Jolla Wants To Build A Foursquare Phone, A Facebook Phone — Whatever It Takes To Wake Smartphones From Their Android Slumber
Finnish startup Jolla is open for business. That’s the message CEO Marc Dillon was putting out, loud and clear, during two on stage appearances at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona last week. Not a bad amount of stage time for a first time MWC attendee and a mobile upstart that hasn't sold a single handset yet because it's still busy making its first phone.
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Applifier’s Everyplay Wants To See Your Game Face
Applifier, a Helsinki-based mobile gaming network, wants to see your game face. Their product Everyplay, which records players at their best (or worst) moments inside mobile games, is launching a new feature today that uses the iPhone’s front-facing camera to record your reactions. Yes, the videos are maybe a little awkward. See the one above. There’s probably a viral video montage in here someday. The new feature, called “FaceCam,” is in beta and a public launch is expected in March. Everyplay is a bit of a pivot for Applifier, which was born out of game developer Jussi Laakkonen’s frustration in attraction users into his social games. The company then built up a large cross-promotion network on the Facebook platform for independent game developers. It grew to 150 million monthly active users. But the industry changed as players migrated toward smartphones and tablets. They created Everyplay as a way for mobile games to grow virally as players share videos of themselves with ...
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Angry Birds-Maker Rovio Crossed 263M Monthly Active Users Last Month
Rovio, the Finnish makers of Angry Birds, said they crossed 263 million monthly active users in December, with 30 million downloads in Christmas week alone and 8 million downloads on Christmas Day. The figure is about 30 percent higher than the 200 million monthly active users the company had at the end of 2011. For perspective, 263 million monthly actives is nearly as many as Zynga has. Zynga reported 311 million monthly active users in the third quarter of last year, and tracking site AppData says that the company currently has 264 million monthly active users on Facebook. Rovio, which found its landmark hit on the iOS platform on its 52nd attempt at launching a game, has set increasingly lofty (and some say, crazy) goals year after year. At an interview I did with the company in November, the company’s chief marketing officer Peter Vesterbacka said he wanted Rovio to be the first entertainment brand with 1 billion a users a day (or as many as Coca-Cola interacts with). The path to that ...
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Mobile Gaming Network Applifier Raises $4M Led By Finland’s Lifeline Ventures
Applifier, which just launched a new platform for gamers to share replays of their best gaming moments, raised a Series B round of funding led by Finland’s Lifeline Ventures. The $4 million round also included existing investors like MHS Capital and PROFounders along with one more new one in Webb Investment Network. Angel investors like Zynga India general manager Steven Lurie, Anthony Soohoo, Philip Reisberger, David Wright and Tekes, which is the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, also participated. Applifier, which started out on the Facebook platform, pivoted largely to mobile platforms over the last year. The company recently launched a new product called Everyplay, which is a way for gamers to share and replay their greatest moments. Everyplay lets gamers share their favorite titles by recording and replaying sessions of games — like a time they might have gotten a high score. “This is not something we’re cramming down the throats of users,” said Jussi ...
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Happy (Early) Bday! :) SMS Txt Msgs Turn 20
CWmike writes "In the fast moving world of technology, there are perhaps few things that have proved as resistant to change as the simple SMS text message. While a dizzying number of options exist today to interconnect people, the text message remains a 160 character deliverer of news, gossip, laughs, alerts, and all manner of other information. It connects more people than Facebook and Twitter, has brought down governments, and in so much of the world still holds the ability to change lives. Dec. 3 is the 20th anniversary of the sending of the first SMS text message. Its origins can be traced back to a Danish pizzeria in 1984. Matti Makkonen, a Finnish engineer, was in Copenhagen for a mobile telecom conference and began discussing with two colleagues the idea of a messaging system on the GSM digital cellular system."
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