 Pair for the extraction point. We've been briefed on all the important stories and events in the world of emerging information. Now, it's time to extract the data and turn it into action. Live from the SiliconANGLE studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, this is extraction point with John Furrier. Welcome to the extraction point. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com and SiliconANGLE.tv here. Live in Palo Alto, inside the cube with some special guests from overseas in Europe from Finland. Guys, some entrepreneurs here visiting the U.S. from Finland with a whole crew of Finnish entrepreneurs. We're here with Yanni Pentinian, right? Yes. Did you get that right? And Willie Mitian, I can't get the accent right, so just correct me. Did I get that? Okay, so you're with Microtask Willie and you're with Premium Fanpage. So you guys have been here before. Willie was swung by the cube with Bremine and we've been talking about Nokia and the news recently. But you guys are here on a couple different fronts from Helsinki and Zurich and Silicon Valley for a couple things. One, entrepreneurship and fellow Finnish startups like Angry Birds are here doing some great business. But you guys are here for the GDC. So before we get into the GDC and some of the trends, let's go through and talk about who you guys are and what your companies are. So we'll start with Yanni. Why don't you start us off? Right, okay, so I was maybe one of the first game that was in like 15 years ago. You were 12 years old? Like, he looked like 9. So there were many of us. There were like maybe 15 of us and we kind of started the whole thing. I worked on pretty much every single Finnish game developer at that time. Then later on I moved to the US for EIA and I made a career with that. Then I became an entrepreneur. And now these days we're working on not games, but the service for game developers. We build a system where any game developer can have a fan page that they upload in English and it can appear in any language. You can have a fan in Japan and that fan can read the website in Japanese. They have no idea that you don't speak any Japanese because it's all fluent, professionally translated text. They can communicate with you. So we're basically helping game developers communicate with the world, but in a global fan page. How old is the company? The company itself is 3 years old now. We're sort of pivoting right now up until now. What does pivoting mean? I mean, I see that on Quora. I made a comment on Shervin, my buddy, where he hates the top 10 words, Haydn's looking at rock stars one. I said, you're missing pivot. It's like the most popular word. It means, you know, you kind of stuck, you failed, you kind of reboot, pivot, you know. Is that the case? Yeah, I mean, entrepreneurs, no big deal. You just kind of brush yourself off, you fall off the horse, you know, you just dust off and do it again, right? Yeah, so now we're just building something new based on what we already learned. Yeah, cool. Well, we'll come back. I want to follow up more on that whole pivot thing and then also talk more about what's going on in Finland and Switzerland. So, Willie, so you stopped by with Ramin and you're pretty active. You've been in the U.S. a lot. Yep. Go back to Helsinki and you guys are doing your company. Tell us what's going on with you and your life right now. Okay, so right now I'm one of the founders and the CEO of a crowdsourcing technology company called Microtask and I'm attending GDC meeting a lot of the, like, gamification people, so people looking at using game mechanics to do other stuff. And my background is also from the gaming industry and computer graphics technology industry. I was one of the founders and CTO of a company called Hybrid Graphics in the early 90s, like a pioneering Finnish tech company. We built a lot of gaming middleware, which we licensed to games companies here in the States and elsewhere, and then from 2001 onwards we started looking to take these technologies from console and PC games over to the embedded space. So basically building some of the very first middleware and low-level software stacks used for bringing 3D vector graphics for cell phones. Licensed that stuff to Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson was used in a bunch of cars, in various Java VMs operating systems and so forth, and then in 2006 we sold the company to NVIDIA as how we became a Silicon Valley. And they just had a huge windfall with that lawsuit from Intel. We saw that and we saw that recently this past year. But we had absolutely nothing to do with that. Yeah, but you were before that, but NVIDIA is known for their graphics, obviously. And so your new deal now is, how's that going? With Microtask, that's going really well. We're fundraising once again, we've done two rounds. It's a VC-backed company and basically this spring we're completing our next financing round that I've been hopping between Helsinki, London and the Silicon Valley. How much did you do in your previous rounds, can you say? We've raised about $2 million