P1 – the exclusive invitation-only social network focused China’s luxury market is in a sweet spot. The luxury market has almost totally recovered from the recession. Sales in China grew an astounding 30 percent year-over-year, reaching almost $13 billion. China is projected to become the 3rd largest consumer of luxury products and services by the middle of the decade as reported by Luxury Daily.
In 2020 the affluent class in China will reach 120m (12% of the urban population) and the upper middle class is projected to reach 600m (60% of urban population). Other social networks like Kaixin001, Renren.com, 51.com and QQ wil only be growing the middle class, totally ignoring the affluent class. This is great news for P1 who are totally focused on this demography. A recent article in Forbes covered “Selling to China’s luxury market 101″ but if you really would like to tap into this market my recommendation is to get in touch with the fabulous crew at P1.
Disclaimer, I am a board member of P1.
Sesame street – step a side! Here come Baby Juno! I’m very excited to announce that I have joined the Juno Company advisory board. The Juno Company is an amazing little San Francisco based company that is focused creating a fun, witty and engaging musical experiences for pre-schoolers. The Juno Company have already won several Emmy Awards and was founded by classical composer and mom, Belinda Takahashim her husband Adam Adelman.
There are several reasons why I decided to get involved in this company, first of all my kids absolutely love Juno DVDs’ and toys. Second, as a passionate music lover, I was just blown away by Belinda’s beautifully orchestrated compositions recorded by real live orchestras. Juno also have very strong social responsibility program: For every for every Juno product sold through the company’s website, the company will donate a special music education DVD to a child in need through K.I.D.S. as a part of their One-For-All-program. This is a great initiative I’d like to help grow.
I really believe in this team and think that the Juno Company is going to be the next Sesame Street. They are already already killing it retail byt totally taking over FAO Schwartz store in New York, the biggest such launch FAO Schwartz have done for decades, selling nation wide through Buy Buy Baby & Amazon and soon rolling out in Toys-r-Us.
I will be helping the Juno Company with digital and social strategy. And I’m not alone, I am joining a great company of advisors: Brooke Shields (narrated all Juno books), Andrew McCollum (Facebook co-founder), Bernard Gershon (former Disney SVP & GM) Peter Safran (The Safran Company) and Dr. Dorothy Singer (Yale). The great thing is that these are not just passive advisors but very active advisors. The way it should be.
If you are interested in partnering or working with the Juno Company bringing highly engaging musical edutainment to kids, feel free to reach out and I’ll hook you up.
PlayHopper was outed by CNN as one of 6 new ventures by Facebook veterans last week.
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.
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.
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