He saw wallpaper as a way of bringing beauty into people's lives. Everyone has this amazing canvas in the wall - you've got four of them surrounding you."
Robot wasteland
Another bright spark in the wintry Finnish night is robotics. ZenRobotics' Recycler robot sorts bits from a conveyor belt of rubbish, and uses artificial intelligence technology to learn to identify different waste objects.
Timo Taalas, the company's chief executive, says the capital's two universities, University of Helsinki and Aalto University, are quite strong in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
"The background of the founders was in artificial intelligence and robotics. We had to find a complex enough problem that could be solved with the combination of those," he says.
More than 200 gaming start-ups have followed the example of Angry Birds, created in 2009 by Rovio Entertainment in Finland's second largest city of Espoo. One, Best Fiends, the debut title of seriously, founded by former Rovio executives, had a million downloads in the week after its October release.