Dodreams Oy, a Finnish MMO-gaming company, has received a major investment from some of the top Finnish investors working with early stage companies. Dodreams offers portal and media companies tournament system software and services to combine MMO gaming with mass media. They recently worked with MTV3, the largest commercial television channel in Finland, to launch and host the Maailmannopeinkansa.fi -game (translates to world’s fastest people). The amount of the investment was not disclosed, but the investors are Veraventure Oy, Risto Siilasmaa (F-Secure founder), Optiomi Invest Oy and the private investor Klaus Berner. The amount and status of the investors in the Finnish ecosystem puts the investment, with my educated guess, roughly in the area of 500 000 – 1 000 000 €.
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Dodreams Receives A Major Investment From Top Finnish Investors
Remedy Entertainment Sheds Some Light On Alan Wake
Remedy Entertainment, a Finnish gaming company, has revealed some more information regarding their newest game Alan Wake, which has a planned release date in the Spring 2010. For those unfamiliar with Remedy Entertainment, they are the developers of Max Payne the first person shooter based in the city of New York. The game was an immense success by all means and they later sold the rights to the game for $10 million US to Take-Two Interactive as well as close to million shares of stock.
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Voddler Signs Deals With Hollywood Studios
The Swedish video-on-demand service Voddler, has just announced a number of agreements with different Hollywood studios to distribute their content. In short, Voddler uses an open source XBMC media centre solution to distribute its content, so the user needs a set-top box to be eligible to receive Voddler’s offering. This could be said to be one of the largest agreements in the space of video for a Nordic company.
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Powerkiss Goes From Wireless Charging To A Service Platform (Video)
We all know Powerkiss from before, but to be honest you can get only so excited about wireless mobile phone charging.
But Powerkiss is not really what it looks like on the surface. One could easily think their core offering is wireless charging. Think again. Increasingly in the future it will be centered around Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled service platform which acts as a glue between different consumer services. Think location based advertising, where the location has been pinned down to the level of a restaurant table, or really selling any other service that is tied to a location. The variations are endless.
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Flowdock Combines Yammer And Google Wave (Video)
A Finnish startup Flowdock is coming out with a new real-time collaboration tool Flowdock. On the face of it, it looks like the company has combined Yammer and Google Wave into a one service which currently runs in the browser.
Flowdock has been developed by the same founders that are behind Nodeta, a software developing consultancy that also offers hosting services. Now they are building a new independent product and have assembled an own team to make it happen. They are considering spinning the company into its own entity, but at least for the moment its living under Nodeta’s legal entity.
The idea for the product was born out of a need that the founders had when they did not find a good product to log hours for the client projects they did. As with most products, what came out is something completely different as the idea evolved.
ArcticEvening Helsinki, Successful Night With Successful Companies
Thank you everyone who made it to ArcticEvening Helsinki last night. The evening was a great success and a special thank you for that goes out to the panelists David O’Weger who covered for Ari-Pekka Salovaara from Severa, Michael Falck from Relex as well as Mikko Kaarela from Technopolis Ventures as well as our sponsors for making the event possible in the first place.
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Sponsored: Zokem – Your Life. Share it. Automatically.
Note: this is our periodical blog sponsor message.
Zokem is a mobile communications and lifecasting startup that enables users to automatically share their daily activities to their friends’ mobile phones, to the Internet and to social networking services, such as Facebook and MySpace.
Neo Technology Secures Seed Funding To Lead NoSQL Movement
I probably shouldn’t be this ecxited, but I am. Swedish Neo Technology, developer of Neo4j, an open source graph database, has secured $2.5 million in seed funding to boost Neo4j’s presence in the emerging NonSQL movement market space.
I just received a happy call from Emil Eifrem, CEO Neo Technology, at the moment in US to talk about semantic web, NonSQL movement and the next step in Neo Technology’s life.
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Ideal Conditions To Build A High Growth Startup Like Heyzap: Y Combinator & San Francisco?
There’s been a lot of talk lately about all kinds of accelerators and Y Combinator like set-ups in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Most recently Aalto Entrepreneurship Society announced that they are in the process of building their own ‘Y Combinator’, although this would be directed only to Aalto University, which really makes it a university incubator.
