Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
At the Library House Mediatech conference yesterday there was a presentation from a company called Slingshot Studios which could be described as a ‘Film2.0 business’.
They described how Hollywood has chased up film budgets to an average of $70m on production and a further $50m for distribution by focusing on the very limited strategy of having [...]
Copied from a VWM press release (from Blackberry so no link or formatting);
London, England - October 15, 2008 - Virtual Worlds Management, the leading virtual worlds trade media company, has announced findings from a comprehensive study of accountable transactions showing that venture capital and media firms have invested more than $148.5 million dollars [...]
Jussi Laakkonen of social gaming stealth startup Everyplay has a great post tracking investment in the social games and virtual worlds space. The simple message - there is a whole heap of activity, with roughly $2-5m being invested per week, and some large individual deals, including Balderton’s investment of $87m into Big Fish Games.
Check out [...]
I was thinking this morning why it is that I don’t log into Facebook, and then as if we were somehow connected in the ether I saw this tweet from Calacanis:
just realized i haven’t logged into Facebook in a week or two. used to login 2-3x a day. hmmm… when did you login to Facebook [...]
As reported on Techcrunch Scrabulous has been wiped off Facebook, following legal action against the owners of Scrabulous by Hasbro, who own the rights to the board game.
This issue has been rumbling on since April when Hasbro released their own version of Scrabble for Facebook and started to turn up the heat on Scrabulous.
Their first [...]
At the beginning of the year I blogged a bit about games in social networks (here and here), since then the category has gone from strength to strength as measured by app installs and usage - e.g. Playfish had 900 million minutes of usage across its three games in June, up from 300 million minutes [...]
I have had a few conversations recently about the difference between media and communications. The dominant idea for as long as I can remember has been that media and communications are converging - and this is undeniably the case in the sense that many of us buy a blend of media and entertainment from [...]
Last week Jeff Nolan wrote a post entitled Incrementalism and “The New New Thing” where he bemoans the lack of true innovation and the state of venture capital generally. He is talking about Silicon Valley, but what he writes applies equally over here in Europe.
He correctly observes that a lot of money is still [...]
I was pleased to read on Techcrunch yesterday a report on the the Web 2.0 Expo entitled Facebook Platform Faces Rough Road Ahead, Despite Successes - it is good to see some reality kicking in.
It seems the conference is concerned about the fading performance of early star Facebook apps (e.g. Zombies) and by the way [...]
According to the New York Times Mattel and Hasbro who between them own the global rights to Scrabble have released their own version of Scrabble for Facebook, or rather got Gamehouse, a division of Real Networks to do it for them.
On top of Scrabulous’s 600,000 plays per day this is further evidence of value in [...]
