How young will the casualties become in the ongoing war against online piracy? You have to wonder, when you learn that a 9-year old girl’s laptop was seized by Finnish police in a raid on her home, following a complaint by the CIAPC anti-piracy group which had ISPs block The Pirate Bay in Finland. The raid followed a request that the girl’s father pay up around €600 to settle piracy accusations. → Read More
“There was this moment in the industry when people thought that games were a science, not a form of art,” said Ilkka Paananen, the CEO of red-hot Finnish gaming startup Supercell.
“But inevitably, games are a form of art,” he said. “They have to be supported by strong analytics, but you have to lead with creativity.”
With Zynga’s moment passed, a new generation of gaming startups like… → Read More
Nokia may still be fighting some pretty major fires on its burning platform, but it’s also building some bridges — namely the Nokia Bridge incubator program — to help those running from the flames, with financing of up to €150,000 ($185,000) to pursue new startups, before they’ve even paid a visit to VCs and angel investors.
The activities in Nokia Bridge are a small but encouraging… → Read More
Nokia played Grinch this year by barring a small, Lapland-based maker of iOS games from a Santa Claus Foundation delegation at Wanda Plaza in Beijing, China. The delegation, consisting of a number of Finnish tech companies, including Nokia, was to show off the best tech Lapland had to offer.
The smaller company, Lapland Studio Ltd, created a game called Elf Rescue in honor of the studio’s… → Read More
GigsWiz, a Helsinki-based analytics service for the live music industry, has grabbed €150,000 in a seed round of funding.
The service basically helps music bands interact with their fans with a widget on their site. During the beta phase bands can collect requests from fans – “where do you want us to play live?” – through the GigsWiz tool on their websites. They can then view the data plotted… → Read More
Many hardware makers, especially in the mobile device area, are betting high on touchscreens to let users interact with their products. Toshiba subsidiary Toshiba Information Systems has now developed the “New Sensation UI Solution”, which is supposed to make user interaction via touchscreens more intuitive through tactile feedback.
While this approach isn’t new in itself, Toshiba’s technology is… → Read More
Would you like to read the regular postal mail that comes through your letterbox on a PC, e-reader or mobile over breakfast? Then move to Finland. Within two weeks, the state-owned national mail enterprise, Itella, will begin opening, scanning and distributing letters electronically to some Finnish households and companies. Yes, you read that right. Postal workers will be opening your… → Read More
ThumbReport, a site dedicated to destroying the English language even more than we have posted some video of “future” phones at NY Design Week by Provoke Design. The first one “expresses your mood with illumination.” Then we have the “Feel” which allows you to feel the touch of your loved one, provided your loved one is encased in plastic and has a single… → Read More
According to the Finnish courts, CSS — the DRM found on standard DVDs — is so weak that it doesn’t even count as a protective measure anymore. As a result, breaking CSS is no longer deemed circumvention of an “effective technological measure” simply because it’s no longer effective. → Read More
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