so far and now we're looking at a round of about $5 million. How many employees do you guys have over there? We're 12 people. So you guys are lean and mean, looking for growth, right? Get back on the market. Oh yeah, and like setting up US sales, most likely enterprise sales of the East Coast done necessarily over here. But I spent a lot of time, maybe four months a year in San Francisco. That's great. We're here in Extraction Point, my new show where we sit down with some of the leaders in the industry and emerging entrepreneurs like Yanni and Willie to talk about what the key signal is out of the noise and you guys obviously in the trenches as entrepreneurs from Finland, which really has a great reputation in the mobile business, from going way back in the day as you guys are proof of, having deep roots technically and from a market standpoint in mobile with Nokia obviously and the talent in Finland. So I got to ask you a couple things around the signal that's been going around mobile. First is before we dive into some of the fun stuff, what's the deal with Nokia? So I mean, speak candidly. I mean, screwed up with Microsoft. There's two sides of the story. We had a good round table with Ramin here and Doug Garland who's a Silicon Valley executive two Fridays ago. So quick comment and perspective. So I was disappointed when I heard that but I don't know if they had any actual choice. You know, they cannot continue with Zimbian. They cannot build a new system and it seems they cannot really go down there either. They were left with the best that's out there and we just have to hope that they find a way to make it. It seems like they're going to be the distant third player but let's hope that they will find a way to... So Ramin says from hero to zero or something like that, you know, the dominant market share player and still huge. They're huge for years to come but whether they can actually make money or whether they can actually come back at the top of the game, the smartphones. How long has the development community as entrepreneurs been sideways, if you will? I mean, there's been some rumblings obviously with Zimbian. It's like, you know, since the iPhone out, it's been years. I mean, finally he writes that memo. I'm going to jump off the, you know, the burning oil rig or something like that. I mean, that must have... People outside of the company, you know, outside of Nokia, we don't think trying to tell them. Get your head out of your know-what, you know? It's kind of, you know, we go in front of a big building and you're kind of yelling and shouting but, you know, they don't listen. But now obviously things are changing. Yeah. That's a good thing. How about you? What are you feeling on the vibe from the Nokia deal? Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things how that's affecting the ICT sector in the startup industry in Finland is the number of Nokia employees, engineers, so like, long carriers within Nokia, lots of good programming skills and so forth who are now leading the company. I mean, it's the number of CVs we are getting daily is just crazy. And it's not only Nokia. It's also in Finland, there's a lot of subcontracting companies in kind of like the ecosystem around Nokia. And for some of these companies, Nokia has been 90% of their business. And let's say doing... There's a ton of talent out there. And they're seeing things like what you guys are doing as entrepreneurs. They're seeing the liberalization, the liberation, if you will, of entrepreneurship come into Finland like the Angry Birds. Obviously the huge smashing box office success that they've been. I mean, they've been huge. So people go, hey, I could do that. And the big change now is that up until now everybody thought in Finland, Nokia, they cannot fall. That's where you go and get your safe career. You do your university degree and then you get a job at Nokia and you say it. But that turned out to be not true. And that's one of the prime reasons why a lot of people didn't choose to start their own companies because they thought it's too risky. It's actually more riskier to actually go into the corporation. I think a younger generation is seeing I could be laid off in three years. Why not start a company and get Y Combinator money and come to Silicon and go, by the way, we have some money for you. We're going to give you money before you leave just so we can say we've seated these entrepreneurs with some cash because we're giving away money too. We won't tell how much it was. Okay, so the entrepreneurship scene is booming there. Capital markets are trying to get with the program. The government, the big companies like Nokia kind of fallen down a little bit figuring out, hey, the world's changing. What effect has the Angry Birds had on all this? I mean, tell me that, I mean, I haven't been there so I don't know. What is the vibe in Finland with the Angry Birds? I mean, is it like one of their own? You mentioned this is like their 50-something game. They've been around the block. They're not a one-trick pony. They've done some good work. But the smashing