Library House, a research house on startups and other fast growing ventures, has listed 100 of the hottest mediatech companies in Europe. The 100 companies were selected by analysing companies using Library House proprietary data and an expert advisory panel. Library House also states that these 100 companies are the ones that will most likely change the mediatech world (mediatech meaning media and technology).

To our joy, we can find 3 Nordic companies in the top 10 list; Blyk (Finland), Sulake (Finland) and Stardoll (Sweden). Other companies in the top 10 were Flirtomatic (UK), MOO (UK), Where Are You Now? (UK), Dailymotion (France), King.com (UK), Playfish (UK) and Plastic Logic (UK). It’s interesting to see that there is a healthy spread of gaming and entertainment companies in the top 10 as well as to note the absence of any media companies per se.

Other Nordic companies in the list were CCP (Iceland), Spotify (Sweden, Luxembourg), Betware (Iceland) and Xtract (Finland). The fact that most of the companies are from the UK or Central European countries pretty much states the overlooking of the Baltic market in total (I believe they are part of Europe, at least the last time I looked). Then again, this is exactly one of the reasons why I set about with ArcticStartup a little over a year ago - to give more insight to the Baltic and Nordic startup industries. Seems like we still have plenty of work to do.

Kauppalehti reports that according financial data published into the government files, the price Sulake paid for the acquisition of IRC-Galleria a while back is 12,5 million euros. The company behind IRC-Galleria is Dynamoid, where the Finnish serial entrepreneur Taneli Tikka has also gathered some experience.

The price was 6,6 times their annual revenue which at that time was 1,89 million euros and 25 times their earnings of 500 000 euros.

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?

The Internet Agency Valve has been all quiet about its plans, but there is something going on about its operations abroad. The agency is a famous flash house in Finland, that has hogged numerous awards from many different competitions. It seems like they have something going on in the US at the moment, more specifically San Francisco.

Valve is recruiting game developers and game designers with the work being located either in Helsinki, Finland or San Francisco, US. A guess is that they are looking towards some sort of Flash based social game as they emphasize the need for “good up-to-date understanding of social networks and web-trends“.

I’ve heard from an industry insider that the person pulling together team is a former Sulake employee. Sulake is the house behind the world famous Habbo Hotel. An educated guess is that Valve is planning something similar, with a different target market perhaps?

The Helsinki based virtual goods operator Sulake saw a profitable first half in 2008. According to Kauppalehti, net profits were around 400 000 euros. The revenues rose approximately 20% to 25,6 million euros for the first 6 months of 2008. Majority of the sales came from sale of virtual goods in Habbo Hotels world wide. According to the company, the annual growth for 2008 will be around 30%.

This is yet more proof, that the company is being heavily pumped into IPO condition. Some sources have told us that 2009 would be the year after all, as the sub-prime crisis smashed the IPO possibilities in 2007.