Mikael Jungner Joins Sofanatics Board
The former Finnish Broadcasting Corporation (YLE) CEO Mikael Jungner has joined the social television startup, Sofanatics' board. Sofanatics is a social television startup where in the first versions users can watch television with others via a web service and share the passion. At the moment Sofanatics is focused around sports. Mikael Jungner, has left YLE as of this month and is now looking forwards to a political career along with some private sector agreements, such as the Sofanatics board seat.
Sofanatics Developing A Social Viewing Service
Yesterday we reported that a big name team has come out with a new startup called Sofanatics. The team consists of Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman, a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto.
We have gathered some further information and believe Sofanatics is a service focusing on sociel viewing. Wikipedia describes a social viewing service as a practice revolving around the ability for multiple users to aggregate from multiple sources and view online videos together in a synchronized viewing experience. Typically the experience also involves some form of instant messaging or communication to facilitate discussion pertaining to the common viewing experience. This would fit our earlier prediction of 'something with video, football and doing all this is a social manner.'
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.
Asmo Halinen Officially Announcing The Move To One Did It
Asmo Halinen, one of the original three Apaja founders, officially announced that he's taking the over the CEO role at One Did It. One Did It is a Finnish startup specialized in eco-social networking.
Halinen has been busy after his announcement to leave Apaja. I still can't make out what One Did Its business model is (previous blog post here), but there probably is one based on the rather long line of investors they have, which include a digital marketing agency Nitro FX, a govenment investment vehicle Veraventure, Kari Rannila, Vesa Puttonen and Esko Reininpoika Alanko.
In addition to acting as a CEO of One Did It, Halinen has also joined to Board of Direcotors or as an Advisory Board member (he does not specify which) to Grey Area Labs and Eat.fi. Both of these startups, Great Area Labs and Eat.fi, are good choices for Halinen. The guys at Grey Area Labs just quit their jobs at Ericsson and decided to start working on their passion, alternative reality games with a serious twist. Similarly, Eat.fi is only getting better. Just recently the leading Finnish restaurant site added an option to filter for vegetarian and children friendly restaurants in Helsinki. Eat.fi is a prime example of a web service done right and for example Dopplr should put in on their site as the first thing you see when you add a trip to Helsinki.
If this would not be enough, Halinen has also joined the Board of Directors at BrainAlliance, A Finnish PHP software house, along with Taneli Tikka, who is also very active on the Board level in Finnish startups.
Finnish Social Gaming - Calm Before The Storm
I met Jussi Laakkonen the other day and asked what is he cooking at the moment. Jussi is a Finnish social gaming long timer and a fresh CEO of EveryPlay.
Here's a video I shot with my Nokia N95 and subsequently uploaded to JayCut for editing via my laptop (see more on JayCut here). In the video itself Jussi Laakkonen tells about his new social gaming startup, which is still in stealth mode. Jussi asked me to mention that Everyplay is looking into hiring a sitebuilder that can handle Ajax and PHP. You can send your resumes to corporate [at] everyplay.fi
Another long time Finnish gaming master mind Asmo Halinenha s also announced that he's moving on from Apaja, a company he founded, but has only let us know about a few board positions his moving into at this point, namely at Eat.fi and at Grey Area.
Social gaming startups like for example Playfish is a great exemple how fast the industry is developing and what kind of opportunities (Link In Finnish) there are if one knows what he is doing.
Social gaming, unlike many other industries, can actually benefit from the gloomy economic environment, as people many times move towards inpexsive games played in the browser from the expensive console games, and in extreme cases have much more time to play and tinker with all kinds of stuff online if they get laid off. As harsh as this may sound, this is largely how for example Typepad got started when Ben and Mena Trott started Six Apart after they got laid off.
Further, Jussi promised us that he will shed light into how the Finnish gaming industry has evolved from an active demo scene by writing a guest blog post on the topic. Another strong player that has come this route is Scred.
Eat.fi Shows Strong Traction in Visitors
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.
Apaja Founder Looking For New Challenges
Asmo Halinen, one of the original three Apaja founders, has just announced through Jaiku that he is looking for new challenges. In other words, he has (or will resign soon) from Apaja's services.
Apaja Online Entertainment is focused on creating community gaming websites under the name of Playray. The Finnish service is called Aapeli and is one of the most popular entertainment sites in Finland.
Apaja has recently gone through quite a bit of transition in its managerial positions. Inka Mero was the CEO for some time, before she left for maternity leave. Tiina Zilliacus took over after Inka as Apaja continued to expand its services abroad to Turkey and Hungary, to name a few countries. A year ago, 1.75 million euros were invested into Apaja by Martin Trigon Venture Partners.
We'll see if we can get a word from Asmo on the reasons behind the decision and what those new challenges might be for this online game & community services heavyweight.
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.
Eero Aarnio's design in Playforia
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.
