Author: Amanda Giasson

Next Games acquires Helsinki GameWorks.

Finland seems to be making a lot of mobile gaming news these days and the most recent is the creator behind the upcoming game The Walking Dead and other high-profile mobile games, Next Games, has recently acquired Helsinki GameWorks, a fellow Finish mobile games studio.

Next Games is excited about the deal as its new games will be launched soon.

The company’s CEO, Teemu Huuhtanen, said in a statement that he is very pleased to welcome employees from Helsinkin Game Works into their “family”. He added that “At Next Games we’ve focused on two key areas from the very beginning: building a robust portfolio and rock solid roadmap of games as well as ensuring we have an experienced team working on it. Joining forces is a logical move.”

The CEO of Helsinki GameWorks, Kalle Kaivola also stated that they are thrilled to be joining Next Games and said that being able to work with a talented team “on some of the most exciting IP in the world” is an opportunity that comes around once in a lifetime.

Kaivola has been appointed by Next Games as Head of Licensed Games and he will oversee the production of the upcoming game based on the popular AMC television series The Walking Dead. The game is called – The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land.

Helsinki is known for its mobile gaming talent.

The capital and largest city of Finland is home to Angry Birds creator, Rovio and Supercell, the studio behind Clash of Clans. Both companies have obtained huge success with their popular mobile game hits. Next Games wants to join these companies and become the next developer with the hit title.

However, the firm has no plans to wait until the launch of its first big mobile game. Its new acquirement will see the firm make a new product roadmap and add an expert group of game developers to its team, bringing its total staff to 45 from 33. The company intends to create a diverse portfolio of internally and externally developed games

Founded in 2013 by veterans from Supercell, Rovio, and Disney, Next Games raised $6 million earlier in 2014 from investors that include Jari Ovaskainen, Lowercase Capital, and IDG Ventures. It hopes to make a huge hit in the mobile gaming sector, a market which is anticipated to grow to $20 billion or possibly higher by the end of this year.

Nextbit has developed a new service that enables Android users to store and sync all of their mobile data online.

What makes this particular mobile technology unique is that it also allows users to store and sync the state of the actual apps, which means that if a user was working on a photo that was only half edited or they were in the middle of game, they can pick up right where they left off when switching from a smartphone to a tablet or vice-versa.

Users can instantly move a project, task or game to a device that is nearby.

The service that has been developed by the startup, which is comprised of a team of people who come from Google, Apple, Amazon and Dropbox, is called “Baton”. The service from Nextbit is also equipped with a feature known as “Pass”. This lets users instantly switch whatever app they are working with to a nearby device, waking the device from sleep mode and immediately launching the app on it at the same state, right where a user left off.

In other words, Baton is a system-level service that essentially gives Android users the ability to hit “pause” on any app they are using and send the app in this paused state to another device where the user can then resume whatever they were doing before making the switch.

Mike Chan, former Google alumni and the co-found and CTO of Nextbit said “We live in a multi-device world, and yet it’s still too cumbersome to switch between our devices.” He added that they have “taken the cloud and deeply integrated it into the Android operating system itself to provide a seamless experience between your phone and your tablet without any effort from developers.” Chan explained the service during a recent demo the company gave at the Code/Mobile conference in California.

The mobile technology does not require app developers to do anything for it to work.

Baton is not unlike Apple’s Handoff feature that has been included in the company’s most recent desktop and mobile operating systems, which allows users to switch tasks between their different iOS devices. However, the major downside with Handoff is it requires app developers to add it into their applications, which not all developers have done. Therefore, it doesn’t always work.

Nextbit, on the other hand, does not require developers to support its mobile technology or even know that it is there. Baton has been designed to remove the steps of finding the app and the proper files when the user switches their task between devices.