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Big congratulations to the CrowdStar team on the successfully launch of Happy Pets, yet another great social game on Facebook. In just a week Happy Pets went from 0 to 890,000 Monthly active users. Amazing.  Following Happy Aquarium's tremendous success not long ago, this is just shows that it wasn't a one off only. Keep a close eye on these guys - they are going to go far. Social gaming have just started to take off, and it is definitely not the-winner-takes-it-all market. There is plenty of room for new companies in this space. The key thing for all social games though, is to convert active users to active paying users. My advice: focus on optimizing mobile payments to a more salient place in the UI. 

Disclaimer: I sit on CrowdStar's advisory board.

Iâ??m very excited to announce that the Japanese gaming company DeNA has made a strategic investment in AuroraFeint, makers of the social gaming platform for iphone games - OpenFeint. DeNA has taken a 20% stake in the company and is going to play an important part in AuroraFeint's international expansion.

Aurora Feint is on a roll, or what do you say about this?

• More than 200 games in the App store
• More than 500 titles in development
• More than 2,500 registered developers

Big congrats to Jason Citron, Daniella Casseley, Peter Relan & the rest of the AF-crew!

Disclaimer: Iâ??m an advisor & shareholder in AuroraFeint.

Innovation Day 2009 Berlin Oct 29

I'm going to be a Panelist at Deutsche Telekom's Innovation Day 2009 in Berlin on Oct 29, together with Julie Meyer (Adriane Capital) Aza Raskin (Mozilla) Norbert Bolz, and Christopher Schläffer (Head of Innovation & Products, Deutsche Telekom. The panel will be moderated by Bruno Giussani, Director of TED Conferences in Europe.

Internetdagarna, Stockholm Nov 3

Giving a keynote the rise of the Social & Real-Time Web. Internetdagarna is organized by the Internet registrar .se. I will also meet with Centr.org, the Council of European Top Level Domain Registries to participate in a workshop on marketing domain names through social media.

I was recently interviewed by Metro about life after Facebook.  As usual there are some mistakes in the article and some quotes are taken out of context, but otherwise pretty okay.

I'm going to be at Casual Connect (June 21-22) next week in Seattle on behalf of Aurora Feint / OpenFeint. Let me know if you want to meet up and learn how OpenFeint can make your games more social and how you can cross-promote your games on the OpenFeint platform.

Oh BTW, OpenFeint just announced the OpenFeint 2.0 social community platform for mobile games :

OpenFeint Social Discovery

Discovery Lobbies: Chat with other people from any OpenFeint enabled game and discover what they are playing. See the name of the game every player is chatting from alongside each and every message. Clicking on the game's name or icon will take you its iPurchase Catalog where you can click Buy Now to go directly to the app store and purchase the game.  

What are my friends playing:

Clicking on a person in the friends tab shows you a list of all the OpenFeint games they have played. Clicking on any of those games will take you to its iPurchase Catalog page from where you can click Buy Now to go directly to the app store and purchase the game.

Social Challenges: Send a challenge to your friends including those even playing a different game! Your friend will receive the challenge when opening any OpenFeint enabled title. From there, they can see click to the challenge information and are given the option to purchase your game from iPurchase if they don't already own it.

It is always a great to see a project that you have been working on go live. Today is such a day. Veodia, a company I have been actively advising is finally launching Screenjelly. Screenjelly is the result of Veodia's acquisition of the French company Screentoaster.

The idea behind is very simple, we all find ourselves in the situation where we are trying to explain to others what is going on our our desktop. For instance, a software that you downloaded got stuck, a program you are using freezes or you get lost when using a web service. That is when screenjelly can come handy. Instead of rather trying to explain to people what the problem is in words, you just Screenjelly it and share it over Twitter or Facebook etc to get feeback.

Some of the user scenarios that I see is for Screenjelly is:

• Bug reporting
• A developer that want so share some cool code he is working on
• Web designer needing quick feedback on a design he is working on
• Alternative to support ticket
• Consumer feedback on Web services or software
• When you just want to show something cool on your desktop
• You name it

Big congrats to my good friend Guillaume Cohen and the fabulous Veodia team for this very simple but useful service!