Asmo Halinen

Co-operation with Sulake

We have just started an interesting co-operation together with Sulake and its social networking service IRC-Galleria. Part of Aapeli’s online gaming catalogue is now accessible straight from IRC-Galleria as well. The players from IRC-Galleria and from Aapeli end up in the same gaming space, with IRC-Galleria based users marked with their own unique G-icon in the gaming lobbies. The collaboration has received a good acceptance from the users and we already have some preliminary plans how to enhance this thing further.

Posted in Playray, other community services, work | No Comments »

Different cities seen from the sky in the same scale

One day, while browsing on Google Maps, I was comparing how different and unique looking each city was seen from the same distance on the satellite view. I thought it might be fun to put screenshots of these views, different cities seen from the sky in the same scale, on one page. So here we go!

Usually when you’re going through Google Maps or Google Earth views you focus on one area. In the following pictures you can see New York, London, Moscow, Peking, Helsinki and Nairobi - all in the same scale (each 590×590 pixel picture shows about 6×6 kilometres area of each city’s centre in the exactly same Google Maps scale). It’s obvious that they look clearly different - at least the latter two - but even still I feel it is a bit astonishing how huge the differences actually are between all of them.

New York

London

Moscow

Peking

Helsinki

Nairobi

Posted in miscellaneous | 7 Comments »

Playfish comes out with their second title

Playfish have just published their second Facebook application - Word Challenge. I haven’t even tested it yet, but even still I’m already pretty sure it is going to be another huge hit in Facebook. Playfish’s first title, ‘Who Has The Biggest Brain?’, is already one of the most popular FB apps and no wonder: it is done extremely well in every detail.

Keep up the good work guys!

I’ll leave my Word Challenge test until Saturday since otherwise there’s too much of a risk it will ruin my Friday at work. ;)

Posted in other community services | No Comments »

Playray heading to Turkey

We are opening our Playray service next in Turkey. More detailed info about that (and also about our recent management changes) is available over here.

Posted in Playray, growth, internationalization, personnel, work | No Comments »

Thousands of Playray avatars in a single mosaic picture

This is pretty cool. Two gurus at our office (Pasi Laaksonen and Janne Puonti) created a mosaic picture out of thousands of Playray avatar portraits. Check out the full version here (2520 x 4020).

The picture includes only face portraits of the avatars - the full-scale Playray avatars are Flash based, bigger figures, shown from head to toes, like this. The negative detail in the picture is that the avatars for the mosaic where taken totally in random, and therefore there are quite many new and untuned ones in the assortment. If there’ll be a new mosaic with better selection I’ll let you know.

And if you’re wondering how many avatars are there in the picture the answer is 2814.

Posted in Playray, avatars, work | 2 Comments »

Sula Pinta podcast

Juhani Lassila, Communications Director of Sulake, and myself were interviewed today by Sula Pinta, podcast reporting about “new dimensions of media”. Sula Pinta is available only in Finnish, but if that’s not a problem for you, today’s episode is available here. The discussion goes mostly around the virtual merchandise business in general but there’s some Aapeli specific issues as well, for example talk about our recent virtual Eero Aarnio furniture launch.

Sula Pinta is an interesting podcast series and I really recommend you to check out the whole archive.

I just wish I’d find a bit more time to read/listen all the great blogs and podcasts that are out there.

Posted in Playray, avatars, blogs, media, other virtual worlds, work | No Comments »

Eero Aarnio’s classics now available in Playray

Users of the Finnish Playray site (and later the users of other Playray countries as well) can now decorate their avatars’ Playforia rooms with genuine virtual furniture by designer, professor h.c. Eero Aarnio. Playray collection includes for example the classics like the Ball (1963) and the Pastil (1968).

Over here you can see a full screenshot example of the Playforia room with Aarnio products.

Posted in Playray, avatars, work | 1 Comment »

Blog recommendations

I was happy to hear that Reinout has started his own blog. Interesting stuff for example about casual gaming. Check it out!

Another blog tip: Payment Guy (I know the real name of the person behind this blog, but as it’s not available on the blog I think I’ll leave it out from here as well). He has pretty good coverage about gaming & virtual world related issues.

The last hint is about Finnish startup scene: Antti & co. have an excellent blog about that.

Posted in blogs | 1 Comment »

2.0 million unique users

Oops, I just realised that December became the first month in this blog’s history without any posts. Sorry about that. There has been quite few posts on my Finnish blog as well. All this jaikuing and facebooking is reducing my blogging, no doubt about that.

Well, at least I’m writing some news now: nice milestone in the story of Apaja. Our Aapeli/Playray services are gathering (over) 2.0 million unique users in this month (source: Google Analytics). A clear new record.

We’ve just opened Playray in Lithuania and in Chile, and there’s more to come.

Good start for 2008 indeed.

Posted in Playray, internationalization, records, statistics, this blog, work | No Comments »

Apaja has raised its first VC round

It’s now public: I’m happy to announce that we’ve just raised our first VC round, 1.75 mill euros, from Martinson Trigon Venture Partners. I am also very happy that at the same time we got Allan Martinson to our Board of Directors. It is a pleasure to work with him and I really like his visions on the business.

Posted in funding, work | No Comments »