success has got to have, like... It's extremely positive. It's an example of, you know, we all know each other, you know, for many, many years. So they accessed one of us. If they can do it, then anyone else can do it. So, you know, that really is a crew that we can do. We can get things done. And the great thing about Vaprovio, the makers of Angry Birds is that they're actually helping the other companies out. They are not keeping it to themselves. They are not trying to just isolate themselves. They actually, like, they give us a chance to build this cool multi-lingual fan page. They are our first customer. So, you know, they... They're taking care of their own. And they're being cool about it. They give us a chance to use our technology to build something cool, give us a market. And now it's up to us to take advantage of that then. You know, they're doing very cool things like that. So they're definitely not hurting. You know, it's not away from us. They're actually bringing a lot of... You know, there's a lot of similarities between when I'm old enough to know when Bill Gates hit the scene and was growing the computer industry was at a very early stage, like the mobile gaming industry. And what Microsoft did really well with Bill Gates and Balmer is they literally took care of their friends. I mean, they didn't hand it in. There's no charity, but there was a camaraderie in the industry where everyone grew together and they had that openness. And there was obviously some... If you didn't perform, you were bounced out. But for the most part, they brought in an ecosystem and everybody made money around them. That was something that really made Microsoft what they were. So I think the Angry Birds is on a good path there. Cool. I think actually a lot of investors around the world right now are looking at Finland hoping to find the next Angry Birds. They think that, you know, because that came from Finland, maybe there's something else there that nobody found yet. Yeah, and Zillion mobile developers did. Well, I mean, only this week, like Index Ventures leading, more or less leading VC in Europe, they invested into Shadow Cities, which is one of the Helsinki startups for guys on location-based gaming. Is there a Helsinki kind of Silicon Valley? Is there a part of town? Is there a part that's kind of like the cluster? Yeah, nowadays there is. There is this Alto Entrepreneurship Society and Alto Venture Garage, which is a physical facility where a lot of the current generation startups are coming from. Yeah, and the guy who runs that's pretty solid. Yeah. Yeah, Rimi. Yeah. He's involved in that, right? Yeah, but also the Alto... They were here on theCUBE. Yeah, and then some of the key guys are right now here in Silicon Valley trying to build an air bridge between Helsinki and the valley. Well, cool. We'll support that all the way. We're excited about the work you guys are doing. We're here inside theCUBE on the extraction point talking with the entrepreneurs from Finland, a huge contingent of entrepreneurs out here this week for a variety of networking reasons and the GDC, exploring opportunities, building relationships, hanging out with their famous buddies, the Angry Birds, Rovio guys, so great stuff. Let's talk about gaming. Gaming is hot. Gaming is not EA, it's not the big monolithic, huge CapEx investment, Hollywood-like high-end graphics, which don't get me wrong, I love the games that are on Xbox and PlayStation, but the Facebook, the social platform, Zynga, you got the iPhone, you got the iPad, created massive disruption. One, take us through from your perspective as entrepreneurs who've been in the mobile and gaming business. Talk about what's going on in the market today. What are some of the big dynamics with developers and with buyers, sellers, users? What do you guys see as the big macro mega trends? We'll start by Willie, what do you think? I mean, I spent the day today at the various, there is like pre-GDC summits where different, like special, like there were summits in specialty areas and there's a couple of key topics there where one was gamification, so basically taking game mechanics and game logic and applying that to pretty much everything else in life and in other businesses and that's a huge phenomenon right now. Yeah, like what you guys are doing, for instance, you're building... Can you give an example, give an example of some of the things you're mentioning? Well, I can actually tell a bit about what we've been working on recently. And so... You want to show the video? I'll do that in like 15 seconds. So basically, for example, at MicroTask we're building a platform for distribution of work globally so we can take very large, complex projects, subdivide those into super small one to two second pieces and then send them to the US, to China, to India, to Farmville, wherever we can reach people digitally. And we were contacted a while ago by the Finnish National Library and these guys basically have... I know I'm going to sound a bit like Austin Powers when I say that, but these guys basically have the whole Finnish