Sami Salmenkivi is an award winning non-fiction author of three books. 

Overall winner of the The Finnish Association of Marketing Communication Agencies’ (FAMCA) Golden Feather awards in 2008 and a silver prize winner in 2013.

To date, Sami's books have been cited in 376 other books and publications. Including scientific papers in publications such as Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing, Journal of Media Business Studies, and International Journal of Interactive Communication Systems ans Technologies.

The books have been published by Talentum, one of the largest business book publishers in the Northern Europe.

Paper Fruits the first game from the new gaming company Sami Salmenkivi has co-launched. It is a word based puzzle game combining game elements from Candy Crush Saga, Scrabble, and Tetris with a live-action multiplayer game, and contemporary flat graphics.

Launched in March 2016 in Finland for beta-testing, the Paper Fruits game went straight to #1 on the App Store top charts as the most downloaded iOS word game in the country, and 6th most downloaded app overall. After the beta-testing period, the game will be launched worldwide in the summer 2016.

The development team has game developers, programmers, designers, and entrepreneurs with experience in launching several successful companies. The team has experience from over 10 game development projects, some of which have been featured in Google Play and in App Store. The has experience of working in projects published by Chillingo and 6waves, some of the top publishers in the world.

Salmenkivi is the main game and UX designer and the Art Director for the game.

What? Watch is a Swiss lifestyle and watch brand launched in New York in the fall 2015. The company's hybrid watches combine classical watchmaking with digital mono-functions in distinctive and original ways, but they are not called smartwatches.

Sami oversaw a branding and marketing strategy creation for a new global smartwatch brand What? and led all marketing related activities for the company 2014-2016, ranging from the build of the e-commerce platform to social media planning, influencer marketing, and PR to deliver an end-to-end customer experience. He was also responsible for the successful launch of the brand in Brooklyn. Media from tech publications The Verge, CNET, and Engadget to business publications like Fast Company to lifestyle magazines Esquire and GQ to the trendsetting Highsnobiety and Uncrate wrote about the brand. People around the world are embracing it and buying the watches in quantities. Some models sold out already two months after the launch.

Sami Salmenkivi is a co-founder and co-owner of Skyr Finland Ltd, a company that is arguably the most successful fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand introduced in Finland this decade. Skyr is now the market leader in its category in Finland.

In February 2015, the company was 112th fastest growing company in Finland among all companies. Skyr Finland imports, distributes, and markets Icelandic yoghurt-like fermented milk product called Skyr. Skyr Finland also takes part in further developing the product, for example by creating new flavors. In fact, the most popular flavor of Skyr in its native country of Iceland, where the tradition of eating Skyr spans hundreds of years, is one that Skyr Finland has developed.

Sami Salmenkivi has been a keen underwater photographer for over a decade. The search for the best reefs to photograph has taken him around the world from Fiji to Mozambique, Papua to Cook Islands and Philippines to Tanzania.

Before setting up his own companies, Salmenkivi was a Planning Director at TBWA\Helsinki, one of the most innovative and creative offices within the global TBWA network. The Gunn Report named TBWA\elsinki in the top 10 digital agencies in the world in 2013, the last year Sami worked there.

Salmenkivi has been in a lead role in planning marketing for companies such as Columbia Sportswear, Nokia, Ernst & Young, Stora Enso, Veikkaus, Kemira, Audi, Koskenkorva. 

Sami has been involved in a lead role in several marketing strategies on a global, European, and national level, ranging from brand strategies and digital marketing strategies down to tactical plans and guidelines.

Sami is a recent graduate of the Documentary Director Conservatory Program at the New York Film Academy where he attended from 2013-2014. He has spent most of his free time pursuing this passion and traveling the globe documenting the changing underwater world. Sami has dived, photographed, and filmed underwater all around the world, from Norway to Mozambique, Fiji to Papua. He is honored to have dived with some of the best underwater photographers and preeminent authors and authorities in the field, including the National Geographic. His interest in the underwater world has sparked his desire to make documentaries about the oceans, including one on tuna fish to be released later this year. 

He has also worked as a Director of Photography. Sami was the DP for a documentary film All in My Head that premiered at DOC NYC, the largest documentary film festival in the United States, in 2016. He has also shot commercial videos for companies such as Neste, Volvo, and Symbio. This year he worked with Prince Ea, a spoken word artist with a half a billion views to create content for Neste, one of the world’s leading renewable energy producers. 

The Last Generation, directed by Sami Salmenkivi. 

Hunt the oceans with a 12th generation fisherman in search of the great fish.  After thousands of years of abundance, the blue fin tuna that has long fed Eric’s family now teeters on the verge of extinction, threatening to take traditional fishing cultures from Maine to Sardinia with it. Eric's daughter Annika would be the first tuna harpooning woman, if she continues the family tradition and the tuna population would bounce back.

 

Sami Salmenkivi runs a fish identification blog site. The site was started from the need to identify the creatures in underwater vacation pictures. Finding fish online is actually very difficult, unless you know the specific names of fish such as Freckled Hawkfish or Orangespined Unicornfish.

The purpose of the directory is to help find fishes based on shape, color or other identifications such as masks or stripes, as well as the fish families and regions. The Fish Directory is an open, free, and Creative Commons licensed.