I’m very excited to announce that Horizons Ventures, the venture capital fund fully owned by Mr. Li Ka-shing , together with Harbor Pacific Capital has invested $5 million dollars in Ginger! Ever since I first started to work with Horizon Ventures while still at Facebook back in 2007, I knew that I wanted to work together with them again. Horizon’s unique passion for education and artificial intelligence coupled with a unique global network (especially in Asia) and a very strong “can do” approach, was my main reason for choosing them as an investor.
I am also very excited that Frank Meehan will be joining Ginger’s board. Frank and I worked together on the partnership between Facebook and INQ Mobile which resulted in the award-winning INQ1 at the Mobile World Congress in February 2009. Beside being a VC with Horizons Ventures, Frank is also active as the CEO & founder of the exciting London-based Kuato Studios leveraging AI and gaming technology to teach children computer programming.
I am also very happy that Harbor Pacific Capital, a small venture capital firm with close connections to Li Ka-shing has invested in Ginger as well. Harbor Pacific Capital has invested in companies great companies like Evernote and Palantir just to mention a few and are very active in Asia.
With these great new partners on board and with some more fuel in the tank, it’s time to get things done!
Techcrunch: Money Talks: Ginger Software Raises another $5.4M Led by Horizons and Harbor Pacific for Speech Apps.
Bloomberg: Li Ka-shing Acquires stake in Language Company Ginger
Facebook’s initial crew moving on to new start-ups.
Some of my former facebook colleagues and myself were featured in a great piece by The New York Times on new companies stared by ex-facebook employees.Will be very interesting to see what can of companies the growing number of X-facebookers will create in 2011.
PlayHopper was outed by CNN as one of 6 new ventures by Facebook veterans last week.
PlayHopper was outed by CNN as one of 6 new ventures by Facebook veterans last week.
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.
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.
- 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?
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The Israeli elections were just held earlier this week. Inspired by what we at Facebook did with CNN during the inauguration of President Obama, and Nana10 & Israeli TV Channel 10 decided to totally by themselves launch a similar integration. What was impressive, was the fact that they did it all by themselves and manged to even upgrade the integration by allowing people to actually comment on the live reports during the live stream, not just making status updates.
The Nana team told me afterwards that the reactions were so positive that they have decided to luanch similar integrations for the very popular reality show “Survivor” as well.
Kudos, the Nana team for being so innovative and showing the world what you can do with Facebook Connect. I am postive that this will inspire other media companies to follow suit.
To learn more about how you can implement Facebook Connect to make the world more open and social, just follow this link. Everything you need to know is here and you woun’t need any approval or support from Facebook to launch it.
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