cultural heritage and they've been digitizing that so basically back in the 60s and 70s they microfilmed that stuff and then 80s and 90s the microfilms were scanned and now they've been using things like optical character recognition to actually turn that text into a searchable format however the results have not been very good especially with the older documents they're in old fraktor fonts they are bad scans and so forth so like 30% of all the text they have is useless. So basically what we built for them is a way for feeding these I mean they started out with 4 million pages of text so feeding that to a bunch of volunteers people who just want to help in the process of electrifying the Finnish culture and actually if I can get the video playing I can show it to them. Yeah let's go to the video Rikki can you pull up the video on the screen here? So basically we built a website. This is also on YouTube as well. So we built a website called Digitalkot and people can log in log in on the website and play a couple of different games you should turn it on so okay so let's see if it plays here it is back on YouTube so hit the play button Rikki okay so anyway I hope you're getting playing there at some point we're in some technical difficulties with the mouse let's blow off the video Rikki you try to keep it playing we'll talk through it. So basically what does this game do? This is a video showing the game it's not actually interactive on YouTube it's just a demo. You can have a video showing the game and you can try it out if you just log in on the digitalkot.fi website so basically in the game we have a level where there's a bunch of moles the moles are trying to cross a river and what you need to do is to build a bridge to let the moles get safely across the river and the way you build the bridge is by typing in words that you see on the screen and those words are extracts taken from the old documents and if you type the word correctly then you get a piece of the bridge if you type it incorrectly you make a mistake then the bridge breaks and you go and drown the moles and drowning moles is a bad thing the way we actually know which you got a correct answer or not is that there's loads of people the moles are walking left to right you're typing like crazy that's the old fracture font so the way we figure out whether you got a correct answer or not is by sending the same tasks to multiple people and cross-comparing the results so they're essentially voting about what is the correct correct answer and that's what we do is they type the word in or is it a question and answer thing they type in the right word and on this level here it's an interactive game it's an interactive flash-based game it's Facebook integrated you log in with your Facebook accounts you can play against your friends you see how your friends are what's the core content on that the core content of the game just for like education or play from the point of view of the player it's a word typing game but from the point of view of the National Library what they get is they get their whole four million page archive no index it's going to take a few years at the current rate but they wouldn't have the budget to hire the people to do that so what do you think about gamification education because that's in the area that we're doing some research in at SiliconANGLE people know I've been talking about this new concept called Silicon Academy which is kind of a stealth project that we're working on it's going to be kind of a portal for education using games videos I mean everyone that I know who's under the age of 15 or 18 are on Facebook, YouTube maybe Twitter, maybe not but they'd much rather be interacting with some game mechanics for education than actually dealing with like old school one thing that's like I have a son who's two years old and he's a active iPad user so you know it's not just under 18 or something it's like the kids they love and they have something that he's doing a lot of things that he wouldn't really be able to do without having it on a computer or on an iPad otherwise certain puzzles and things like that would be too complicated because you mess up the pieces it's just meets too much organization skills but when it's on a computer they can just learn how to navigate the menus they actually get very interested in that he learned the alphabets when he was a two year old so games that people know today let's take this to a whole other level beyond play what is next for gaming I mean obviously play being farm you got Halo it's fun it's exhilarating then that's it what's going on in the game business non-play education, socialization integration values what are you guys seeing as the top trends there in products do you see anything I mean your game with the word game is nice I mean you can turn that into a fun play educational game it could be so it's taking advantage of play but not pure play you know what I'm saying yeah I think language learning is one thing where if you can make a game where you kind of learn while you're playing it you don't think about learning the