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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Openfeint

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

Qzone‘s General Manager Peter Zhen and I shake hands after the social networking panel at the Tencent MInd 2009 Forum in Guangzhou. My friend and moderator Gang Lu on the right. Some videos posted afterwards: 

I am very excited to announce that I recently joined AuroraFeint‘s Advisory Board. Aurora Feint is the company behind the tremendously popular Massive Multiplayer iPhone game, Aurora Feint and more importantly, behind OpenFeint the Social Gaming Platform for the iPhone that recently announced OpenFeint 2.0 in connection with the WWDC covered by Techcrunch.

I’m very impressed by how the two creators of AuroraFeint, Daniella Cassley and Jason Citron managed to develop such a great game and then move to a social gaming platform in no-time signing up popular titles like: Pocket God, SticksWars, MyBrute, Knights On Rush, iDracula, EpicPetWars, Ankagua3D, KnowitAll, Optime 4 in a row, Sneezies and many more. Over 3 million users have now joined the OpenFeint social community.

What is then OpenFeint 2.0 and why should you care? Well, if you’re an iphone game developer you have probably realized how increasingly difficult it has become to be discovered in the iphone app store. Just as social discovery through friends and people you care about drove the usage and engagement of applications on Facebook, it’s going to become very important for games on the iPhone. Through social discovery, your friends become the filter for what is relevant and important to you in a sea of clutter. People are more likely to download applications and play games if they discover that their friends are using them.

OpenFeint 2.0 is really all about answering the question What Are My Friend’s Playing?‘
in a myriad of ways. The developers of Aurora Feint has taken every
piece of OpenFeint and injected a healthy dose of Friends into it.
Every page you look at, from a game’s iPromote page to your
achievements list, has social context.

iPhone games that have integrated OpenFeint have seen a significant boost in sales as a result of the social discovery features embedded in the platform. The developers I met with are very excited about OpenFeint 2.0 and what an impact it will have on their games in terms of user-engagement and the fact that you don’t have to worry about developing leaderboards, achievements, profiles, chat rooms and friends list imported from social networks. The best of all is that it only takes around 30 minutes to integrate.

Since I had the privilige to work on Facebook Connect related stuff while at Facebook before it was rolled out in the open, I am very excited to see that through OpenFeint 2.0 game developers get full Facebook Connect integration as well as Twitter and MySpace integration – winn!

So if you’re an iphone developer that want to provide your game with some powerful social plumbing and boost your sales don’t hesitate go here now: OpenFeint and if you want to get in touch with the team at AuroraFeint – feel free to reach out to me directly.

Click here to get OpenFeint now.

I was recently interviewed by Rebbecca Fanning for Asian Venture Capital Journal about VC’s facing global challenges. The cover story describes how VC’s are spending more time (than money) huddling in conference rooms with CEO’s and entrepreneurs, revising business plans, bugets and strategies. Some interesting data points:

• Asian fund-raising peaked in 2008, with a jump of 8% to $20 billion in new funds. In the first quarter of 2009, Asian venture fundraising plummeted to $1.7 billion. The first quarter 2008 comparable was $6.9 billion.

• In Asia, investment declined 22% to $22.3 billion in 2008. The first quarter of 2009 recorded 114 deals totaling $1 billion, compared to 375 deals totaling $8.2 billion for the same period in 2008

My advice to entrepreneurs struggling in these tough times (by no means meant to be comprehensive) can be found at the end of the article.