Just as much there has been discussion on whether Seedcamp model or Y Combinator like model is the better one (Y Combinator leading the pack at the moment), the respective differences and most importantly whether you need to be a Paul Graham to make it work. And even the workings of Y Combinator model has been under strong scrutiny by those who don’t believe before they see the first major exit.
Spotify CTO Is Leaving, Door Won’t Hit Him On The Way Out
Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn tweeted about leaving the company this morning, in a surprise move that might signal the direction of things at the Stockholm (er, Luxembourg) based startup.
When a CTO leaves a company as well regarded as Spotify, there can only be two possible explanations. The first is that he got poached by a bigger company with promises of more technical resources, and, obviously, straight cash. The second possibility is that the CTO, driven by the desire to solve complex problems, feels the technical challenges have been exhausted at his current company, and may even “trade down” to an earlier stage startup to regain the thrill of crunching that is the bulk of work at infant tech firms. What is the case here with Spotify? Well, it should already be clear – if you’ve been paying attention.
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Bambuser Picks New CEO From MySpace Nordic
Things are cooking in the Bambuser kitchen. The Swedish live video streaming service has pointed out Hans Eriksson, CEO MySpace Nordic, to take over CEO tourch from Jonas Vig, co-founder and now previous CEO Bambuser.
As I met Måns Adler, founder of Bambuser, this weekend, he was very glad and excited about having Hans onboard, as well as where Bambuser is heading right now. Startups go through different stages and the time has now come to Bambuser to move on to acceleration stage where adding experience to team is a quite natural.
CCP Games – Iceland’s Pride
During my visit to Iceland a few weeks ago, I had the chance to visit one of the greatest “startups” in a while – CCP Games. CCP Games has its offices in the Silicon Docks area of Reykjavik. While the other startups are doing the proper bootstrapping and sharing offices next door, CCP Games has grown to cover three stories employing some 450 people at the moment. Those who aren’t that familiar with CCP Games, they are the developer of Eve Online one of the most popular MMORPGs out there. In short, there are over 300 000 registered players on Eve Online and almost everyone is paying about 15 USD a month for the membership (some have 14-day trial accounts). This in turn sky rockets their revenue well past 50 000 000 USD annually.
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BioWaz – Energy From Waste
We told you already about wind, solar and tidal-energy technologies, so now its time to go down and get dirty. Biowaz from Norway offers a biogas plant, and their target customers are farms and agricultural businesses. That might seem awfully far away from being Cleantech, though if you know that over 49% of European Union subsidies go into the agricultural sector – that were close to EUR 50 billion in 2006 – you might realize that there is a huge market.
The concept is as easy as it is beautiful: Farms, especially livestock farms, produce huge amounts of organic waste and manure. The manure and organic waste are usually collected in storage tanks, and might be used as class B fertilizers on fields. However, this “garbage” has more potential. It can, through the process of anaerobic digestion, be transformed into biogas, which consists of approximately 60% methane gas. The methane gas can be used to produce heat and electricity, or as fuel in cars. Continue reading »
Nokia Looking To Unload Dopplr?
TechCrunch has heard that Nokia is looking to sell off Dopplr, a company they acquired less than a month ago. If this is indeed true, I wouldn’t want to be a Nokia shareholder. In essence, Nokia paid for recruiting Marko Ahtisaari, Dopplr CEO (former Nokia) as well as Matt Biddulph, Dopplr CTO. The reason I wouldn’t want to be a shareholder is that paying for these kind of recruitment fees isn’t the smartest path down the road to gather a winning team of professionals.
We also heard that there isn’t a lot of synergies regarding the product roadmaps of Ovi and Dopplr, as they were mainly after the team behind Dopplr. This again raises an interesting point, would you as an entrepreneur sell your company at any cost and whatever the future may look like for your beloved one?
ThirdPresence Has A Solution For Mobile Media Distribution
ThirdPresence, a product being created by the Finnish Ubipart, is a SaaS platform solution for distributing media on mobile phones. They were also present in the Nordic Venture Forum earlier this week and they did well, they received the best presentation award that will allow them to present at the European Venture Summit in Dusseldorf. What makes ThirdPresence an interesting service is that they’ve managed to really clearly simplify their offering and tackle one thing very well – the technology to distribute media to mobile devices.
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Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
