Net

CrowdStar's Happy Aquarium & Happy Pets

Big congratulations to the CrowdStar team on the successfully launch of Happy Pets, yet another great social game on Facebook. In just a week Happy Pets went from 0 to 890,000 Monthly active users. Amazing.  Following Happy Aquarium's tremendous success not long ago, this is just shows that it wasn't a one off only. Keep a close eye on these guys - they are going to go far. Social gaming have just started to take off, and it is definitely not the-winner-takes-it-all market. There is plenty of room for new companies in this space. The key thing for all social games though, is to convert active users to active paying users. My advice: focus on optimizing mobile payments to a more salient place in the UI. 

Disclaimer: I sit on CrowdStar's advisory board.

DeNA invests in Aurora Feint

I’m very excited to announce that the Japanese gaming company DeNA has made a strategic investment in AuroraFeint, makers of the social gaming platform for iphone games - OpenFeint. DeNA has taken a 20% stake in the company and is going to play an important part in AuroraFeint's international expansion.

Aurora Feint is on a roll, or what do you say about this?

• More than 200 games in the App store
• More than 500 titles in development
• More than 2,500 registered developers

Big congrats to Jason Citron, Daniella Casseley, Peter Relan & the rest of the AF-crew!

Disclaimer: I’m an advisor & shareholder in AuroraFeint.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Innovation Day 2009 Berlin Oct 29

 

I'm going to be a Panelist at Deutsche Telekom's Innovation Day 2009 in Berlin on Oct 29, together with Julie Meyer (Adriane Capital) Aza Raskin (Mozilla) Norbert Bolz, and Christopher Schläffer (Head of Innovation & Products, Deutsche Telekom. The panel will be moderated by Bruno Giussani, Director of TED Conferences in Europe.

Internetdagarna, Stockholm Nov 3

Giving a keynote the rise of the Social & Real-Time Web. Internetdagarna is organized by the Internet registrar .se. I will also meet with Centr.org, the Council of European Top Level Domain Registries to participate in a workshop on marketing domain names through social media. Let me know if you want to meet in connection to any of these events.

China bans foreign investment in Online games industry

This is very disappointing for many foreign investors eyeing the Chinese Online games industry. General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) issued a an order on Saturday prohibiting foreign investment in domestic online gaming operations through joint ventures, wholly owned enterprise. GAPP ever goes so far as to prohibit foreign firms from indirectly influencing Chinese gaming firms through agreements or technology support. This is really outrageous but not at all surprising. After all, this is China and the Online gaming market is mushrooming and is estimated to reach value of $3.5-4 billion this year so why not make sure that you're in control & keep the revenues inside China? Thanks to Frank Yu for the hat tip.

Digital Chocolate To Use OpenFeint

Digital Chocolate, one of the most frequent publishers of iphone games is going to use OpenFeint for scoreboards and achievements. This is a huge win for OpenFeint, that already has more than 3 million active users on its platform and more than 200 games in the app store. I have covered OpenFeint several times before here . Also check out the interview Jason Citron, Peter Relan & I gave to TUAW some time ago. If you are an iphone game developer integrate OpenFeint immediately! You won't regret it. Follow: OpenFeint on Twitter for more frequent updates. 

Disclaimer: I'm on their advisory board.

WEF Summer Davos China 2009 Facts & Figures

WEF Summer Davos (China 2009) Facts and Figures See you there!

Summer Davos, Dalian next week

Next week I'm off to Beijing for my first board meeting with P1 which shall be really exciting and then I'm straight off to the Annual Meeting of the Champions 2009 also called "Summer Davos" in Dalian, China. If you're going to be at the event and want to meet up please ping me.

Profiled in Swedish Metro

I was recently interviewed by Metro about life after Facebook.  As usual there are some mistakes in the article and some quotes are taken out of context, but otherwise pretty okay.

