IGDA Finland November event, Finland Game Jam kick off

Do you want to know how the leading game studios do their demo? Or are you interested in Global Game Jam event which shall take place in January 2010? Game Jamming will happen in over 50 location around the world at the same time. It will be 48 hours of sweat, ideation, game mechanics, coding, sound and graphic design, team work and networking.


Remedy Entertainment will give a demo of Alan Wake and Gorm Lai will talk about Global Game Jam (GGJ) event. The talks will take place at the IGDA Finland Presentations session (venue: K13, time: 5PM). At 7PM the crowd will move to Cuba Cafe for after session networking. We will also show some GGJ videos and games at the bar. Join us on 17th November!

More information from: http://igda.fi/

MindTrek - there and back

MindTrek conference is the only conference in Finland providing good crossover of anything and everything to do with digital media. This year MindTrek attracted nearly 800 participants. Sunny Thursday was well spent at the conference. I chatted with people, followed start up lauch pad session and had good time at the party (thanks Jussi & other friends!). The organizators of the conference had invited some bloggers (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, The NextWeb, StartupMeme, Techpulse360, ChipChick, and toothlesstiger.com) to cover the event. If you want more indepth report from the event or open innovation environment Demola – check out the blogs. Of course MindTrek has also good Twitter coverage and good stories at other blogs. For example Katri Lietsala blogger about Chris Messina presentation (in Finnish!). You can also find a video of the talk titled ”Identity is the platform” from the web.

Another keynote speaker came from Google. Mr. Jyri Engeström talked basics about snack size media. You can find his slides from Slideshare.

Start Up Lanchpad was a combination of ”real” start ups and companies that are already stabilizing their business. Pitching is not traditionally a Finnish way of selling your business idea or product. We truly have to learn several lessons still but I was actually pretty excited and impressed by the pitches. In my opinion the jury didn’t always address that relevant questions (except Mrs. Sharon C. Ballard – I liked her clear, relevant, tough and well put questions). Still it was really interesting to see new products (software and hardware) presented in pitch-format. My absolute lanch pad favourite was Kamu World. One member of the jury questioned the unique quality of Kamu World without AR-aspect which according to Jussi Laakkonen was mainly targeted at hard core users of Kamu. I think both brand image and Kamu character are differentiating Kamu from the competitors. It is true that interaction and gameplay is in line with other Facebook games / application but then again – Facebook games and applications are still evolving. I expect games in social networking services to evolve greatly within the next few years. At the start up lanchpad competition Kamu World is competing against f.ex. Virtual Air Guitar, Epooq and MultiTouch screen. The results will follow shortly.

So: this year my MindTrek experience was a bit of this and that – I wish I would have had more time to follow game related presentations but oh well – maybe next year. Last night I had to rush to Helsinki to be ready for an interview at 7AM. I talked about future of gaming at the morning television show at MTV3 channel.

Online video rules ok

Interesting research data from comScore (with US focus).

• The top video ad networks in terms of their actual delivered reach were: Tremor Media Video Network (19.5 percent penetration of all online video viewers), BrightRoll Video Network (16.2 percent penetration), and BroadbandEnterprises.com (14.8 percent penetration).
• 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 582 minutes of video, or 9.7 hours.
• 120.5 million viewers watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com (82.6 videos per viewer).
• 44.9 million viewers watched 340 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The average Hulu viewer watched 12.7 videos, totaling 1 hour and 17 minutes of videos per viewer.
• The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

Eig09 Innovation keynote

This might be of marginal interest but those into online gambling & iGaming might find it interesting at least.

Eig09 Innovation keynote

View more documents from Sonja Kangas.

Popular social networking activities

Even though I do not totally agree that "to be an Early Adopter of Technologies Goes Mainstream" this is an interesting article.

"For decades, the adoption and use of the latest technologies was limited to a subculture: Whether called “tech enthusiasts” or “gadget geeks,” the implication was that most of the world got along fine with older, established products and services, while a smaller group pursued the most leading-edge technology." But now Forrester Research suggests that we’re all gadget geeks now."

Finnish gamers in the limelight

Hello world from Stockholm Sweden. Today I am visiting Jadestone and Paf in Stockholm. Last week I gave a presentation on "video gaming trends" and I am about to put those thoughts into a slide set format shortly. I have also been putting together a presentation for EIG09. And what's EIG you might wonder? EIG is the European iGaming Congress and Expo that will be held in Copenhagen mid September. I was asked to give an Innovation keynote (focusing on online gambling and future of iGaming). It has been fun to put the presentation together. I will put both of the slide sets to Slideshare as soon as I have given the presentation / finalized the trends slides (mid September most likely).
IGDA Finland season 09-10 will start officially next Tuesday. We have really superb season coming up. We'll start with Everyplay session on September the 8th. Everyplay is a social games startup. Currently they are developing Kamu World for social networking sites (Facebook at first). It is a new virtual hangout featuring playful Kamus. Check it out! Early version of it is already online and Finnish speaking readers might also like to check out newest Pelaaja magazine. September issue focuses on Finnish game development scene and there is a couple of words about Everyplay and the future of gaming as well. All in all IGDA is a perfect context to catch up what's the latest with Finnish game developers and well as to network with all the bright minds. More information about the event from Igda Finland site. IGDA will also organize Presentations series. The first session will be in October and focus on Global Game Jam. Finland will get our own Game Jam next January! More information available in October at Igda.fi.

Another nice games related event is Social Gaming night at Villi Wäinö (Kalevankatu Helsinki city centre). It is held every Tuesday at 7PM by Jolly Dragon.

Btw. I noticed that I have been writing this blog since Feb 2006 and managed to put together some 200 posts. I started using Twitter in in Dec 2008 and I have already sent over 400 posts. The benefits of both blogging and microblogging are starting to show. I will continue doing both also in the future. Check out Twitscoop.

Btw2. Found this pic. Mobile social networks (UK).

Assembly09 post mortem (from my viewpoint)

Four sunny summer days were well spent indoors at Assembly09. I was promoting a game concept & prototyping competition, meeting friends and following compos. There was high number of fast and extreme music entries, some nice fast graphics entries and - as expected - some amazing entries to 64 and demo compos. Some of my favorites (any category) were Proof of Concept, Frameranger and irrelephant. Check out all Assembly Compo entries from Assembly TV.

For those who don't know: Assembly is one of the biggest demo scene & gaming events in Europe. Assembly Summer gathered ~6000 participants out of which 500 are girls! Awesome - Go girls! Assembly is about participating in compos (in music, graphics, programming demos etc.), hanging around with friends, playing games (lots of WoW and and CS players around), chatting, staying at the Arena 24/7 for 4 days and eating lots of junk food. It must be overwhelming experience for the youngest participants which were not much more than 10 year olds. It was also nice to see some people staying overnight with their small babies. That was kinda cool - Go Next Gen!

Besides gaming and compos there was ArtTech seminar running on various topics. I followed indie sessions. Cactus gave a good preso [the same (?) as at GDC09], Blueberry Garden show didn't give that much new ideas and Petri Purho was such a Prince Charming as always. He were basically going through a set of really funny and cool indie games. My favorite was the "get that f**ing raccoon out of the gears!" game (EnviroBear), turning levels thingie (Punishment) and Cactus stuff (Psychosomnium) of course. If not groundbreaking new ideas, at least we got good laugh by watching Petri playing.

Paf Concept & prototype competition will be running until the end of August09 and the results will be out by the end of September. Assembly compos were dominated by men but I truly wish to see entries from girls to this concept competition. All in all -- it is all about good new ideas!