language you learn how to advance in a game that's one very good example I've seen a couple examples learning Chinese playing a game how to draw the character which otherwise would be a tedious job it's very difficult but when it's part of the game you don't really think about that part you just want to win the game it's a user behavior it's like user behavior they pick up a book they open it up and they read chapter 1 they go to chapter 2 this is a process that's learned gaming it's the same thing you're saying is gaming can take the same mechanics you play the game and you drive the mechanics you win so that's a user behavior you see that porting over to other environments yeah that keeps you the motivation to learn it's a very short term motivation you don't think about learning to speak Chinese you think about advancing this one level much more what about socialization you guys are obviously from Helsinki with the internet now you can fly to Silicon Valley like it's New York that's a little bit longer flight but for the most part you've done the jet jetting over here the net gives you more access it is a flatter world we're living in so with mobile you can do business now without lugging a huge laptop so how's the world changing on a social basis with this new environment well one example is that our company is based in Finland and these days reside in Switzerland and we communicate like as if we were in the same office we communicate just as if we were sitting next to each other we don't really need to be in this I sometimes text my wife and she's in the other room you know when you're building a company you can actually hire a person anywhere in the world but that's a huge advantage you don't need to be tied to the same you don't need to ask people to move if you find somebody who's really talented you want to hire them you just ask them to join a company you don't need to tell them you have to move you have to take your family and move to another place you just hire them as part of your team regardless of where they are and that is really changing what do you think about the entrepreneurship world in Silicon Valley and around the world what's your observation around the current entrepreneurial climate it's fairly good especially like what we've been experiencing in Finland there's been a huge entrepreneurial boom over the last couple of years especially how is the mic working? so we have a little mic problem here hold on is the mic not working? ok so go ahead so there's been a huge boom over the last couple of years and the big thing is that the entrepreneurs are self-organized so it's in a housing we nowadays have it must sound a bit silly to you since you're based out of Silicon Valley but back a few years ago we had hardly any entrepreneurial events people didn't get that much together so you have something to go every night so it's been a how's the funding climate? it's now starting to get going in Finland it's international funding so recently we've been able to raise from foreign VCs like European mainly London based Swedish based Tallinn based VCs the Finnish VCC is fairly dead unfortunately so what do you guys think of in the US mainly Silicon Valley what's your perceptions of Silicon Valley right now? it's very vibrant I've said bubble but that's ok it's a good time for entrepreneurs no doubt if you're an entrepreneur out there Silicon Valley is smoking hot right now on the seed side of it seeing it from a far away it's very inspiring I don't know how it's in here maybe you're feeling that the bubble is bursting we visit here we come here for a few weeks we get energized I mean I have a lot of experience I've been through a bunch of cycles and I'll just say for the folks out there who are thinking about whether this is a bubble or not I saw some folks writing about it in New York and it's not a bubble happens here all the time in Silicon Valley that's where the innovation and the inspiration comes from entrepreneurs as you know as you get entrepreneurs together they like the mingle bubble which is a bubble where there is a bubble outside of the early stage because in IT there's actually a lot of real spending and real tangible value being transferred, cloud computing mobility is driving a lot of change so in the traditional IT environment we're seeing data we're here at Cloudera which is the home of Hadoop in the large businesses there's real spending, real change real infrastructure building and migration so there's no real bubble there for startups. I mean, when you've got the Angry Birds, you've got Apple, you know, the biggest tech company, you've got Facebook here in Palo Alto. I mean, you can't help but go, this is a crazy environment, crazy good. So, it's definitely really fun for your entrepreneur. So, you know, just be careful, right? I'm writing a post right now called Angel Dust, which is about talking about the angel financing market here. And it's for the first time I've ever seen in my lifestyle a bloodbath between angel roofs. So, you're seeing angel investors starting to, you know, kind of go to war with each