Everyplay reveals Kamu World social gaming on Facebook

Everyplay, a Finnish social gaming startup, revealed today a new Facebook social game called Kamu World.

I tried it right away and it feels really addictive.

Getting started is really easy. Kamu World is a FB application, so you really have almost nothing to do. Just go to www.kamuworld.com or do a search on FB with keyword “kamu world”.

Once you get in, you are being asked couple of simple questions and you are ready to go. You can choose a name and skin for your “buddy”.

In the actual game you hang in one of the rooms that are located around the world. There you can chat, do different tricks or emoticons, get new friends, and give other buddies “thums up”.

Soon you will find that others have skins and emoticons that you don’t. That’s because they are on a higher level than you. You can gain levels by gathering “sparks” or points you get from being active member in the crowd.

What’s great about this is that the game is linked to your Facebook profile, so you can allow people to see who you really are.

For future reference, this combination of ease of use, distributed credentials, Facebook integration and clever use of avatars will open totally new worlds.

Just wait and see!

More stories on Kamu World

Arctic Startup

TechCrunch UK

Everyplay is a developer and publisher of social games. Social games are fun, casual games played together with your friends on social network such as Facebook and MySpace.

Everyplay was founded in year 2008 by veterans of game development and social media. The founding team consists of:

Jussi Laakkonen, CEO & founder

Jussi is a seasoned game industry executive and entrepreneur. Prior to founding Everyplay he was in charge of business development for racing game developer Bugbear Entertainment. Jussi has together with Pekka Aakko led ASSEMBLY, one of the world’s largest computer festivals since year 1992. Jussi has previously worked at steering group level at data security company F-Secure and co-founded Eworks, a multimedia startup in the 1990s.

Pekka Aakko, business development director & co-founder

Pekka is a veteran IT industry executive with key expertise in partnerships, sales and R&D. He most recently worked as a director at Logica. Together with Jussi Laakkonen Pekka has led ASSEMBLY’s growth to a national institution that attracts over 8000 festival visitors in two annual events. Pekka was also founder of Internet Finland, one of the first private held ISPs in Finland. Pekka also founded with Jussi Laakkonen Eworks Finland. He also was an early pioneer in online games as the chairman of BATmud, one of the earliest and most successful still running MMOs in the world.

Jalmari Raippalinna, CTO & co-founder

Jalmari is a pioneer in high end Flash game and rich media development. As a senior developer at Apaja Online Entertainment, he led the creation of the Playforia virtual world. Prior to Apaja, he worked at Sulake, the makers of Habbo Hotel. Jalmari’s cutting edge Flash skills have been demonstrated in award winning Flash demos created in the Evoflash group.

Matti Savolainen, Server lead & co-founder

Matti is a senior developer of highly scaleable, rich media systems. He was instrumental to developing the backend systems Finland’s largest social network IRC-Galleria used to scale to 500 000 users and over 4 billion page loads a month. He has also been a programmer in a various indie game projects.

Fruugo unveiling the curtains – Don’t kick the panda

There has been a great deal of buzz about Fruugo during the last few months. This “biggest startup in Finland”, “Jorma Ollila and Risto Siilasmaa venture”, “Tekes funds their fun” and “most NDAs in Helsinki” rumoured company is now finally starting to unwrap from their stealth position.

I had a pleasure to be in the first group of non-NDA intros on the current Fruugo beta couple of days ago. This means I have access to their system. I can use it and even buy stuff (which I’m propably gonna do during the weekend). Yes, it’s still in beta, but it works!

I’m not going to give you a tour around the user experience of Fruugo, that is being covered already by Startupbin, who attended the same group with me. Also, for screenshots of the service in Fruugo photostream in Flickr.

How’s their business outlook?

Instead of judging a system like Fruugo by it’s cover, I think we should look at the business model they are providing. Before getting to talk to Fruugo people and seeing how the system will function, I had my expectations high.

I was thinking that this is a chance to make ecommerce really happening by removing the obvious obstacles that have slowed down the wider use of international business

• Trusting the merchant
• Trusting the buyer
• Complex it systems required
• Challenges with international payment systems
• Language problems
• Problems with the logistics
• Problems with customs and other related paperwork

I knew that if Fruugo can solve most of these problems, they will be very successful.

And glad I was, when I was presented how Fruugo will work. Let’s see:

Trusting the merchant. Fruugo will check the background of all merchants in the system. They will also make sure that customers’ are being served by offering Fruugo customer service – someone to get in touch with and solve the problems with.

Trusting the buyer. Fruugo will take care of the customer side as well. Fruugo has their own “fraud management” system, that clarifies the problems with buyers behaving badly.

IT-systems. Instead of having to invest huge amount of money into websales systems, Fruugo will only need to have an interface with merchant IT-system. If the merchant is not selling online yet, there is no need to start a new multilingual webstore – just integrate the current system with Fruugo, and you’re good to go.

International payments. Fruugo has it. Customers pay with the systems they normally use in their country, and in their preferred currency.

Language problems. Not to worry anymore. Fruugo is localised in your own language, but you can also choose multiple languages that you understand. My primary language in the system is Finnish, but I also said I can use Swedish and English. When searching products, I can do a search using any of the languages, and I get the results in my primary language. If I was to seach for “hame”, “kjol” and “skirt”, I would always get a nice selection of skirts, in Finnish.

Logistics. This is something that may be in their future pipeline. Now the logistics are taken care by the merchant, but is of course automated and supported by Fruugo knowledge.

Customs. At this point Fruugo doesn’t really need to help with the customs, since their markets are within the EU. I personally believe this will be solved, once Fruugo expands outside of the EU.

Fruugo will start opening to limited number of users gradually. First they will take Finland, and very soon after that Sweden. It is expected, that Fruugo is available in most of Europe during this spring.

I had the opportunity to talk to Fruugo CEO Juha Usva and VP of Marketing Janne Waltonen about this. They are very convinsing, down-to-earth, cut-the-crap and brightvisioned with Fruugo and their opportunity. No, there is no company jet or huge parties. Fruugo is not hosting huge parties.

They are working hard to provide something that will hopefully change the way people do ecommerce.

And feeding their little baby panda. Gently.

Links: Fruugo CEO Juha Usva on MTV3 interview today (in Finnish)

Addition: Now Arctic Startup joined the club as well