Sulake CEO LaFontaine Shares More About Third Party Games On Habbo Hotel
After news of layoffs at Sulake, the Finnish developer of the Habbo Hotel social community for teens, we spoke to CEO Paul LaFontaine, who told us that Habbo Hotel will further evolve into a platform on which third parties will be able to develop additional services. GamesIndustry International recently got up with Paul LaFontaine, where they discussed Habbo's market share and future plans with the service. The article is a good read if you're interested in the service, but below is a rundown of their stated plans.
46elks Connect Apps To Voice And SMS
Making your app interact with voice and SMS often requires learning new software and buying hardware. 46elks is a Swedish start-up that offers a cloud-based platform that easily connects apps with telephony technologies. Founded in January this year, they have just released second alpha version of their product. The newest addition to the release enables apps to interact with phone calls as well as send and receive text messages. Developers can try it out for free with an invite, which you can get by registering on their website. Priority is given to developer communities from Europe to get feedback from their early users.
SoundCloud Launches App Gallery, Take Notes
Music and audio sharing service for artists, SoundCloud, today announced the launch of their App Gallery, "a nice home for all the apps using the SoundCloud API." In the process they are demonstrating how startups can develop thriving application ecosystems without the "get rich quick" motivation that drives many developers to create for that other app store.
We've all heard it before, at events, camps, or pitching sessions - to be really successful in the consumer web you have to be a platform. But how do startups, even a funded startup with a rapidly growing user base convince a critical mass of developers to spend their precious time coding for them? In particular, why does a handful of Swedish guys who moved their company to Berlin just because the parties are better, think they can build a dynamic App Gallery?
New Job Openings
We have been slowly developing ArcticIndex with KiskoLabs to make it even more useful for the Nordic and Baltic entrepreneurship community, which seems to grow bigger and stronger by the day.
ArcticIndex is the primary information resource of Nordic and Baltic startups and the entrepreneurs behind them. It's effectively your one stop shop for getting the latest information on the companies and people region, whatever your need.
The platform has developed nicely and the latest addition to the service, a job board, is starting to get traction and we're seeing more and more activity in there.
Go and check out some very exciting opportunities that have been posted on the Job Board or post your own (here).
Betware, Another Gaming Solution From Iceland
Betware is also another of Library House's nominees for the 100 hottest companies to change the media technology industry. Like the name suggests, Betware is into providing online gambling and gaming platforms through turnkey solutions. The company itself is relatively old as it has started operations already back in 1996.
Betware has had enough time to build a very respectable and admirable business proposition for its clients through it products and solutions. The platform truly offers all the necessary modules and tools required to start a gaming site and get it going - hence a true turnkey solution.
In terms of games, they have developed over 100 games categorized into number games, sports betting games, racing games, instant games, casino games, multiplayer games as well as live betting. Betware also claims that these games are all playable through the mobile phone, internet as well as in some cases in the future, the digital television.
There's definitely a large ecosystem of different kind of gaming in the Nordic and Baltic region, be it mobile games, casual games or money games like in the case of Betware. What are your thoughts, should we cover these topics more in the future as well?
ENCA: An Acid Test For A Platform To Take Over Niche Markets
ENCA is a Finnish social network that helps people to collect and swap euro coins and other euro numismatics.
ENCA aims to be the ultimate language agnostic Social Network for coin collectors. It lets its users to swap euro coins in their own language. Say you're a Parisian coin collector who does not speak (or does not want to speak) any other language. In the future ENCA aims to translate your postings into all the 23 European languages currently spoken in the EU. Out of those 23 languages, currently the service can do only Finnish, French and English and the team is working on German and Spanish. All together ENCA has information on over 1200 coins in it's database at the moment.
One could argue that ENCA is a combination of Wikipedia, Ebay and Facobook in the world of coin collecting. It achieves to be informative in nature when acting as a Ebay like broker, but at the same time bringing in a Social Network like dimension.
ENCA is coded in PHP on symfony-framework and for database it uses MySQL.
The project was started in late 2006 by an enthusiastic Finnish coin collector, who got the idea when the euro was introduced as a common currency across the chosen EU countries. He played with the idea for years before settling for a social network around coin collecting. Once started he got quickly a strong group of business savvy people involved, namely Jarno Anttalainen (CEO at Syväjohtaminen / DeepLead Ltd.), Taneli Tikka (CEO at RunToShop, COO at Dopplr to name a few) and Ville Karkkolainen (CEO at Triventum). See more on the team here.
ENCA's business model is three fold:
- Premium services for users
- A percentage cut from the coins sold via ENCA (yet to set up).
- Targeted marketing
The market size for coin collecting is significant. There are about 2 million active euro coin collectors world wide and the value of euro-numismatic market is annually around 2 billion euro. Ebay already by itself has over one million euro items on sale each year with an estimated average price of 20 euro a piece.
Coin collecting market is promising, but the real upside is in multiplying the ENCA model and platform to another niche markets, say stamp collecting, books, wines etc. The same platform will bend easily into a any such Social Network platform by just changing the look to go with the respective niche.
ENCA's foundation is unusual and different from the way Finnish companies are normally born. As ENCA's founder did not have much money or assets to back up a major loan, nor did he want to resort to institutions such as Tekes with its high bureacratic hurdles, he needed to figure another way to raise the money. ENCA has altogether 34 investing partners and all of them fall in either Friends, Fools or Family category. One investment might not be more than one or two thousand euro, but all together they add up.
This is a financing model that's much used for example in Sweden and US and one would hope we'd see more of that in the Nordics and Baltics as well. This model enables one to do a proto of the service or product one wishes to bring to market. The proto makes the idea much more concrete and thus gives the service a lot bigger chance of getting the Business Angels or VC funds interested to further develop the product with the team.
ENCA is just out of Beta and one still needs to have an invitation from a member to join the social network. Regardless, the guys at ENCA were nice enough to give all our readers a possibility to sign up here. Happy coin collecting.
