metarand

RockYou Raises More Funding To Climb Virtual Superwall

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat has a great piece on RockYou’s move into the Asia Pacific region courtesy of another round of funding from strategic investors in the region, namely Softbank and SK Telecom.

Why Asia Pac you might ask? The answer is – virtual goods.

Cracking the formula for monetizing social networks via virtual goods is the current holy grail. Where better than China to learn the ropes – bigger than web advertising, virtual goods are a $1.2bn business there already.

In addition, Softbank ploughed $400m into Xiaonei – a socnet similar to Facebook, but ahead of the curve: they recently introduced a virtual currency system. Teaming up with these players is a smart move.

UPDATE: Facebook has started to head down a similar track – they’ve moved to a micropayments system as of today.

Tags: Rockyou, SK Telecom, Softbank, VentureBeat, Xiaonei

LinkedIn Looks Out For Users By Opening Platform

Reid Hoffman has announced that his professional social networking tool, LinkedIn, has opened up its platform to third party developers. The current roll out includes a suite of, eight external and one internal, apps that are aimed at enhancing user productivity through file sharing, project management, arranging business trips etc.

Tags: LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman

Open Mobile Markets: How To Drive Impetus

Open mobile platforms and markets are all the rage.

Apple generated $30m in the first month with its iStore, and has attracted a plethora of app developers of all shapes and sizes – from Electronic Arts through to start ups like Palo Alto-based Tapulous.

The first Android-powered GPhone is about to hit the streets and this means the Android market will be open for business. RIM is working on something similar and Microsoft is creating a platform for selling apps on its Windows Mobile systems called SkyMarket.

But take a closer look at the Android Market and one thing is glaringly obvious – it’s relatively deserted. Sure it’s a chicken and egg thing, but what made Facebook’s F8 platform so successful in gaining immediate impetus was the critical mass element.

Currently, only a handful of apps are ready for Android – MySpace has a basic version of its soc network ready, imeem’s Internet radio service and a number of weather related apps are the pick of the bunch.

Where is everybody? EA’s Spore, which is the best mobile game I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing would be a great marquee.

So here’s the rub. The beauty of the iPhone Store was that you could generate revenue immediately. The Android Market is currently missing that key revenue enabler – a closed commerce system.

As the number of app markets proliferates and the total addressable market mushrooms I suspect we’ll see a number of meta solutions appear. In particular meta systems that can market, track and monetize apps across all the platforms as well as tools that allow developers to code once, and release cross platform.

In the meantime, app store owners need to focus on getting traffic in the door, app developers buzzed about their platform and a monetization mechanism in place.

Tags: Android, Apple, iPhone, Microsoft, MySpace, SkyMarket

Social Media: Are Families More Connected, Sharing More?

As an initial touchpoint for this post I want to point to a comment made recently by Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Talking about Facebook’s redesign at the Future of Web Apps event in London, he noted that sharing amongst people is growing at an exponential rate:

“One of the things that we have thought about at Facebook – we don’t have any conclusions on it yet – but an interesting historical analogy is Moore’s Law.” (The Law stated that the speed of processors would double every two years.) “And I wouldn’t be surprised, although there’s no definitive link yet, if something like that exists with the rate of sharing.“

This is a key insight and one that is being backed up by a Pew Internet & American Life Project on Networked Families. The report explores how parents and spouses are arriving at a “new connectedness” through the use of key social media enablers.

Read Write Web has a useful summary of the report. Yes, there is always the need for cognizant balance between work and play, face time and screen time, but on the whole we are able to connect more with family and friends, colleagues and compadres. I want to explore this more in a piece I am writing, but it seems to me that we are on the cusp of attaining a whole new level of sharing and connectedness.

Tags: Future of Web Apps, Mark Zuckerberg, Pew

Pongr: Are Facebook Apps On The Nose? fbFund Finalists Announced

The Facebook blog has a post today titled, “Drumroll, please”, and goes on to announce the top 25 finalists in their fbFund Developer Competition. Running an eye through the list I’d suggest a clang of cymbals is more appropriate.

Many of the apps are merely derivations of apps that have long since fallen out of favor. And then there are the names – take Pongr as an example. Surely the guys behind this one could’ve thought of a more appropriate name for a mobile price checking app.

