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SGN, a mobile gaming platform and publisher based in Silicon Valley, has named former EA and LucasArts executive Randy Breen as CEO. Founder and former CEO Shervin Pishevar continues at the company as executive chairman. Breen first joined the company in 2009 as COO.

SGN is one of the top gaming publishers on the iPhone, with 15 million unique installs of games like F.A.S.T and Skies of Glory. Revenue in this market will almost certainly explode this year with the October 2009 launch of in-game payments for free Apple appstore applications.

Companies like SGN, ngmoco and Tapulous are all in a prime position to tap into that growth. 2010 may be as good for these companies as 2009 was for the social gaming companies like Zynga, Playfish and Playdom – big financings and acquisitions across the board.

The press release is below.

SGN NAMES RANDY BREEN CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Founder Shervin Pishevar Continues as Executive Chairman

Palo Alto, Calif. – January 14, 2010 – SGN, a leader in mobile social gaming, today announced that Randy Breen has been named SGN’s chief executive officer. Shervin Pishevar will remain focused on SGN in his day-to-day role as founder and executive chairman.

Since joining SGN in an interim role as chief operating officer, game industry veteran Breen has been pivotal in providing leadership in all aspects of corporate operations including game production, business development, marketing, strategy and executive management.

“Over the last five months, Randy has done an incredible job leading the company and I look forward to continuing to work closely with him,” said Pishevar. “With the industry preparing for explosive growth this year – resulting from massive expansion in the iPhone, Android and tablet marketplace – I strongly believe that Randy’s experience and knowledge will be instrumental in building SGN into the largest mobile social gaming company of 2010 and beyond.”

SGN entered into the iPhone market in 2008 and has since had more than 15 million unique downloads – resulting in an average of one in three iPhones and iPod Touches that run at least one of SGN’s games. To date, the company secured $15 million in one round of funding and has expanded globally with more than 100 employees worldwide.

“Working with Shervin and the team over the past five months has exceeded all of my expectations coming into the company,” said Breen. “I’ve witnessed the birth of EA and Lucas Arts’ gaming business, but I’ve never seen such an immense opportunity in gaming as SGN has ahead of it.”

“This is a great day for SGN as Shervin Pishevar – one of the most dynamic, passionate and innovative entrepreneurs I’ve worked with – has joined forces with one the most experienced gaming leaders to help take SGN to the next level,” said David Sze, Greylock Partners. “Shervin has been instrumental in taking SGN from being just an idea to one of the leading mobile social gaming company’s in the world. Breen and Pishevar are a dynamic duo that will push SGN forward in the mobile social gaming space.”

Breen brings over two decades of industry gaming experience to SGN including fifteen years at EA. Starting off in production roles, Breen moved into the lead executive producer and creative director position for EA. His next five years were spent at LucasArts Entertainment, a subsidiary of LucasFilm, as vice president of product development where he helped build and scale their gaming business. For more information, please see http://www.linkedin.com/in/RandyBreen.

About SGN
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California with offices in Beijing and Argentina, SGN is one of the largest developers of mobile social games. SGN’s current stable of advanced games has led to more than 15 million unique downloads on the iPhone and iPod Touch. SGN specializes in advanced games such as Skies of Glory and F.A.S.T. that have console quality graphics and live multiplayer features over 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth. F.A.S.T, the company’s new 3D jet-fighting game, was listed as #5 on Apple’s App Store Top Paid Games list for the iPhone and #6 on the Top Paid Apps list in the U.S. within the first two weeks of its launch. SGN’s games are on 1 in 3 iPhones and iPod Touches. For more information, please visit www.sgn.com or www.twitter.com/sgn_tweets.

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I’m in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee for Christmas and on a drive between Memphis and Nashville I noticed that every $30/night hotel offered free wireless Internet access. Further, when we got to Nashville and checked into the relatively low-frills Holiday Inn Express we had better wireless Internet access than I’ve had in hotels around the US and the world—some of which I paid double to stay in.

What gives with hotel WiFi?

This is a ten-year-old technology that has improved in speed and quality nearly everywhere—in homes, in offices, in public spaces, in coffee shops, in airports—even on planes. You can even get free WiFi at Krystal, a fast food chain that’s on par with White Castle and sells hamburgers for less than $1 each. Over the past two years I’ve stayed at more than two-dozen hotels around the United States and the emerging world. I’ve noticed a trend that seems to fly in the face of basic economics and technology adoption: The pricier and fancier hotel, generally the worse quality the WiFi, if it exists at all.

On a trip to Boston two years ago my fancy downtown, five-star hotel had no wireless access. The brand new W in Santiago, Chile has no wireless access. In India, Rwanda and Argentina I’ve had to buy expensive 24-hour WiFi passes, which can add up to hundreds of dollars per stay, for a connection that was just OK. But I knew better than to complain: The quality of the connection is almost always better in emerging markets than Western Europe.

London is hands-down the worst: I’ve stayed at the Sanderson in London twice and always had a hard time getting online, and I’ve also stayed at the Malmaison where even the wired connection didn’t work. I had to go down to the lobby to get a signal. Even then it was like the early days of wireless where you wandered around holding your laptop looking for bars like you were panning for gold.

