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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.

Congratulations to CrowdStar & Facebook for entering into a five year strategic relationship around Facebook Credits. I remember a little more than a year ago when I had just walked out of the door at Facebook and I first got involved with CrowdStar. In those days they were called HotBerry and had some of the most popular trivia apps on Facebook. I worked with CrowdStar as an advisor before I launched my own company PlayHopper and initiated the first meeting between the two. Its amazing how far they have come in such a short period of time and wish all the best to Suren, Jeff, Peter and Niren.

Disclaimer: I’m a former advisor to CrowdStar and a small share holder.

Congratulations to Jason & the Aurora Feint crew on launching OpenFeint X - the coolest thing since sliced awesome! Now you can build free-to-play iPhone games just like the ones on Facebook with virtual goods, micro-transactions,  millions of players and all that stuff! Aurora Feint rocks the iPhone games market once again. If you are a game developer – don’t be a looser ! Integrate OpenFeint now & get that Xbox-live experience in your iPhone game + million of users. Nuff said. Disclaimer: I’m an advisor.

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.

• What are the pros and cons of an apps only strategy?
• What are the best practices around a hybrid website/app approach?
• And, is there still such a thing as a website only strategy?

This and many other questions will be discussed at the Consumer Web – User Acquisition in the Era of App Platforms panel  that David Hornik, August Capital, Jason Oberfest, MySpace, Rashmi Sinha, Slide and myself will participate in moderated by Dave McClure, Founders Fond this Friday at TieCon 2009.

What do you think? What is your take on the above questions?

Dear friends, I am no longer with Facebook and am now going to spend the near future exploring new ventures. I you are interested to talk to me, please contact me using the contact details to the left. You may also leave a voice mail on: 650 488 7688.

Stay tuned for more.

Rebecca Fannin have just published her book "Silicon Dragon – How China is winning the tech race". I was interview by Rebecca a year ago on my role in Maxthon. Now the story is out – with some great quotes from my buddies Morten Lund and Bill Tai as well as Maxthon founder Jeff Chen. The book is a very interesting and entertaining read on Chinese entrepreneurship – believe me it is like nothing else…My claim to fame in this book is :

Jacobsson’s skip to Facebook is symbolic. He is one of the first tech entrepreneurs to leap from a Chinese to an American start-up, as sign of the growing stature of made-in-China technology..

Although I really didn’t have time to go Jeff Pulver’s Facebook party given my new job, new child and relocation errands, I’m glad that I stepped by. Letting your Facebook friends connect with each other over free drinks is definitely a great idea. Everyone was wearing stickers with their name, company and tagline. Anyway, I made some new acquaintances and had a chance to catch up with some old friends. Kudos to Jeff for inviting me and for the great idea.  I wonder if there are any other Facebook networking events like this around the world? (In the picture Jeff, me and Ouriel).

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