their newest games is Growwwings.net, a cross-curricular internet-based educational game teaching sustainable development.

The development of serious games in general is expected to boost in Finland. The horrors of “edutainment” are fading, and the new rise of games with objectives beyond entertaining is expected to break through in a few years. The major reason for this is that serious games development is finally being driven by gaming rather than teaching professionals. The game development gathers still together very versatile teams; for example HappyWise’s team includes computer scientists, game designers, content providers, graphic designers and business expertise, along with specific experts depending on the target field of different projects.

In addition to HappyWise, there’s a healthy, developing gaming industry chapter in Oulu with a bunch of new firms. Also Turku is catching the wave, with Turku Games Organisation founded just recently to amass efforts. IGDA Finland on the other hand has been active in Helsinki area already for quite some time. Looking forward to cover other interesting gaming startups later on..