Nordic Game Program has had its ceremony in Malmö Sweden where it gave out three million Danish Kronor worth of funding. The program was started by the joint decision between the Icelanding, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish Ministries of Culture to promote Nordic games. The program was founded in 2006 and has plans to run until 2012. A total of 84 projects were submitted and only eight received funding.
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Nordic Game Program Passes Out Over 400k€ In Funding
Mindtrek Launchpad Finalists Chosen
This year’s Mindtrek Launchpad finalists have been chosen. The companies went through the detailed analysis of the pre-jury (disclosure: I was one of the pre-jury members voting for the finalists). The MindTrek Launchpad competition will award the most innovative Finnish digital media product, demo or concept – and the people behind it, who have the urge to make it big. Six finalists from the submitted The finalists, in alphabetical order, are:
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Get In The Know With ArcticIndex
The second half of 2009 is well under way as the late comers have finally returned from their summer holidays and the focus is once again put back into work. While the economies around the world are showing slight rebound from the nasty recession, things are still uncertain. This however doesn’t seem to be the case with startups – the uncertainty has not startups all that hard, compared to the bigger giants. One proof of this is that many startups are still recruiting.
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Everyplay Comes Out Of Stealth, Launches Facebook Social App Kamu World
Everyplay, a Finnish social gaming startup founded last year, has come out of stealth mode and released a product called Kamu World on Facebook. It is a “virtual hangout place” featuring edgy “Kamu” characters (‘kamu’ also means ‘a buddy’ in Finnish).
http://www.everyplay.com/news.html#bll
Kamu World in its current form is essentially a collection of visualized virtual chat rooms without that many game-like features. It has very polished look and feel already, though. When entering the world, players can create their own Kamu creature, and choose a location around the world (e.g. a game arcade in Tokyo). Kamus appear as small, desktop-size creatures, smaller than for example a drinking glass.
All actions of the player cumulate “Sparks”, experience points, which allow the player to level up and get more features unlocked. Furthermore, all activities of all players in the world also contribute to the status of the whole world, making it a happier and funnier place. Quite interesting feature further engaging the users is that you can print a PDF copy of your Kamu to make a 3D paper doll, then take pictures of your Kamu in real life settings, and gain Sparks from Everyplay in exchange for the pictures.
Jussi Laakkonen, CEO and founder of Everyplay, says Kamu World is a sheer test at the moment – something that getting out of makes the whole thing just more interesting for the firm. Everyplay will keep on building on Kamu World, though, but it is unforeseen how things evolve and they are open to learn as much as possible along the way. Everyplay is fully focused on fixing most pressing issues in the service and learning about usage patterns to build new features. More customization options, virtual items for decorating and games to play are on the way. At the moment there are no other plans, but it is clear also other products may be coming up later.
Jussi commented the firm has no plans to extend to other social networks for the time being. They want to see how well they are able to distribute the game in Facebook considering the competition by the already big startups.
Jussi regards Facebook as a very compelling distribution channel, not least since one can reach an audience of hundreds of million people globally – for free. Jussi isn’t worried, though, about Facebook starting to collect fees (or “rent”) for accessing and providing services for their members — he mentions that one cannot build a business model based on the distribution platform being completely free, and if a minor platform fee is going to kill you the business model has been defective in the first place.
http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/05/should-facebook-charge-app-developers-rent
Everyplay, a Finnish social gaming startup founded last year, has come out of stealth mode and released a product called Kamu World on Facebook. It is a “virtual hangout place” featuring edgy “Kamu” characters (‘kamu’ also means ’a buddy’ in Finnish).
Kamu World in its current form is essentially a collection of visualized virtual characters and chat rooms, with few game-like features. It has compelling and very polished look and feel already, though. When entering the world, players create their own Kamu creature, and choose a location around the world (e.g. a game arcade in Tokyo) to meet other Kamus in. Kamus appear as small, desktop-size creatures, smaller than for example a drinking glass. Continue reading »
Invest Tech Finland – From Wireless Power to Social Games
Espoo Otaniemi boomed of startups and investors when Invest Tech Finland was held for the first time on last Tuesday and Wednesday. There was a real mix of companies from all round consumer web, nano, medical and material tech.
We got some taste of new startups, more seasoned companies seeking growth and some familiar faces marching forward with their plans. There were quite a few interesting companies to write about, the full list can be found here – check these out. Note that most of companies presented at the event already had some prototypes, partnerships, customers or revenues. Here is some of my picks (not in any particular order):
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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.
Gaming Defies Down Turn With Venture Capital
Jussi Laakkonen, CEO of Everyplay, has done extensive research in terms of investments to the gaming industry in the recent years. We also covered Jussi’s previous findings in ArcticStartup close to two months ago when he reported that approximately 2 to 4 million USD are invested into the casual gaming market each week.
Jussi has compiled a nice 2 blog post analysis into the market with discoveries such as investments peaking in July 2008 to the amount of 71M USD in total to the industry. He has also added the MMORPG market to the analysis. It’s clear that the two largest segments in the gaming industry, receiving funding are the MMORPG and the casual gaming segments.
Some of the largest investments made were 9You’s 100M USD, 83M USD into Big Fish Games, 29M USD into Zynga Games and Gaia’s 11M USD financing rounds.
So with regards to my previous post on Betware from Iceland, I asked whether we should cover the gaming industry more, a clear answer from you was – yes, please. We’ll get more insight into this industry in the future as the market is one of the most attractive ones in many ways, not only investments, at this moment.
However, have a read at the full analysis into the investments by Jussi Laakkonen of Everyplay – Part 1 and Part 2.
Photo by A*A*R*O*N (CC:by-nc-sa)
Casual Games Market Hot – 2-4M USD Invested Per Week
Jussi Laakkonen of Everyplay has compiled a very extensive list of investments to casual gaming startups in the US and Europe.
Laakkonen has compiled the list from public resources such as VentureBeat, TechCrunch, GigaOm, etc. He admits that there are possibly a lot of investments missing as they based on PR, which naturally works best in the US.
From the Nordics and Baltics, in the list are investments to Apaja Online Entertainment and Sulake, so I’m guessing there are many more smaller seed investments made to smaller Nordic and Baltic companies which aren’t present in the list.
What’s your take – is the casual gaming market the hottest corner of the internet industry at the moment?
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