Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.
The Game Industry In Flux
Sulake Fires 28 And Signals Plans For Facebook
Back in October we wrote about the negotiations Sulake was having with its employees about reducing the work force. The plan back then was to reduce the workforce by 20%, which would have meant something along the lines of 40 people. They ended up sacking 28 people, to cut costs, and thus stayed well below the initial plan of 20%. Juhani Lassila, their Communication Exec stated in the Finnish M&M article that the current restructuring and cuts have dramatically improved their profitability.
While 28 people were fired, I’ve heard from close sources that others have left the company of their own will and the environment isn’t all that lively inside the company. This of course is completely natural when a startup that has grown to a multinational gaming house has its first real employee negotiations and ends up cutting its workforce by this much.
Continue reading »
MySites And Dazzboard Team Up
Two Finnish startups, MySites (see our previous story here) and Dazzboard (see our previous story here) announced recently that they will partner up: MySites which has completely rebranded itself as ’social cloud storage’ is now offering Dazzboard users (as well as everybody else) unlimited amount of data storage for free.
We talked to both, MySites and Dazzboard CEOs, to get to the bottom of what is happening with the services and what the co-operation is all about.
MySites, for its part, is going head on againts services like Dropbox or even Mobile.me, which are cloud storage services primarily for consumer use. Ramine Darabiha, MySites CEO, emphasized that “MySites is going for the social angle. Not just a file service, but the best way to share files while you’re on Facebook and on Twitter.” Darabiha adds that “MySites is aiming to be the most Facebook friendly cloud storage service by integrating with many Facebook features such as friends and commenting to name a few”.
EmotiCards – Your Best Pictures As Postcards Via Facebook
Swedish startup EmotiCards is one of the many projects that saw its daylight during the 24 Hour Business Camp earlier this year. Today, six months later, Emoticards have seven employees and have just launched in beta on the Swedish market. The Company is a self-funded joint venture project between Spontu, Pixell Productions and KST Info Services. The idea of offering to send real, printed postcards using ones own pictures isn’t a unique one, but EmotiCards are trying to differenciate their service.
Environmental Approach With Premium And Free Cards
Apart from the obvious efforts to try to keep the interface very simple with few steps and easy payment, EmotiCards are printed on FSC-certified paper. Printing itself is as far as possible done locally close to the recipients thanks to the Xerox Premier Partner Network, shrinking delivery times and the need for air mail.
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 »
ArcticStartup Visitor Traffic Statistics
Many people come to asking about our readership, where our readers come from and how fast we’re growing as a blog. These conversation have many times spurred very interesting conversations and made me analyze the value we provide much more closely as I would’ve otherwise done. I’m always thankful for all the comments and questions, since they make us think about how to build the blog into a more valuable destionation to our readers to visit and what they are most interested in reading.
The other days when I was reading a blog post by an American VC, Fred Wilson, who has probably the most read VC blog in the world, I realized that I have never told you directly those figures, even though the very conversations spurred by the numbers have been so valuable to us. So here goes.
We get little over 10 000 unique visitors a month and about 30 000 page views (and we very rarely cut the blog post so that you need to click to ‘Read more’ to see the rest of the story as for example TechCrunch does, since this effectively double’s the page views as the site loads again. A nice trick to fool the advertisers) . RSS subscribers we have about 600. All of this traffic is originating from no less than 130 countries. Yes, the growth has been very rapid as we are just little over one year old. But where it gets interesting is when we go beyond the pure readership.
Amazingly, we get a lot of the traffic from Facebook. I have pulled a feed from the blog to my Twitter account, which I have in turn plugged-in my Facebook status update, effectively cross- posting ArcticStartup blog updates to the services I use the most and where most of my social graph resides. Before I had my personal Twitter feed pulled to Facebook and all the @messages made little sense to my Facebook friends, I just recently decided to pull the ArcticStartup blog specific Twitter feed there, but for some reason it’s not working very well. Antti, Miikka and Karri all seem to import AS blog posts in different way to Facebook. I believe Miikka imports the blog post as notes, whereas Antti and Karri occasionally post them manually. I might be wrong here though.
Equally interesting is the traffic coming from Twitter. This traffic has and is growing fast as the Nordic and Baltic countries are familiarising themselves with the new micromessaging communication tool. I’m quite certain we’re about the see a similar boom in Twitter adoptation as we saw with Facebook which didn’t leave anyone cold. That said, It might take longer than it took for Facebook to swipe across the Nordic and Baltic countires. This is because it is not as easy to see the value in Twitter as it is in Facebook. Facebook most people got almost instantly and started visiting the site franticly already after the first week. With Twitter it takes much longer time which can mean from several weeks to months depending on how many people you start following. I also believe it’s not only in how many people you follow, it just takes time to build the habit of going back to the page (or client) and see the value in jumping on and off the funny stream of links and info bits. And some people might not ever get there. Still, I think it’s going to grow fast and we’re about the feel that also here in the arctics. It’s going to be the most talked about the service of 2009 and it’s going to be felt in every company and school.
