Rick Thompson is hoping that lightning strikes another time. Thompson was the chairman and co-founder of Playdom, the social game company that Disney bought last year for as much as $763 million. Now he has started a new game company, Wild Needle, focused on social games with a location twist.
“Wild Needle represents a shift in the way smart money is thinking of social games,” Thompson said in an interview.
It used to be smart to invest in a game company making social games for Facebook. But Thompson is putting money on the idea that mobile is becoming a larger opportunity. His six-person company will focus on making games for the iPhone and then expand to other mobile platforms. Japan’s DeNA validated this “mobile first” strategy when it bought iPhone game publisher Ngmoco earlier this year for $403 million.
Thompson said he isn’t looking for a similar transaction anytime soon. But because of Zynga’s dominance and Facebook’s crackdown on viral distribution, he doubts that small startups can make an impact on Facebook.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Wild Needle has raised $2.5 million in funding from Thompson and Shasta Ventures. Thompson said that he didn’t need the money to start the company, but he did want access to Shasta’s managing director, Robert Coneybeer, who is joining Wild Needle’s board. Wild Needle’s other top executives include Heidi Carson (vice president of product), Chris Kirmse (vice president of engineering), and Minglei Xu (software architect). Thompson also was founding chairman of online ad networks Flycast and Adify. Kirmse is a veteran game developer who worked at Xfire and was the co-creator of Meridian 59, the world’s first 3D massively multiplayer online game.
Thompson said that there is enormous untapped potential in mobile games that use a device’s location awareness and its always-on connectivity to a social network. Mobile games have lower distribution costs and potentially new kinds of game play around location awareness. Smartphones are also likely to be ubiquitous.
“Things go in cycles,” Thompson said. “Facebook is very challenging for startups now because of high-distribution costs and lack of virality. He said he has investments in a couple of Facebook game companies, one of which is Funzio.
Thompson said Wild Needle is aggressively hiring now. Dan Yue, co-founder of Playdom, and John Pleasants, who was CEO of Playdom, remain at Disney. Thompson said the company’s first game will be targeted at women and feature cool game play. He said he doesn’t think he has direct rivals, but other location-based game companies include Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah.
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The quality of money is not strained
Bobo in the New Yorker this week (you can thank me for not excerpting the weird sexual second paragraph):
After the boom and bust, the mania and the meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.
[....]
A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes).
How many doctors and lawyers got own-your-own-plane rich via the gentle snow of wealth? No, don’t give me “maybe he means a two-seater”, you know that’s not what he means, and, no, making it by representing OJ Simpson or via a biotech IPO doesn’t count as count as “gentle snow”.
I’m not sure why he’s doing it, maybe to reinforce the notion of the deserving rich.
Update. This is weird and unintentionally comedic, but it didn’t creep me out as much as the paragraph about male lower bodies and female upper bodies, so I’m sharing it:
The server came to their table and took their orders. The restaurant seemed to specialize in hard-to-eat salads. Erica, anticipating this, chose an appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t require cutlery expertise. But Harold went for a salad, composed of splayed green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without brushing salad dressing on both of his cheeks. None of it mattered, because Harold and Erica clicked. Most emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are a language that we use not only to express our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state. Harold and Erica licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting. Erica did the head cant women do to signal romantic interest, a slight tilt of the head that exposes the neck. Then, there was the hair flip: she raised her arms to adjust her hair and heaved her chest into view.
Source:http://removeripoffreports.net/
Schneier on Security: More Stuxnet <b>News</b>
January 17, 2011. More Stuxnet News. This long New York Times article includes some interesting revelations. The article claims that Stuxnet was a joint Israeli-American project, and that its effectiveness was tested on live equipment: ...
Exclusive: Entertainment <b>News</b> Company TheWrap Acquires <b>...</b>
TheWrap, a venture capital-backed news organization focused on the business of entertainment and media, has acquired ItsOnTheGrid.com (IOTG), TechCrunch has learned. TheWrap made the acquisition for an undisclosed amount of cash and ...
Knight Science Journalism Tracker » Blog Archive » Mammoths <b>news</b> <b>...</b>
“Japanese scientists attempt to resurrect Mammoth” shouted the news agency AFP (source: The online version of the Japanese newspaper “Yomiuri Shimbun”: Daily Yomiuri Online). The article lacks any hints about the major hurdles of such ...
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