One of them does catch my eye though – GroupCard. Initially put into play at Stanford University, this app empowers users to rally their friends to sign the same printable online card to celebrate any occassion. Each friend can add a message, upload photos or audio, and even make a gift contribution.

That sounds like a really neat app.

Tags: GroupCard, Pongr

iPhone App Development Grows Up: Goldminers and Litigators Arrive

Last year the flavor was Facebook’s F8 Platform. This year it’s been all about iPhone apps. Fast followers, like Google, with Android, and RIM are emulating Apple’s app store, but the defining moment(s) that point to the platform having reached a stage of nascent maturity are twofold:

* firstly, the Sydney Morning Herald has cottoned on to the fact that there is good money to be made from developing apps – I’ll let you read the piece written by Asher Moses for yourselves, but I suspect/hope the developers will now descend on this new vein of “easy” moola;

* secondly, an iPhone developer has taken on Coors in a litigation over a beer drinking app emulation that users the iPhone’s tilt motion. Brave move, I wish Hottrix luck and hope their law firm is taking this on purely on contingency.

It will be great to see more developers tapping into these mobile app stores, but the key will be in keeping up the quality in the apps.

Tags: Android, Apple, Google, iPhone, RIM

App Stats Get More Useful On Facebook

Facebook, the Palo Alto-based social network, has released a new suite of Insights into application usage.

Rodney Rumford sums up why this is important for app developers:

For the first time i really feel like i have insights in to users behaviors and how a specific app compares to the average app on facebook across multiple criteria and data sets.

This will ultimately help app owners gain insights into how people use thier applications and areas where they can tune the application. While the insights are great; it merely means there is more data to sift through and analyze. This is a good thing if your mission is to align with the new focus of facebook on useful versus viral apps.

Tags: Insights, Rodney Rumford

How Much Do You Rely On Google? Web Services Redundancy Is A Big Issue

Reading this post from Steven Hodson I am forced to wonder whether putting all my email eggs into Google’s basket is a good idea.

I use gmail almost exclusively these days. I even route my corporate email through Google’s mail solution.

He makes a good point regarding customer service, but as a user, we should also seriously consider some form of redundancy when it comes to the web services we rely on. I don’t have the answer here, but believe this is a very serious issue.

“Great Apes!” Facebook Favorites Apps, Flushes Others

A year ago Facebook announced its F8 Platform – open architectured and a new frontier for all app developers to populate. But a chosen few apps were lauded as the leading lights. This gave a huge first mover advantage to a handful of players.

Today, Facebook has essentially named the frontier won. A select few apps will be chosen (not by the users, but by Facebook) as “Great Apps” and they will be rewarded with a higher level of visibility and early access to new features.

Other apps, essentially the “Great Unwashed”, will either be chosen to be part of an Application Verification program and receive some form of certification that gives users more assurances of their good character or they will be flushed to the lower recesses of the Facebook platform with the implied certification: “Install at Your Peril”.

I can see benefits for Facebook users, who have become saturated with spammy apps, but for developers who have built apps that deliver high levels of engagement and value to users, it remains to be seen whether the inside track will be fair and equitable. Facebook’s current track record in delivering on its developer promises is not crash hot at present — anyone remember the Facebook Fund?

Tags: Facebook

VentureWrap: Zynga Brings Kleiner Into Play With $29M

The Potrero Hill, San Francisco-based Mark Pincus social games venture, Zynga Game Network has closed a $29 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins.

New Kleiner partner and former Electronic Arts Chief Creative Officer Bing Gordon will be joining the board and getting actively involved in operations.

This follows a recent $10 million Series A and the investors in that round (Avalon Ventures, Foundry Group and Union Square Ventures) have participated alongside Kleiner and IVP in the Series B.

I suspect this funding will be used to fuel a number of acquisitions. This is borne out by Zynga’s additional announcement that they have acquired YoVille, a virtual-world app that has over 150,000 daily active users on Facebook.

[Hat tip to Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures]

Tags: Avalon Ventures, Bing Gordon, Facebook, Foundry Group, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Mark Pincus, Union Square Ventures, Zynga