XIHA is a Finnish startup developing XIHA Life, a multilingual social media platform and an online community targeted at people living outside their home country, and the multilingual people around the world. XIHA invites users of any language, but adjusts the user experience to each user so that they only see automatically the content they understand. Despite the current economic climate, XIHA has raised a significant amount of risk capital from a Chinese VC.

Jani comments it’s hard to find risk capital in Finland to support global growth. According to Jani the Finnish VC’s thought the risk was too big. Out of the international VC’s Jani thought Chinese were the best, as they have both money and vision.

The amount of investment was not disclosed. However, the amount is rather significant, as the founder and CTO Jani Penttinen says with it the company will open offices in the US, Switzerland, and China, and will hire ten more people, developers and business roles, to achieve 24h global operations. Another ten will be hired later depending on the economical climate. There is also more money coming if certain growth targets will be hit. XIHA has strong Chinese roots due to Jani working in the country, and Jani’s spouse Sun Xiaowen being Chinese. “Xiha” means ‘fun’ or ‘happy’ in Mandarin Chinese, and also ‘Hip-Hop’ in Cantonese.

As of now, XIHA is still losing money, but the goal is to get to profitability by the end of the year. So far the main income source has been downloadable games, but XIHA is planning to expand to other digital products as well. Below is a quick interview with Jani Penttinen from Slush Helsinki.

Jussi Laakkonen, CEO of Everyplay, has done extensive research in terms of investments to the gaming industry in the recent years. We also covered Jussi’s previous findings in ArcticStartup close to two months ago when he reported that approximately 2 to 4 million USD are invested into the casual gaming market each week.

Jussi has compiled a nice 2 blog post analysis into the market with discoveries such as investments peaking in July 2008 to the amount of 71M USD in total to the industry. He has also added the MMORPG market to the analysis. It’s clear that the two largest segments in the gaming industry, receiving funding are the MMORPG and the casual gaming segments.

Some of the largest investments made were 9You’s 100M USD, 83M USD into Big Fish Games, 29M USD into Zynga Games and Gaia’s 11M USD financing rounds.

So with regards to my previous post on Betware from Iceland, I asked whether we should cover the gaming industry more, a clear answer from you was - yes, please. We’ll get more insight into this industry in the future as the market is one of the most attractive ones in many ways, not only investments, at this moment.

However, have a read at the full analysis into the investments by Jussi Laakkonen of Everyplay - Part 1 and Part 2.

Photo by A*A*R*O*N (CC:by-nc-sa)

To continue from our partnership with the Nordic Venture Forum we have partnered with the European Venture Summit to bring more visibility for Nordic and Baltic startups among the investors in the region.

European Venture Summit is two day long conference in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1st and 2nd December that will give some of the most promising companies from Biotech & Industrial Biotech, ICT and New Energies the opportunity to grow their businesses across borders by facilitating contacts to an experienced and international network of venture capital and corporate investors, strategic partners and expert advisers.

Some of the companies present include Qrodo (SWE) - Easy to use internet service for live sports events using low cost equipment and infrastructure, Mobispine (SWE) - Mobile Internet and messaging, Valimo (FI) - Your ID online, and Vocab (SWE) - Mobile intelligent learning.

You can register here and choose from different packages the one that’s to your liking. They include everyting from access to company & research presentations to up to 6 pre-arranged meetings from a selection of 15 potential One2One partners.

The recent weeks’ downturn in the global economy has dramatically tightened the availability of funding for companies, not only startups but large companies alike. The downturn that started from the US with the uncovering off the sub-prime “fraud” has echoed its effects to all corners of the world as connections between financing houses begin to unravel.

Sequioa Capital, one of the most famous startup financing houses in the US, has held a secret meeting earlier this week. A slideshow from the meeting has fled to the public unraveling the contents of the meeting - short and long term scenarios for the world economy. The contents of the document are not very positive. If the name of the presentation is “RIP - Good times”, I think it says all.

I’ve also heard while discussing with Nordic entrepreneurs that the financing market has, also in Europe, tightened dramatically. This of course means that those seeking funding rounds form the public will face tougher times in years.

I’m expecting we’ll see a huge rise in applications to the government institutions that support and finance entrepreneurs as the private markets tighten. It is natural for entrepreneurs to seek financing at all costs, as it is their only way to survive if they do not have a positive cashflow. This however, in my opinion and even at the cost of receiving a ton of hate mail, does not give the institutions any right to loosen their funding - just to support the companies and keep people employed.

This may seem harsh, but the Nordic startup scene is still very small in terms of employment and thus does not pose a great threat to the GDP. Times like these serve as natural ways to bring about healthy change to the markets with companies that are truly innovative and have a chance of becoming profitable in the near future (ie. are already showing healthy amounts of revenue).

One must also remember that even in difficult times, it is usually the strongest that survive - creating more value in the long run to the individuals as well as economies they serve.

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?