The Game Industry In Flux
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.
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.
MoiPal To Implement New Virtual Goods- Store Widget
MoiPal, a Finland based social gaming virtual world by Ironstar Helsinki, has introduced widgets for music artists to sell MoiPal virtual goods to the virtual world users. MoiPal is not a localized virtual world like Habbo, which has started their community building from scratch in each new country. Instead MoiPal aims to create a common space where all nationalities mix and thus make the world seem more lively. MoiPal is also mainly intented to be played via mobile phones. According to MoiPal CEO, Joakim Achrén, focusing on mobile phones instead of the browser creates stickiness and users tend to come back much more often.
MoiPal has been working on virtual goods partnership all along 2008. These have mainly been with record labels and Finnish music artists, including Lovex, Hanoi Rocks and Lordi. What this means in practice is that the partnering artists have seen a MoiPal character creation widget appear on their website. If a MoiPal charater has been created through one of these websites, the character that has been created have been able to get virtual clothes and a look that resembles the one of the artist who's website is in question.
Through the partnership the artists get visibility in MoiPal virtual world when characters walk around in t-shirts and clothes that carry the artist logo and name. Artists can also perform a virtual concerts in 
MoiPal City, which is the center of the MoiPal virtual world. Currently Lordi, a Finnish heavy artist, is actively present in MoiPal and interacting with the users.
The latest development is selling virtual goods via a widget that sits on an artist website. MoiPal has confirmed its first deal that was done with EMI and EMI's up-and-coming new artist, Haloo Helsinki. With a Premium SMS message the users can buy their character a full blown Haloo Helsinki costume set. In addition to the 50/50 revenue share the record label can get visibility to their new acts.
MoiPal is currently in talks with all the major record labels for similar kind of deals. The virtual goods store -widget can also be placed on an artist MySpace profile page via OpenSocial that MySpace has implemented. This has also been experimented with two Finnish bands, namely Stigg Dogg and Notkea Rotta.
MoiPal has currently over 100,000 users. The service was launched in October 2007 and aim to hit over one million user mark by the end of 2009. The two biggest methods in building the virtual world for MoiPal are Facebook apps, of which they already have all together three, and getting visibility in artists' websites. Currently most of the new users come from South-East Asia. The service grows with approximately 600 new users a day.
If you feel a sudden urge to try out the service (here), by writing moilei or snoukka in the promotional code field ArcticStartup readers will get a free virtual t-shirt for their MoiPal character. Go play!
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.
Xiha Life gets a double peak
Xiha Life, a Finnish based multilingual social network, got mentioned yesterday by both: TechCrunch and Mashable (here and here respectively). Regardless of the quality of traffic that a company's web page receives when it gets TechCrunched or mentioned by any other major news service this gave Xiha Life a welcome publicity boost in the US market
The main reason of this sudden interest towards Xiha is its public launch in US, which took place yesterday.The second and we believe equally compelling reason is their new Music section, which will challenge other social networks going after the less known artists who are determined to climb to the mainstream from the long tail, thus competing with the likes of MySpace.
Xiha has more than a decent user base for an organically grown social network from the Nordics: 500,000 monthly users worldwide. We wish the best of luck to Jani and rest of the Xiha Life team in conquering the rest of the world's multilingual population.
