Chartboost Is Building The Next Mobile Ad Network To Watch, And They're Expanding To Europe
Five years ago from their native city of Barcelona, Maria Alegre and her husband Pepe Agell used to watch old Stanford Technology Ventures Program videos from entrepreneurs sharing their founding stories. Intrigued by what they heard, they picked up and moved to the Valley, where Alegre dug into mobile gaming at early developer Tapulous, which went on to be acquired by Disney. Fast forward to today, Alegre is running one of the fastest-growing mobile ad networks in Silicon Valley (one that we’ve heard from three separate sources grossed about $50 million last year). Her company Chartboost is quietly sucking in talent from an older generation of mobile ad networks and gaming studios like Google’s AdMob, DeNA’s Ngmoco and EA’s Popcap. They also picked up $19 million in funding led by storied VC firm Sequoia earlier this year. “It’s kind of crazy. This all happened in four years,” she said. “Anyone can do it. People running these companies are not super humans. They are just ...
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Angry Birds Friends Is Coming To iOS And Android, The First Rovio Facebook Game To Go Mobile
Rovio today took one more step to grow the ubiquity of its games worldwide: it is launching mobile versions of Angry Birds Friends, a social version of the game created for Facebook, which has picked up 60 million installs and 15 million monthly active users on Facebook's desktop platform in the year since launch. The news was announced during a Facebook mobile event in Helsinki: the social network is doing the rounds in Finland this week talking to mobile games developers based in and around the city -- home to two of the biggest mobile games developers there are, Rovio and Supercell.
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Singaporean-Finnish Startup Nonstop Games Raises $2.9M For Core Gaming On iOS, Android
Nonstop Games, a Singaporean-Finnish gaming company (yes, really), just picked up $2.9 million from two Scandinavian venture firms, Creandum and Lifeline Ventures, to build out core games for iOS and Android. The company’s team has an interesting backstory. Henric Suuronen was a head of studio at one of Europe’s biggest social gaming companies Wooga, and a director at Digital Chocolate Finland before that. The company’s CEO, Juha Paananen, doesn’t have a long gaming career, but he previously ran Asia-Pacific business development for Nokia out of Singapore so he has lots of experience working in the mobile industry. Random fact of note: Juha is also the brother of Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell, that Finnish gaming company that’s tearing up the charts with two top-grossing games in the top five. We’ve heard from multiple sources that the company is making more than $1 million a day on average, but they decline to talk about updated revenue figures since acknowledging a $500,000 ...
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The Brain Trust Behind FarmVille Launches Red Hot Labs With $1.5M From All-Star Investors
Back in late 2009, Zynga quietly acquired a startup called MyMiniLife, a maker of virtual worlds that allowed players to outfit their characters and homes with virtual lamps, furniture and so on. You couldn’t see it at the time, but the MyMiniLife acquisition was a company-making deal. It spawned FarmVille, the monster hit that put social gaming and Zynga on the map. At the same time, MyMiniLife was starting to run out of money. Ultimately, it turned out to be a win-win. “While Zynga had some success with Mafia Wars and Poker, they weren’t necessarily in a dominant position,” said Amitt Mahajan, who was one of FarmVille’s co-creators. “They were not yet known for building these isometric worlds. Playfish was catching up, but the reusable game engine behind FarmVille gave them a leg up.” Now Mahajan and another MyMiniLife co-founder, Joel Poloney, are back with a new company called Red Hot Labs. Looking to have the same impact on mobile gaming, they’ve raised seed funding ...
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How Long Can Nintendo Hold On As Spending On Mobile Games Surpasses Handheld Titles?
With Sony’s presser on the PlayStation 4 yesterday, it’s time to ask questions again about how console stalwarts like Sony and Nintendo are responding to an onslaught of Android and iOS devices that are cannibalizing their businesses. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the handheld category where the Sony PSP, PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS face substitution by smartphones and tablets. We’ve seen this trend consistently in the earnings reports of gaming companies like EA, where revenues from handheld devices are shrinking compared to smartphones and tablets. Now IDC and app tracking service App Annie are reporting that spending on mobile games finally outpaced spending on dedicated handheld titles this year. (The report is here if you want to see it yourself.) App Annie reported that if you add up spending on mobile games on both iOS and Android, it now exceeds spending on handheld games. It’s not surprising as revenues for individual smartphone and tablet gaming businesses are ...
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