Yesterday we reported that a big name team has come out with a new startup called Sofanatics. The team consists of Toni Laturi, CEO (former Valve managing director), Asmo Halinen (Apaja co-founder) as well as Sami Kuusela and Peter Nyman, a familiar face in Finnish television as he hosts one of the most known Saturday night shows Uutisvuoto.
We have gathered some further information and believe Sofanatics is a service focusing on sociel viewing. Wikipedia describes a social viewing service as a practice revolving around the ability for multiple users to aggregate from multiple sources and view online videos together in a synchronized viewing experience. Typically the experience also involves some form of instant messaging or communication to facilitate discussion pertaining to the common viewing experience. This would fit our earlier prediction of ‘something with video, football and doing all this is a social manner.’
Other such service include View2gether, Oortle and SeeToo.
Knowing the people behind the company and the fact that they have possibly looked for advice from Floobs, it is highly likely that they are focusing on sports. Integrating the service into some existing platforms (Think Facebook like networks for sports) for distribution might also make a compelling experience and a way for the service to pick up adaptation speed very quickly.
Laturi was looking into raising their first round of capital already early summer. I believe they have raised it successfully by now and we should see something coming out soon.
