Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Facebook gained more than 2 million new people across Latin America and the Caribbean in September to reach 35.4 million monthly active users, according to our most recent Global Monitor report. While Colombia is still the largest Facebook country in the region, with 6.51 million users, Argentina and Mexico have about caught up. Read More

In 2009, social gaming exploded onto the scene. EA bought Playfish for more than $300 million just a couple of weeks ago, and Zynga and Playdom (we’re an investor in the latter) both raised large rounds of financing this year. Traditional computer gaming has been showing steady growth for a long time, but not the tremendous growth that the leading social-games companies have shown. What is it about social games that has enabled such a difference in trajectory over the last year, and why has it been startups and not the big established publishers that have led the charge? There are three key factors: development, distribution and discovery.Read More

Lazzaro discussed her research in “the choices that players make and the emotions that they feel”, created from her background as a cognitive psychology graduate and programmer. She commented of the ‘massively social game’ trend, which she’s been speaking about for a couple of years, suggesting that only in the past few months have Facebook titles started to fulfill that promise. Read More

“The Indian mobile market is still immature and the demographic is very much geared toward casual games and the under-30s. Games based on cricket and Bollywood stars are extremely popular, as well as action genres such as Batman and Superman, but the Indian mobile business model is very different than the West,” he says. Read More

Have you ever seen a business plan with hockey stick revenue projections? It’s common for VCs to receive business plans showing sales growing from 0 to $100m in the first 5 years of a company’s life. In fact, growth conversations between VCs and management teams often cause angst. One of the reasons is that people from both groups tend to have unsubstantiated beliefs about how long it takes to build an important company. Maybe these conversations would be easier if we simply knew how long it takes to build a successful company? Read More