Remember the YotaPhone ? The delightfully kooky Russian smartphone that pairs a bog-standard LCD screen with an eInk display on its rump? It...
Remember the YotaPhone? The delightfully kooky Russian smartphone that pairs a bog-standard LCD screen with an eInk display on its rump? It's been teased for a launch for months now, but the company behind it has just spilled the beans at a press event in Moscow: the YotaPhone will launch in Russian and Europe today complete with a confirmed €499/19,990 RUB price tag, right in line with rumors that flew around earlier this year.
Local, organic salad chain 
Somehow, 2013 marked the year that Helsinki became a global gaming capital in its own right. Maybe it was because Supercell, a humble gaming studio that started back in 2010, blossomed into a $3 billion company in less than a year. Or maybe it was when Rovio announced the two billionth download for Angry Birds with a dubstep dance on-stage from the Finnish National Ballet. Or maybe it was because even Japan's most influential gaming entrepreneurs like widely respected DeNA founder Tomoko Namba and billionaire and GungHo co-founder Taizo Son showed up for Finland's flagship startup conference Slush last month. Even global VC firms like Accel, Atomico and Index held competing dinners all on the same night to scout for their next hit-maker. Or maybe it was just the naked Finns shamelessly running around during the conference after-party between the freezing ocean and the sauna at 2 a.m. in the morning. In any case, this Nordic critical mass is no fluke. Supercell and Rovio's wake has left a generation of local game designers and developers invigorated and hungry to prove themselves on the world's stage. There are 180 gaming studios across the country, up threefold from 2010, according to statistics from Neogames and IGDA Finland. “The main difference is that the companies now believe in themselves. They know they can do anything,” asserted Peter Vesterbacka, the chief marketing officer of Rovio (pictured below). A New Wave of Emerging Games Studios In 2009, you could have said it was interesting that Angry Birds originated from Finland of all places. Last year, it raised eyebrows that there were two, not one, gaming phenoms out of the country. Now there are dozens of studios waiting in the wings like Grand Cru, Next Games, Boomlagoon, Playraven, Seriously, Frogmind, Fingersoft and others. Grand Cru, the most watched up-and-coming team out of the region, has been polishing its Minecraft-inspired title Supernauts for well over a year and is set to launch in a few days in Finland in timing with the country's independence day. Staffed with alums from earlier gaming predecessors like Digital Chocolate, Max Payne-developer Remedy and Redlynx, Finland's studios aren't novice game makers. Many of them come with more than a decade of experience in a community that traces its roots back more than 20 years into the early 1990s Demoscene, where thousands of developers would huddle around glowing computer screens hacking at mega-conferences
Ptch, the Dreamworks Animation-incubated mobile video startup, has been acquired by Yahoo. The app was launched just over a year ago and will shut down on January 2, 2014. Until then, you'll be able to download your ‘ptches' if you're a user, or save them out to your camera roll. The announcement was made on the Ptch blog this afternoon. “As part of the Yahoo team,” the announcement reads, “we'll be able to focus our efforts and leverage our technology to make Yahoo's photo and video platforms the best in the world.” Due to the text of the announcement and the fact that the product will be shuttered, we're calling this one an acqui-hire. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ptch was an app that started inside DreamWorks animation, as a project of its CTO Ed Leonard, who ended up taking on the CEO role. Co-founder Hans Ku also worked at DreamWorks. When we spoke to the Ptch team last year, there were around 20 of them, about 1/3 of which came from DreamWorks. About 2/3 of them came from outside places like Yahoo and Myspace. Now, it looks like some of them will boomerang back to the big purple. The app allowed users to remix their videos with effects and music, and to offer their original clips up to others in order to mash them up and remix them further. The concept was centered around allowing friends and people with shared experiences to use all of their combined media to craft the ‘story' of the event. There's no word on where this leaves DWA Investments, the separate company that was funded by Dreamworks and which created Ptch. Since it's equity-owned by the employees, it seems like it would go along with the acquisition, likely to be dissolved. This continues Yahoo's strategy of absorbing talent in the mobile app design and development space. Yahoo is in the process of retooling all of its offerings to be mobile-centric, and developing new properties to bolster its media empire. In order to do that, it's been snapping up small teams and products that have strategic value of some sort, but mostly for the people.
Just kidding. But since Jeff Bezos is going to pull his 