Even more interesting the the traffic sources are the list of countries where the traffic is coming from. I find it nothing short of amazing that we receive traffic on average from 130 countries. Needless to say our readership is truly global. The top 10 consists of the usuals suspects of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, The United States and UK, but what more interesting ones are India and The Netherlands. This is a clear measure of the activity around the technology startups in those countries.
photo by “abnelphoto.com”
Nokia Launches Ovi (App) Store
Nokia has just announced at Mobile World Congress that the company will launch its own app store called Ovi Store, as was rumored. It was expected that Nokia places this service under its global Internet services brand Ovi.
But it will not be just an “app” store – Ovi Store will serve ringtones, wallpapers, videos, podcasts, applications and games in various languages like Java, Flash lite, widgets. The Ovi Store will thus replace Nokia’s previous services like Download!, Mosh, and Nokia Software Market, thus greatly unifying and simplifying the consumer content offering of Nokia. Interestingly, Ovi Store features social discovery, meaning that users will be recommended and promoted content which is used by their social network. Also location aware featuring will be supported by Nokia. The social features will be supported apparently by at least Facebook and MySpace, who both give a statement in Nokia’s press release.
Developers are offered 70 % of the revenue share, similarly Apple App Store. However, the net revenue will hugely depend whether the consumers use credit card or operator billing – they will have the option to choose the method. According to Nokia’s experience on N-Gage billing, vast majority of the consumers select operator billing when given the choice. It is unsure whether it would be possible to offer slightly lower price for credit card purchases to encourage this option – it is unlikely, though, given Nokia needs the approval the operators to include the store in the operator phone variants.
I have not been able to try out the actual user experience yet, but if Nokia has taken note from their cumulated learnings with previous services and Apple, this could be a major boost to the company’s content business and the S40 and S60 software ecosystem. After all, S60 has been, and still is, the platform of choice for many application developers due to the sheer handset volumes in the market. In the gaming market Nokia has a tough task in competing with iPhone, though.
In the beginning, only selected content providers and publishers are allowed to publish in the store, but Nokia will gradually open up the support to all developers. Developers can register for the Ovi Store at publish.ovi.com.
Gemilo Launches Reign Of Elements
Gemilo, a Finnish social media startup, has launched a Facebook application (or a game to be more precise) called Reign of Elements. The game was launched on 24th of October and in 4 days accumulated around 2200 members.
Gemilo activated 10 players of another game and gave them tools to create objects, weaponry, areas, enemies, etc. When the game launched, the crowdsourced designers had created an entire game on the platform that Gemilo provided. Furthermore, there is no common way to play the game as the designers and players themselves update a wiki where information on the game is shared.
The game seems to work pretty nicely and is a nicer form of text based RPG. There are small interesting details that add charm to the game, such as the slowly increasing stamina if you stay put. It will be interesting to see how the game takes off with the new Facebook design as I’m guessing the application usage in general has slowed down somewhat due to less visibility.
The European Landscape For Startups
Occasionally we intentionally divert from our primary focus on reviewing and reporting on internet and mobile software startups and growth entrepreneurship in and from the Nordic and Baltic countries to examine the European, the Baltic and the Nordic landscape for the entrepreneurs. Here’s another take on the issue.
Dirk Van Quaquebeke, the founder of Tailor Nation (Facebook app here), talked to me about his experiences on running a startup while working at the same time in Deutsche Bank, where to set up your startup and whether London is the startup hub you should go to as an entrepreneur.
When I asked what would he do if given the chance to do a startup anywhere, Dirk said 1) do an MBA in IIM in India (given one is a business guy). 2) While at it build a team around you since you get access to the great talent pool while in India. 3) Given there’s three founders, one stays offshore production center at India 4) pay people well & even incentivize some through equity 5) build a sales force through the founders located onshore like London (given its a product that needs a sales force).
Dirk emphasized that London is mainly a PR center where its rather expensive to live (something I can assure!), thus living in somewhere else like Copenhagen or Berlin might be equally good or even better option. He also pointed out that you can do development across the time zones, but if you can avoid it do so because you will be much more efficient.
I will disagree with Dirk especially on the MBA bit -if you do an MBA you will most likely rationalize yourself out of all the big ideas and dreams you had, and even if you can stick to your dreams the socialization effect among the MBA students will lure you to the nice (yet bored out of your mind) life at McKinsey. Naturally, there are exceptions for example if you have already started a couple of startups and you like to know a bit more about say finance. In the latter case, an MBA might be a good option to meet other like minded people in a place like Stanford and maybe even learn a bit. But as a rule of thump, avoid MBA schools!