other. So, you're seeing factions of early stage investors not working together. And that's just good. I think it's good competition. So, if you're a startup entrepreneur, there's a lot of money. I mean, you saw the Y Combinator News they're handing out money. Yep, you know, that's like, yeah, I mean, they're scratching a lot of lower quality startups. And a lot of these angel list stuff, a little bit lower quality from what people are talking about. But for most part, it's still a lot of activity, which is generally a great trend. So, I mean, I think, you know, you guys should, I mean, you're a little bit beyond the funding there, but for the most part, it's good. And I've heard people say, you know, they don't need financing. So, there's a big school of older entrepreneurs who are my age, who don't need 50,000 or 100,000, they fund it themselves. Because right now you can actually build a business with that money. You don't need to have like a huge team anymore. And you can get resources outside of Silicon Valley that are also hungry for this bridging and relationship building. So, I think you guys are in a good spot in the way you guys are coming over here. And I think the attitude for the, for all the Finnish entrepreneurs have been very solid. I've been very impressed with the quality and attitude among them. You guys are really you're hungry, you're smart, you got integrity. There's a good culture over there. So I think I see good things for the for the Finnish entrepreneurship movement over there. So cool. So any final comments you guys want to part, we're going to end the extraction point here, we're talking about gaming, we're talking about entrepreneurship, we're talking about Finland, the impact of entrepreneurship in Finland, impact of gaming in the world, mainly angry birds obviously from your neck of the woods, huge success globally. We are living in a gaming culture where gaming is not just a cult side demographic, it's now mainstream game mechanics are and game paradigms are integrating into user behavior, mainstream user interfaces, mobile. I mean, it's pretty exciting. So any final comment you guys want to share with the with the audience? And if you're attending GDC, try to somehow get your hands on a ticket to the Nordic party tomorrow. It's one of the scariest events of GDC. Is there a special like secret handshake, passcode URL? Yeah, but you will not remember anything the next day anyway. Yeah, any final comments? No, I just, you know, wanted to encourage people to, you know, really look at the gaming as, you know, you don't need to have a lot of resources to build something very cool. And there's a lot of room for innovation now with all these new devices coming out. You know, it's really exciting world and I'm very happy to be part of that. And your, your company is the premium fan page.com. Check it out as for me, who are you trying to reach with that? Well, anyone making games. So it's, well, not website owners necessarily. If you build an iPhone game, for instance, then what you really need is marketing, because the marketing channels within the phone are very limited. So you need to build a social media campaign. And for that, you need to reach people around the world. So, you know, we help you build social media streams, you do it in English, and we'll just get it out there in, you know, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, whatever. So you get the whole world covered with the same effort that you usually use just, you know, for for English social media marketing opportunity with you guys exactly for big corporations in the US to go international and not not big. I mean, yeah, small ones, actually, because there's big and small, you know, the big ones, the biggest ones, actually, they can afford to hire their own, you know, teams and your marketing or whatever are the small companies up until now, they didn't really have any chance for that because it required too much resources. So we are taking care of that. And it's very cost effective because it's crowd sourced. Still, we take care of the quality. So yeah, it's very, very good alternative for any size company. Great. And Willie, your company? Micro task. Yeah. Main product and audience you're trying to reach. Yeah, so, so the micro task core product is the micro task platform, which is a distributed work platform, as I mentioned earlier, for taking large complex work processes, subdividing those into small micro tasks and then tapping into a global labour pool. So you're able to source them where, wherever is the least, least expensive, we'd be focusing recently, mostly on text recognition. So things like processing of forms, like digitization of forms, digitization of archives, and we're advancing to areas such as business card scanning. Who's your primary customer that you want to reach that wants to give you money? I mean, right now, it's been national libraries. Those guys have massive, massive archives. So digitization, digitization, anyone who's interested in preserving and or moving step on then other other big areas are, for example,