COMPANY

XIHA Ltd is a Finnish company established in fall 2007. The company develops and operates a global web service XIHA Life and the state of the art technology platform behind it. In addition to social networking features, XIHA Life includes a digital content store with integrated virtual monetary and payment systems.

MANAGEMENT

Jani has 15 years of experience in game programming and entrepreneurship. He started his career at Finnish game development companies such as Remedy Entertainment and Housemarque, before moving to Las Vegas, USA, in 2000. He led several demanding programming projects at EA’s Westwood Studios, best known for its Command & Conquer game series. A few years later he continued consulting to Electronic Arts and founded two game companies in the U.S.: Jollygood Games for PC casual game publishing and UMOCO for 3D mobile games. In 2005 he moved to Shenzhen, China, and founded a mobile and casual development studio with Xiaowen Sun.

Wen has several years of experience in business administration, web design and entrepreneurship. In 2005 she founded a software company in Shenzhen, China, with her spouse Jani Penttinen. Wen, who is a citizen of China, has strong interest in Western cultures and online communities. She has been developing XIHA Life from the beginning and is responsible for the site’s Chinese communities. Wen moved to Finland in 2007 to found XIHA Ltd, as was not easy to find top class software developers in China. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from a Chinese university.

Jan acts as an Advisor and Vice Member of the Board at XIHA Ltd. He is a co-founder of Hybrid Graphics, one of the most successful Finnish software companies, where he worked as a Board Member, Human Resources Director and Senior Software Engineer. Hybrid was acquired by NVIDIA, a Nasdaq-listed technology company in 2006. With his long and versatile experience, Jan has a notable position in developing XIHA’s early stage corporate strategy.

Taneli, a serial entrepreneur and dealmaker, has run all together 8 companies and held board seats in 13 Additionally he is a director of some committees and management groups for public technology programs for the Republic of Finland. Taneli is currently heading RunToShop as its CEO. Prior to that he was CEO and a major shareholder at IRC- Galleria (the largest social media company in Finland) which he sold to Sulake Corporation (the company behind Habbo Hotel) in the spring of 2007. He is also working with well-known social network sites Dopplr and Muxlim. In his spare time Taneli is an enthusiastic scuba diver and practitioner of Chinese martial arts.

TECHNOLOGY

XIHA's in-house developed technology platform allows intelligent, multilingual user generated content creation and tagging. Users can select not only their native language, but as many languages as they want to communicate with and create content on the site.

We are working on algorithms to automatically recognize and tag languages so we can filter out content in languages the users cannot understand. This will make the whole social networking experience much more valuable and relevant to the users.

BUSINESS AREAS

The first content category in XIHA Life's digital content store is downloadable PC/Mac games in casual games segment which are sold with so called Trial-to-Purchase model, allowing free evaluation trial on every title.

Casual games are targeted for mainstream audience and for people who enjoy easy, quick and fun games. Casual games business is the fastest growing game segment in the world with revenues growing over 40% a year. More info at Casual Games Association

Online social networking refers to Internet and mobile communities of people who share common interests and activities. It's certainly not a new phenomenon, as social aspects where part of the information services prior to the World Wide Web. In the 1980's, social networking occurred in electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's) and in the 1990's as website forums and chats.

The more recent boom in social networking services was initiated by Friendster in 2002, bringing attractive profile pages and making it easier for people to share user generated content, and connect to other people. Today, there are hundreds of social networking services on the internet, and millions of people use them every day. The best known networks include News Corp.'s MySpace, Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, Google's Orkut, AOL's Bebo and privately owned Facebook.

XIHA Life is focusing on multi-cultural aspects and monetizing on digital content. We believe in openness and are currently building methods for information exchange with other leading social networking services.