Sofanatics - Sofa, Fanatics, So fanatic?
There's a new startup in town called Sofanatics. The company, based in Helsinki Finland, is in its early stages and has nothing but a simple splash screen on their website. Earlier today the team tweeted about this and thus broke the silence regarding the company - at least on the level that who's on board the startup. The team behind the startup is Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve co-founder managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman. Nyman is a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto.
Apaja Spins Off VirtuToy
Apaja, a Finnish Social Gaming company and the creator of Aapeli and Playray communities has launched a spinoff company by the name of VirtuToy. The news was reported by the Finnish Digitoday.
There are rumours circulating around the new company as to what it will be up to, but so far nothing has been confirmed. The CEO of the company, Ilpo Kuokkanen, is the former founder of Saunalahden Serveri, an ISP service that later went public at the end of the Finnish dotcom boom. Sources inside the company did not disclose any information, but they were told to be very busy at the moment. VirtuToy has a 2 man board at the moment and it consists of Ilpo Kuokkanen, the CEO and Ilkka Vesterinen, the Chairman of the Apaja board.
According to Kuokkanen, talks are in final stages with partners and financiers. Furthermore, he reveals that the service will be launched in September this year - not sure if fully, but partially at least.
The name VirtuToy can be rolled around with various concepts. One of the most obvious ones is a virtual toy - something of a fully digital tamagotchi.
Disclosure: I used to work with Apaja from 3/2006 to 10/2007.
Photo by Leo Reynolds (CC)
Finnish gaming companies come in large numbers
Asmo Halinen, Co-founder of Apaja, has compiled a listing of Finnish gaming companies into a rather comprehensive list. You can find the list here, and the original blog post about the project here (in Finnish).
Asmo started the list way back in 2005, but has updated it along the way, the latest update being from 16 July 2008. The list has 38 gaming companies altogether, a number which in itself amazes me. I'd be very interested about the ratio of 'other startups' vs. gaming startups in Finland, if anyone wants to compile such a ratio. And if that is not challenging enough I'd love to see the ratios from all the Nordic countries. I have yet to figure out why Finland has relatively such high numbers of gaming firms. Any ideas on this would be warmly welcomed.
Let us and Asmo know (via comments) if he's missing anybody from his list.