Minigore - Now live with OpenFeint

The anticipation has been great for Chillingo's Minigore and it is now here. Minigore is a survival shooter game with two great on-screen joysticks. I am pretty sure this game will end up if not as number one in  iTunes app store - so as one of the top games. The most interesting part is that although Chillingo announced Crystal - its own social gaming platform, Minigore has chosen to integrate OpenFeint instead.

OpenFeint vs. Ngmoco's Plus+

In the battle heating up over social gaming platforms Pockergamer has a great write up and comparison. After laying out all the other competitors it decides to take a deep dive with OpenFeint and Ngmoco's Plus+. Needless to say, OpenFeint wins big time over Plus+ in three out of four critical categories!

Disclaimer: I'm an active advisor to OpenFeint.

How To Create an OpenFeint iPhone app in 19 min

creating an OpenFeint iPhone app from scratch from Alan Taylor on Vimeo. What are you waiting for? Put some serious social plumbing into your iphone games yourself by integrating OpenFeint today!

OpenFeint Launches 2.0 - Social Community platform

I'm going to be at Casual Connect (June 21-22) next week in Seattle on behalf of Aurora Feint / OpenFeint. Let me know if you want to meet up and learn how OpenFeint can make your games more social and how you can cross-promote your games on the OpenFeint platform.

Oh BTW, OpenFeint just announced the OpenFeint 2.0 social community platform for mobile games :

OpenFeint Social Discovery

OpenFeint Social Discovery supports multiple approaches to discovering games and game content in the App Store

Discovery Lobbies: Chat with other people from any OpenFeint enabled game and discover what they are playing. See the name of the game every player is chatting from alongside each and every message. Clicking on the game's name or icon will take you its iPurchase Catalog where you can click Buy Now to go directly to the app store and purchase the game.  

What are my friends playing:

Clicking on a person in the friends tab shows you a list of all the OpenFeint games they have played. Clicking on any of those games will take you to its iPurchase Catalog page from where you can click Buy Now to go directly to the app store and purchase the game.

Social Challenges: Send a challenge to your friends including those even playing a different game! Your friend will receive the challenge when opening any OpenFeint enabled title. From there, they can see click to the challenge information and are given the option to purchase your game from iPurchase if they don't already own it.

Screenjelly on CNN

Wow, Screenjelly is on a roll. Thanks to the fabulous Chris Pirillo.

Quick Screen recording with Screenjelly

It is always a great to see a project that you have been working on go live. Today is such a day. Veodia, a company I have been actively advising is finally launching Screenjelly. Screenjelly is the result of Veodia's acquisition of the French company Screentoaster.

The idea behind is very simple, we all find ourselves in the situation where we are trying to explain to others what is going on our our desktop. For instance, a software that you downloaded got stuck, a program you are using freezes or you get lost when using a web service. That is when screenjelly can come handy. Instead of rather trying to explain to people what the problem is in words, you just Screenjelly it and share it over Twitter or Facebook etc to get feeback.

Some of the user scenarios that I see is for Screenjelly is:

• Bug reporting
• A developer that want so share some cool code he is working on
• Web designer needing quick feedback on a design he is working on
• Alternative to support ticket
• Consumer feedback on Web services or software
• When you just want to show something cool on your desktop
• You name it

Big congrats to my good friend Guillaume Cohen and the fabulous Veodia team for this very simple but useful service!

OpenFeint Is On A Roll

OpenFeint is really on a roll. The developers keep on signing up, new cool games are being launched and the interest from bigger game publishers & developers is huge. Here's a couple of links to recent coverage about OpenFeint:

AuroraFeint to roll out OpenFeint 2.0 a gaming platform for the iPhone
How OpenFeint plans to become to mobile social gaming what Facebook is to web apps
OpenFeint 2.0 social community platform released
OpenFeint 2.1 beta supporting iPhone 3.0 from today
Tuaw interviews openfeints Peter Relan, Net Jacobsson and Jason Citron
Net Jacobsson joins OpenFeint Advisory Board