We met Simon, the founder of Linklib, last year and just knew he was cool. He is our only film director founder in WebFWD… and you’ll see why!

“Hi Mozillans!

We’re really stoked to be part of WebFWD! We believe that an open internet is the way forward for artists and creative people. We want to be part of WebFWD’s community because we want to learn how to build a sustainable business by creating tools for filmmakers to engage their audiences and find new ways of financing their films.

Here’s a short intro of me, Hampus and Linklib that we’re building together. Looking forward to meeting you all soon!

— Simon Klose, co-founder

Simon Klose

Simon grew up loving languages and fearing technology in Lund in the south of Sweden. After graduating from law school he started making documentary films. This fall, he’s putting his finishing touches to the definitive documentary about the file sharing site the Pirate Bay. When Kickstarter’s servers where on the verge of crashing as fans flooded to back his crowd funding campaign in 2010, Klose realized the importance of engaging one’s audience.

After four years of filming, Klose had close to 200 hours of footage that had to be cut down to a 90 minute film. He couldn’t help to shake the feeling that the stranger-than-fiction Pirate Bay-tale was much more complex than the story he could squeeze into a 90 minute feature documentary.

At Mozilla’s MozFest in 2011 Klose got help by the community to hack a way to embed links into his documentary and send them time synched to the audience’s phones. That way he could tell all those additional stories without ruining the traditional full screen viewing experience. And Linklib was born.

Hampus Söderström

Hampus Söderström is a Swedish programmer from Lund, Sweden who has built a flourishing online gaming community around his martial arts game Toribash. After 10 years of Unix programming at IBM and various Swedish telecom companies Söderström designed a game that combined simple animation, physics and user-generated martial arts

But Söderström didn’t just want to make another fighting game, he wanted to create an online community where users could design and share their own fighting techniques. So Söderström included a wide range of community-building tools—including chat, wikis, and discussion boards—outside of the main game play. The developer’s site also hosts an active marketplace where users can sell and buy virtual additions for the game’s characters for cash or credits. Today Toribash has become a virtual community with more than 40,000 members. When Söderström doesn’t crank out code he’s on the beach kite surfing.