Ville Vesterinen (@vesterinen) is running a very exciting mobile startups called Grey Area that has just released the game Shadow Cities. Next to being a CEO he’s also the chairman and co-founder of Arctic Startup which is said to be “the Scandinavian TechCrunch”. We want to learn more about Ville so we asked him these 5 questions:
1) What field do you think is the most inspiring with regard to the field you’re in?
I think location is really exciting with all the untapped potential. I’ve seen a lot of awesome stuff that’s not yet released that some friends are working on and we at Grey Area have only scratched the surface on what we want to do. Much of the exciting stuff around location is at the intersection of location and social and that’s also what I’m most bullish on.
2) When was fortune on your hand?
Being able to work with all the brilliant people is my lucky moment. They inspire me everyday by their example.
3) How did you end up as the CEO of Grey Area? What were the critical / turning points in this path?
I’ve known the other founders for years and last summer we sat down to talk about what Grey Area could be and we just all got really excited where we could take the company and the product. The product was already quite far at this point and one could imagine how it would change the way we will experience cities. I have always been really interested in rediscovering cities equally for those who live in the cities as well as for those who visit. Already in 2006 I co-founded a new type of city guide concept to explore cities and Grey Area is all about understanding the city in a novel way as a context for entertainment. But the critical piece for me is and always has been the people. I love to work with great people and I couldn’t imagine better and more talented people to work with than Andreas, Teemu and Mikko.
4) How will mobile gaming develop over the next 3-5 years?
I believe it will be much more social and context aware than anything we are currently experiencing in the mobile or even in the browser. Once we start to collect, use and understand the data that mobile phones can offer I also believe the experience will be personal and unique for each gamer much like in the web at the moment.
5) What question would you like to ask our audience after your talk?
I’d like to ask where and when they mostly play mobile games and if they are seeing their behavior changing.