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The Chinese Gaming company The9 has invested in AuroraFeint – makers of the OpenFeint platform to bring OpenFeint to China & Android. Very exciting times for Jason & the team. I first got involved with OpenFeint as and advisor last year after I left Facebook & have been very impressed by the speed Jason Citron & his team have executed on their vision under the guiding star of Peter Relan, founder of YouWeb who incubated the company.

OpenFeint has over 2,200 live games for the iPhone, and will soon have publishers such as Astraware, Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile, Hudson Soft and others onboard.

With both Chinese and Japanese investors onboard (the Japanese gaming giant DeNA invested in the company last year) AuroraFeint is set up for a strong future presence  in Asia.

Very excited to see how the how the story unfolds.

Disclaimer: I’m a former advisor & a small shareholder in AuroraFeint.

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.

I’m in Guangzhou, China getting ready to talk at Tencent Mind 2009 Forum . Tencent’s conference for its biggest advertisers in China. It’s a great honor to be talking with QZone‘s General Manager Peter Zheng about social networks trends in China and in the world at large. Of biggest interest to the 500 advertising executives invited to the conference is probably the return of investment for advertisers on social networks. 

A year ago I was interviewed by Rebecca Fannin, international editor of the Hong Kong weekly Asian Venture Capital Journal and former International News Editor at Red Herring for her upcoming book: Silicon Dragon: How China Is Winning the Tech Race“.
The books message is that we shouldn’t be surprised if the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates will be coming form China.
Through an in-depth account of the new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs that is challenging the U.S. for global high-tech leadership, Rebecca is trying to take the reader behind the scenes to provide an up-to-the-minute account of a phenomenon that is just now breaking the surface in mainstream media and business press.
I was one of the entrepreneurs interviewed through my involvement in Maxthon as was Jeff Chen, Maxthon’s founder. Rebecca just let me know that the book will be hitting the shelfs anytime soon and you can pre-order it already from Amazon (see link above).
I have not yet read the book, but for anybody interested in how the Silicon Dragon is taking on the U.S for global high-tech leadership I think it will be very interesting reading.

Last year when I was visiting Hong Kong and met with the Simon Lee & the guys at Bullpoo, they complained that there where not enough web entrepreneurs in Hong Kong. And if there were, they were not aware of each other. I then suggested that the meet up with a few people I had been in contact with and start meeting informally for drinks once a month. Guess what? Today Simon tells me over Skype that the initiative I started have just resulted in the fourth Hong Kong Web Start up Meet up, and they were almost 200! Amazing!

EditGrid hosted the last meetup, Yahoo HK have started to show-up and  Catharina Maracke from Creative Commons was there as well. I am really excited about the fact that it was started on my initiative and in one year has grown to such an extent. There is nothing more gratifying than being able to help and connect people with each other.

And of course, what event/group can be taken seriously if they don’t have their own Facebook group? Join HK Web 2.0 on Facebook here.

I for sure will come by next time I have an opportunity to join the meetup. Good luck – and thanks Simon for sharing the story.

Last week I attended the First Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford University, organized by CRV’s Susan Wu and Charles Hudson

and reported about it here. On the panel “Are virtual goods the next big business model?” I realized that I this really might be the case. 

Accel’s, Kevin Efrussy who invested in Facebook, got a lot of question about Facebook’s introduction of virtual gifts. Kevin said that if he who is a pretty boring non-cool person with pictures of his kids on his profile got gifts that people have paid $ for – then imagine what people (read attractive girls) who are cool & in receives! 

Susan Wu also reported that prior to the panel she got a virtual pizza thrown in here face by somebody she didn’t even knew. And this person paid for that. How weird is that? Although virtual goods is extremely popular in Asia and a huge revenue generator the uptake in the US and Europe has been very slow. Enter Facbook. Min Kim from Nexon, added that Facebooks introduction of virtual goods is paving the way for a general acceptance of virtual goods outside of China, and in particular in the US. Judging from the popularity of virtual goods on Facebook – he just might be right.

But why on earth are people buying bikini’s to their girlfriends avatar or virtual flowers that dies after two weeks?

According to Doppelganger‘s Tim Steven, its a real expression of affection, identity and emotion. People really feel just as proud wearing a pair of branded jeans in a virtual world as in real life walking across the school yard. It’s the expression of the same thing. Moderating the panel Susan Wu, clearly stated that she would invest in a company selling virtual goods on Facebook! We have just got used to all the applications being launched on Facebook by companies hoping to gain distribution like a Trojan horse, now be prepared for the same companies getting ready to sell virtual bikinis, pizzas and why on iPhones to make some money too.

So are virtual goods the next big business model? Probably. If Habbo hotel make 90% of their revenues on virtual goods, they sell more furniture than IKEA and girls in Korea spends more money on their virtual haircut than on their real – there must be something in it…

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Nexon, vgsummit, virtual goods, virtual worlds

I have been following the guys from Cooliris for a bit more than a year now and today they came to see me and demonstrated their new product: Piclens. Piclens delivers an immersive and full-screen experience for viewing photos on the Web. By downloading a browser plugin, you can search and browser images from Google, Flickr, Yahoo, Friendster and more in full-screen theater like mode. I think it really rocks and totally changes the way images can be experienced on the Web.
Download Piclens here!

Technorati Tags: piclens

Here are some additional thoughts I have for the next Le Web 3.

1. Lifehacker competition
2. Virtual goods, world & economy panel/speakers
3. Bootstrapping – building the most effective and cheapest bootstrapping budget

Technorati Tags: bootstrapping, leweb3, lifehacking, Lifehacks, vgsummit2007, virtualworld