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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 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.

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.

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.

A recent article in Wall Street Journal talks about virtual relationships and their affect on real relationships. According to a recent study cited we can learn the following about the cognitive processes in players brains:

• On a neurological level, players may not distinguish between virtual and real-life relationships
• People socializing in virtual worlds remain sensitive to subtle cues like eye contact – in one study, participants moved their avatars back if another character stood too close, even though the space violation was just virtual
• Our brains are not specialized for 21st-century media – There is not switch that says “Process this different because it is on the screen”.

More discussion at the MIT Advertising Lab and Neuromarketing

This is just awesome! Frets on Fire is a game about musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible. It’s an open-source project with hundreds of songs composed by the community and supports multi platform. In short it is open source guitar hero! How cool is that!

Features: 

• Unique inverted keyboard gameplay style
• Song editor  form making your own tunes
• Compete iwth others on the World Charts
• Supports importing Guitar Hero I-II songs
• Multiplatform
• Open source

Technorati Tags: fretsonfire, games, opensource, guitar hero, music

I told you and showed you about HiPiHi – China’s Second Life. Hold the fort! Here comes Frenzoo – Second Life for teenage girls in Hong Kong..According to Brand Republic “Frenzoo, an Asia-centric 3D virtual world aimed at teenage girls, will soon come out of stealth mode to connect consumers in a Second Life-like experience.“.Via Angus.

Technorati Tags: Frenzoo, HiPiHi, Virtual Worlds, Hong Kong, Second Life, SL

Have you ever wondered why there are is no advertising on loading screens of Flash-heavy sites? So does Adverlab , and they really raised a good point. I actually tend to skip Flash-based sites if they don’t load at once, and I dont think I am alone. Taking advantage of the loading time is actually a very good idea for either advertising or information snippets.

Susan participated in an Avatar panel at SXSW in Austin and shared some of her notes with us on Avartars, Virtual worlds and Gaming. She also points to a very interesting academic study on Game Studies (download).

Main points:

1. Games need more laughter in the slaughter
2. Players want to help other players do well in the game even when the game is competitive
3. Games need non-white characters who are not gangsters or criminals.
4. Gamers are less social than you think they are, less social than even THEY think they are
5. How do players learn to play? If it looks like a sniper, it should act like a sniper
6. Gestural interfaces that make sense, make sense for specific reasons.
7. You can quantify which factors matter most in immersive game design.
8. There are multiple ways to approach realism
9. There is such a thing as ethical videogame design
10. Death matters..

After a very good board meeting with Maxthon, I paid a visit to HiPiHi - Chinas answer to Second Life. This came about after I had written a short post on them earlier and got an invitation to swing by their office. Kaiser Kuo (Ogilvy) and Xinhua Liu (early investor in HipiHi & Technology Director at Burson-Marsteller).. also joined me.

Armed with camcorders, cameras and curious minds, we invaded HiPiHi physically and virtually. I must say that I was really impressed. I always felt like Second Life was too geeky and to inaccessible, and therefore had only signed in a couple of times and flied around out of boredom.

Not so at HiPiHi. They have been smart enough to realize that most of us deadly are not geeks and need a more user-friendly user-interface to motivate us enough to play around in this virtual world. Although they are just in private alpha, they have come along way with a team of just 60. The user is offered a bunch of pre-fabricated avatars, buildings, hills, rocks, objects and event water to furnish their own worlds. Should they feel for it later, the user can always customize or create any object from scratch as they see fit.

It is clear that HiPiHi has given much thought into making the virtual world more user-friendly. HiPiHi’s CEO Hui Xu (beside me on the picture above) explained to us that the service will be launched in four stages based on traditional Chinese creational mythology (read Kaisers summary for an expansion on this).

Revenues will come from virtual property sales and advertising. And I can definitely see how advertisers will love this. Especially since HiPiHi is targeting the young and cool rather than a bunch of geeks in pajamas or "social media stars".



I shot a couple of short clips of a walk-through in HipiHi-land with a simple digital camera. Comments are both in Chinese & English. More clips here.

I have a very good feeling about HiPiHi and am waiting eagerly for the public launch.

(Image above: Sunset in HiPiHi-land).