Avatars United is a Stockholm Sweden based service that enables you to connect to your in-game friends or avatars. The service resembles pretty much the basics of any other social network, except in this case you are using your in game person to connect to others.

There is very limited information about the company behind the service, Enemy Unknown. All the data on the internet, such as no wayback machine data available, little data from Compete.com and Alexa, suggest that the company and the service itself are relatively new.

There are no other growth figures available from the company, except for Compete.com giving them close to 6k unique visits in September 2008. Avatars United also reveals on their developer page that they are looking to create an application platform to enable third party apps on their site.

Interesting concept, which brings about a few questions to my mind. First of all, if you are an active gamer that would take advantage of such a site as Avatars United, you probably play lots of different games. This of course brings in the difficulty of keeping all your avatars up-to-date on the site if you have to log in with each of them as a single user. Secondly, some game houses have also seen the urge to create a similar service - such as Warcraft Social by Blizzard.

Lots of potential for Avatars United, if they manage to bring together the real value of hosting all your avatars in one place. There is a lot of potential in this genre despite the tought competition. Glad to see some initiative being taken to grasp that opportunity.

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.

Here’s the first startup of a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.

Zero Point Software (Denmark) - Zero Point Software is a developer of intellectual properties in the video game space and their offering was two fold:

1. They were looking funding for the game they were developing, namely the Intersteallar Marines.
2. They were also ’selling’ Real Time Voice Porting to the VCs present. Real Time Voice Porting is a technology they had developed specifically for games.

Interstellar Marines is a AAA science fiction First Person Shooter video game aimed at the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms. The game is positioned in a highly competitive but also equally profitable segment. According to the guys behind Zero Point Software PC and console sales passed $30 billion dollars in 2007, of which shooter games accounted for approximately 10 percent.

Real Time Voice Porting for it’s part is a patent pending technology. It makes the gaming experience that much closer to what it would be in real life. For example if you talk to other users in a virtual bathroom while playing the game, you will experience how the reverberation affects the sound of your voice. In a similar fashion, shout your lungs out in a virtual valley and you will hear the echo of your voice.

In addition to the Interstellar Marines game itself and the patent pending technology Zero Point Software wants to rethink the game distribution model: the company aims to sell Interstellar Marines directly to the consumers without the need for a publishing deal. Whereas now a consumer pays about 75euro a game, the company wants to push this all the way down to 30euro a game.

The company also aims to build a social network around the game. It hopes this will reduce the investment risk by creating proof of market, ensure great quality through large scale focus testing and generate early streams of revenue. It aims to do this by letting the users play bits of the game along the way its developed, thus trying to get the gamers hooked and come back for more while at the same time creating a buzzing viral word-of-mouth.

The founders also emphasized that the game needs to be easier to access than pirated games, which would mean a user could play first 30 minutes for free and only after that she would have to pay if still interested.

The game trailer looks as good as any, even though it’s a long way from blockbusters such as Halo3. Similarly, I have no doubt that the patent pending technology can be a success. What I doubt though is whether you can bypass the publishing houses as Zero Point Software is planning to and still reach a wide enough audience for the game to take serious market traction. Whatever you think about the big publishing houses, they still play a critical part in the marketing of the games and thus creating the awareness among the bigger gaming public. You’d need to have a hell of a game if you plan to be the next Halo3 (or a bigger hit) just with a viral word-of-mouth. That said, the startup is not just talk and no action -The Interstellar Marines trailer has already passed two million downloads and gotten an average user rating of 9.2 on GameTrailers.com. Nice going!

Many of the facts and figures are from the good people at Nordic Venture Forum.

Trust Solutions is Swedish startup developing a mobile skill-based gaming service GameJane, which was launched in July.

The service as such is free, but users have to bet credits based on real money in order to play against others. The bet can be set freely along some limits, and the winner will collect the pot, less Trust Solutions’ fee of 10% in normal games or 25% in tournaments. Users can acquire credits by premium SMS or with a credit card on the website. The trick of skill-based gaming is that all games are based on skill rather than luck and played against real persons so it’s not gambling by definition.

The service is currently only available in Sweden. Users can download the game client from the GameJane page, and register to the service via the client. The client includes a lobby system for checking your account status, selecting the games you want to play, finding people to play, practicing games, and checking leader boards. GameJane currently offers 16 rather simple yet classic games (clones of Pac-Man, Scorched Earth, and Tetris and so on), with more coming up. You can play against a friend or pick a random opponent.

Interesting twist is that as all the games are played against another player in real time, your playing may also affect the other’s progress depending on the game, so there is also some head-to-head interaction. Also a neat feature in the service is that you can see actual replays of played matches on the web page. The service uses open source technology Swimmer, and a thin Java client, which pulls most of the functionality and graphics from the server.

There doesn’t seem to be that many users yet, but on the other hand the service is still in its early days. Looks very promising, though, all the basic elements needed for this kind of a service seem to be there already. Once again the success probably boils down to discovery and enabling solid micro-transactions in different countries, issues which are not trivial at all on mobile. It feels GameJane might have more leverage potential as white-label solution targeted to operators, which might allow for wider and faster distribution. As of now there’s, however, no indication of what kind of go-to-market strategy Trust Solutions will use.

Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, offers Finnish companies possibility to take part in the UCLA Global Access Program once again this year. In the program MBA students of UCLA will make an international business plan for the companies as their final thesis, focusing on analysis and action plan for entering specific international markets. The program was ranked last year as the best of its kind in the US, and the bar for both participating companies and students is high. There have been yearly around 10 Finnish companies participating in GAP, including e.g. one of the fastest grown firms Openbit and Cidercone.

Eurostars is an European funding and support program specifically dedicated to creating competitive SMEs that will be leaders in their own sector. The program tries to ignite international collaborative research and innovation projects by easing access to support and funding for growth companies. The program is initiated by EUREKA, pan-European intergovernmental network founded to enhance competitiveness of European businesses. Eurostars offers 400 million euros of R&D funding to SME companies over a six year period. Tekes funds the Finnish participants with 5M euros per year. The next deadline for electronic submission of applications is November 21st 2008. See instructions from Tekes.

Gaming and interactive media companies can also apply for funding of 10,000-100,000 euros for producing product demos and prototypes in the Media 2007 program. The program is aimed at companies developing on and off-line interactive works. Eligible are interactive works for the computer, internet, mobile phone, games console (including handheld), and digital television, that present a substantial degree interactivity, narrative, and innovation. Companies that submit an application must have completed a previous interactive work, or an animation of at least 24 minutes, and prove that the work has been commercially distributed between January 1st 2006 and the date of submission of their application. The next deadline for applying is November 17th.