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Monday, Aug 30, 2010 / Writer: Juhani Lassila, Director PR & Communications

We're challenging you to help the disaster victims in Pakistan


As most of you may have heard, Pakistan has been hit by a terrible natural disaster. The Indus and 5 other rivers have flooded, destroying villages and cities and rendering 20 million people homeless, and 10,000 dead (and counting). The United Nations has called this the worst natural disaster of the decade. More people are affected by this than the 2005 Asian Tsunami, 2006 Kashmir earthquake and 2009 Haiti earthquake COMBINED.

Sulake has taken part in the aid by donating to Unicef. We challenge all companies (and individuals as well) in our industry to donate to the aid! There are of course many channels to do this, Unicef is one of them - to support Unicef, simply navigate to http://www.supportunicef.org/.


Wednesday, Aug 25, 2010 / Writer: Merja Turpeinen, Communications Manager

10th Anniversary of Habbo Hotel

As you probably know, this year we are celebrating the 10 th anniversary of Habbo Hotel. In the past decade Habbo has come a very long way and grown from a hobby project to the global community it is today. To show exactly how we’ve grown over the years, we’ve put together this short SlideShare presentation:

Habbo Hotel: 10 Years Old
(The texts shows better in Slide Share)

We were also really excited to see how Habbo fits into the 2010 Social Networking Map created by Flowtown.

The map is an updated tribute to a map of online communities created in 2007 by XKCD and shows how much our online world has changed and how big a player Habbo Hotel now is within the context of the world’s online communities and social networks.

We’re proud of how far Habbo Hotel has come and look forward to the next ten years.


Tags: Habbo Anniversary


Tuesday, Aug 24, 2010 / Writer: Juhani Lassila, Director PR & Communications

Young people identify with an online community almost as strongly as with their own family


Here's an interesting press release, which was released yesterday by HIIT (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology). It was already covered by some international media, so if you prefer to read it from an "independent source", check out e.g. CNET.

Young people identify with an online community almost as strongly as with their own family

Teenage online community users feel part of their online community almost as much as they feel part of their own family. An international study of the users of teenage online community Habbo reveals that users identify more strongly with the online community than with their neighbourhood or offline hobby group. The study is based on a survey with 4299 respondents from United Kingdom, Spain and Japan. All three nationalities yielded similar results.

The study was authored by Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT (currently a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo), and Professor Pekka Räsänen from the University of Turku, Finland.

The authors point out that peer groups are important for the development of adolescents' identity and values. The study addresses the question of whether online groups are standing in for traditional peer groups that are thought to be weakening in some developed countries. The results confirm that online groups can act as strong psychological anchoring points for their members. The authors conclude that games, social networking sites and other online hangouts should be seen as crucial contexts for today's youths' identification and socialisation experiences.

The results also suggest that in relatively young information societies such as Spain, online groups are more often "virtual communities" consisting of relative strangers. In mature information societies such as Japan, online groups are more likely to be a way of keeping in touch with family and friends. This may influence the experiences that youth receive from online groups in different countries.

The study, titled "How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups? A comparison between United Kingdom, Spain and Japan", is published by the Journal of Youth Studies, the leading international scholarly journal focusing on youth research.

Habbo is a popular teenage virtual world developed by Sulake Corporation. It has 15 million monthly unique visitors from over 150 countries, according to Sulake. The site is available in 11 local language versions and recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. 90 percent of Habbo users are between 13 and 18 years old.

For more information:
Dr Vili Lehdonvirta
tel. +81 90 7818 4470
e-mail: vili.lehdonvirta(at)hiit.fi

Professor Pekka Räsänen
tel. +358 50 567 2230
e-mail: pekka.rasanen(at)utu.fi

Tags: Habbo Insight