What comes to the location, I believe one should build strong ties to the Silicon Valley (something Jyri Engeström, the Jaiku co-fouder, also reiterated) as it can significantly cut the time to market which might make a big difference from the time the window opens to the point where a competitor has already a critical mass and beyond your reach. That said, I still believe one should stick to the community s/he knows be it Copenhagen, London or Helsinki, since culture and support mechanisms like your family and friends make a big difference and if that is not a big enough reason you might loose not only time but also your money while trying to relocate and adjust.
Online Video Editing And Exporting By JayCut
JayCut, founded in 2007, is a Swedish online video editing startup offering free and simple video editing service.
You can upload unlimited amount of videos and photos in a wide variety of file formats to JayCut’s service, and then combine, mix, or trim different clips into one, and add captions and music. You can share the photos, raw video or the finished mixes with friends either using their service, downloading the file to your own computer, iPod, or other device, or sending the files to MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, or your blog. Public videos can also be rated and commented on on their web page. Downloading a file only seems to work in WMV format, and seems to sometimes require some waiting time to get converted before the download can be made. The online service might also be suitable for “open source” film projects like Stray Cinema where people share, re-edit, and mix the raw film footage.
According to some rumors the company has angel financing from London based investors. The business model could be based on including ads in the exported videos, which isn’t probably the best alternative, though. Interestingly the company has roots in student entrepreneurship, as they mention nearly all of the founders have been involved in the entrepreneurship association Excitera at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.
Fortumo Enables Easy Creating of SMS-Based Services
Fortumo is an Estonian mobile service startup. The company advertises you can start earning revenue with SMS services in just 5 minutes, without any technical skills. They offer a simple way of creating different mobile services without startup or monthly fees.
The basic service version allows for different models like selling information via SMS, creating SMS-based text-to-win campaigns, or SMS-based chat boxes or advertisement columns to web pages. You can set the end user price and SMS keyword for your service yourself. In case you know your stuff and have a place to host your service, with a little coding you hook up to their APIs, create practically any kind of service you want, and get better revenue share. One of Fortumo’s client is MTV Estonia, who uses SMS services in the programs and webpage e.g. to choose songs or win tickets in competitions.
Fortumo also has a couple of trial services: other enables pay-per-view video business for your YouTube videos, and the other one allows you to set up SMS chat board on your Facebook profile. While the services might not make too much commercial sense, they do give a good example of what kind of options you have with Fortumo.
Fortumo takes commission of the revenues earned by all the services created using their service. Fortumo takes 2-3% of the end-user price depending on country, type of service and volume. (I have to love the way they frame it, though, as after tax and operator share that would be more like between 6-10% of the net revenue.) In essence, the customer payout rates range from 30-60% of the end user price price after the tax, depending on the country and service type.
Fortumo currently supports billing in the Nordic countries and Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and, interestingly, China (China Mobile and China Unicom). They mention in their blog two new countries in the Balkan Peninsula will be added soon, while continuing expanding in Europe, Asia and to North America. The biggest challenge for Fortumo most likely is that the mobile billing channels are notoriously hard and slow to establish (if trying to go direct).
Zipipop looking for international markets
Zipipop (see our previous coverage) launched recently an English version of their “Mennäänkö yhdelle?” application in Facebook, now called “Going for one?“. It’s an application designed to make it easier to get your friends in the same place for a drink. Helene Auramo, CEO of Zipipop, provided us a bit more insight into the company’s plans.
Helene comments it was clear from the beginning that if the application would fare well in Finland, they would produce an English version. The Finnish user interface has done the trick in getting the application to spread around, and it seemed right now was a good time to make the international debut.
Helene reveales Zipipop has actually used the Going for One? application as a demo for a bigger “Event Organizer”, to learn about users’ wishes and behavior. They were especially interested in learning how spontaneous small event organizing works with social media.
Then the obvious follow-up question, where’s the money? Helene comments Zipipop is currently developing “creative advertising models” supporting the usability of the applications and providing thus added value for the users, as opposed to banner advertising. In addition Zipipop continues to make Facebook applications for other companies. Helene confirms Zipipop is profitable already, so seems they have been able to keep costs under control so far.
In the future Zipipop will be expanding into mobile. Going for One application is already usable on mobile, and according to Helene the main focus of development will be seen on that front. She also flashes iPhone as one of the target platforms, and the company is also looking into Open Social.
While the Facebook/social network sector can be a tough place to do business in, it’s good to see brave activity there (and there are some good examples also). These days it seems everyone’s up to creating different advertising models, though, but I hope Zipipop finds the correct mix. I also heard through the grapevine Zipipop has something to do with a Finnish technology consulting firm, who is among other things specialized ramping up startups and acquiring funding…maybe there’s something coming up?
Arch Red Oy
Lumi Group Oy
iasy
