The Nordic countries, and especially Finland, have been strong in graphical software development. This has partially been reflected in the relatively large and successful gaming industry. Another area where this expertise has now had positive network externalities is the animation and movie industry in the form of 3D. For those unfamiliar with 3D movies, Wikipedia defines the technology as the process of including the illusion of depth perception. There’s an interesting Finnish player in this area that has attracted quite a bit of international interest in the recent months.
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Pushing The Frontiers Of 3D Movies – Stereoscape
Imbera Ramping Up Production – NorthZone Led $15 Million Round
Chip-packaging company Imbera Electronics announced that it raised $15 million from NorthZone Ventures, Index Ventures and Conor Venture Partners. NorthZone led the round. Imbera is the developer of patented Integrated Module Board technology for 3-D semiconductor packaging
Previously Imbera had raised $2 million in a first institutional round and just under $1 million in seed money before that.
The newly raised money will go to kick start a new high-volume manufacturing operation in Sangsong-ri, South Korea, and to continue Imbera’s embedded technology evolution through its R&D activities located in Espoo, Finland.
According to VentureBeat Risto Touminen, Imbera’s chief technology officer, had worked on the technology as a student at the Helsinki University of Technology since 1999.
You can read more about Imbera’s chip packaging technology at VentureBeat here.
It’s good to see a Nordic VC’s Nordic VCs active, when the Venture Capital industry in Silicon Valley is coughing.
Unity Technologies Eases 3D Game Development for iPhone and Wii
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.
Tero Sarkkinen of Futuremark at MindTrek
I asked Tero Sarkkinen, the CEO of Futuremark, what the 11-year-old Finnish startup is all about while visiting at MindTrek, Finland.
Tero spoke to me about Futuremark’s work, which is centered on 3D graphics. He also shared his thoughts how the company went through the previous dot-com bubble and on the current gloomy economic situation and how it might resonate for the startups.
3D Technologies R&D Introduces 3D Markup Language for Web
3D Technologies R&D, an Estonian Tartu-based startup founded in 2006, is developing an ultralight XML-like standard for better showing interactive 3D and 2D content on the web than is possible with HTML. The cross-platform standard is called 3DMLW – Three Dimensional Markup Language for Web, which is licensed under GPL. The company also provides also an independent plug-in for web browsers to display 3DMLW.
The mission of the company is nothing less ambitious than to create de facto standard for displaying 3D-content on the web. The stated goals are 1) to offer at least as good 2-dimensional content and animation presentation as Macromedia Flash does; 2) to let users easily develop dynamic content and use 3DMLW in different content management systems and web portals; and 3) to support most common 3D-model formats, videos, music and animation.
The firm has completed beta version of the 3DMLW editor Quantum Hog, which is now available for download. With the editor one should be able to create 3D models and animations as easily as creating HTML documents.
3D Technologies R&D belives in the future more than 50 % of the web content will be shown in three dimensional format, as also virtual communities are getting more and more popular. In the near future 3D Technologies R&D is planning to introduce a possibility for other companies to make their virtual worlds even more interesting and interactive for their customers by using 3D content.
According to TigerPrises.com, Owner Kaspar Koov comments it will be easy to integrate the content with other systems like CMS’s, forum-scripts, news portals, and even CRM, and Business Intelligence tools or other applications. Users won’t have to know how to create 3D models, but can just take the existing models and use them on the web. The company has created a virtual office for Fujitsu Services Estonia. In essence that is a virtual intranet, connected with other company systems, allowing the users to walk around, communicate with colleagues, and see what tasks they are working on.
3D Technologies R&D is targeting the global market, seeing the US, Germany, and China as the three main regions of interest currently. 3D Technologies R&D is looking for venture capital from the US to make the expansion possible.
[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]
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