Arrington may have his silly germaphobe, fist-bump movement. MG may be determined to hold AT&T accountable for its embarrassingly bad iPhone service. Here’s my outrage: Why in 2010 do so many hotels have zero, unreliable or outrageously expensive wireless Internet access?

This is clearly not a cost issue when economy hotels like Holiday Inn and Days Inn have no problem offering free wireless access from the middle of nowhere in the South. (Not to mention Krystal.) This is an issue of greed or tech ignorance on the part of luxury hotels and consumers and business travelers need to start showing some outrage.

On the greed point, Paul Carr—whose parents are hoteliers and lives in hotels now—says the sky-high prices are largely the result of hotels losing fees from business travelers making phone calls, now that we all have mobile phones. The only way to make up the cost was to start charging for Internet access. I wouldn’t have a huge problem with that if the access was good. But I get angry when you charge me $20 a day for a connection that barely works when I can get a better connection at a coffee shop next door for free.

Why not do what the Royal Orchid in Bangalore does? They offer a basic connection for free, and offer a paid rate if you want a faster speed. That still allows a way for the hotel to make money off business travelers with expense accounts, gives guests who need a high-speed connection an in-room option and offers price-conscious guests a way to do the basics like checking email for free.

The other issue is technology. A lot of hotels—deeming themselves too tech-ignorant to install and manage wifi networks themselves—entered into pricey service relationships with third party providers. Hotels say it’s those providers who saddle us with the high fees, and in my experience, not very good connectivity.

If hotels feel they absolutely can’t manage these networks themselves, there have to be better options. What about big Web portals and search engines like Yahoo and Google, or for other countries the local equivalents? Google was ready to wire up all of San Francisco for free access in exchange for ad placement and a Google start page, why not do that for, say, a chain of boutique luxury hotels instead? Or at a minimum, outsource to a service like Boingo that is pretty consistent in service and that many travelers already have a subscription for anyway. It makes the fees hurt less when you can buy an annual pass that’s also good at coffee shops, airports and other public spaces.

These are just a few ideas, and no doubt those of you with more experience setting up networks for big spaces have more. The Internet is fully woven into our lives now. It is the primary way people stay in touch, work and entertain themselves. There is no reason we shouldn’t expect a decent—and preferably free—connection when we pay upwards of $150/night for a hotel if a $30/night hotel can offer it. I, for one, would forgo the pillow mints, free HBO and mini-shampoos if that helps with the margins.

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There tend to be two types of emerging market tech success stories that get ink, venture capital and revenues from the U.S. The first is the so-called “copycat,” most prevalent amid Chinese Internet companies. (I say “so-called” because I think it actually takes quite a bit of innovation to localize an idea successfully, plus most Valley Web sites are just rip-offs of one another.) The other type are the IT outsourcing firms that multinationals hire to handle anything from annoyingly menial to overly-complex techy projects. These companies built much of India’s tech sector.

I found an example of each last week in Argentina. Earlier this week, I wrote about MercadoLibre—one of the only Nasdaq traded companies to come out of Latin America and clearly a company that took the copycat route. Conveniently just upstairs from MercadoLibre is Globant, an Argentine company taking the outsourcing route.

Globant has cobbled together a $50 million a year (and growing) business that’s something like a mix between edgy-but-small Ideo and big-and-boring Infosys. It’s hard to get excited about an IT outsourcing firm. My question is always: If you know so much that you can advise everyone on their businesses, why don’t you actually make something yourself?

And for the local economy, tech services companies are a great way to create a lot of high-paying jobs quickly, but long term it doesn’t necessarily build a startup ecosystem that knows how to build product companies—a gripe I heard repeatedly while I was in Bangalore last month.

And, personally, when I look at the world’s fast growing economies and burgeoning populations, I get a lot more excited about entrepreneurs that are taking advantage of those untapped domestic markets in ways US companies can’t. 95% of Globant’s revenues come from the UK and the US, so their chief local advantage boils down to labor cost, which many companies doing business in India’s services sector have learned isn’t a sustainable edge.

But, despite all that, Globant is worth watching for six reasons.

1. A quick sale isn’t the goal. Co-founder Guibert Englebienne (pictured above) boldly says the plan is to go public on Nasdaq in two years. For those keeping score, that would make two for Argentina after MercardoLibre.

2. Globant is building an actual business to back that bravado up. I mentioned the $50 million in annual revenues. Globant also has 1500 employees and is the fastest growing company in Argentina. It has ten development centers throughout the country—some in the poorest areas. It also has offices in London, Boston, New York and Palo Alto. Globant has also acquired two smaller companies and aims to do more.

3. It’s an IT company people really aspire to work at in Argentina. Globant gets 1,600 resumes a month and is co-creating some local university classes to create a skilled enough workforce to support its growth. It’s invested heavily—almost obnoxiously—in creating a cool “Google-like” place to work complete with massage rooms, yoga rooms, game rooms and a hair salon. Its conference rooms are named after iconic hipster cartoons like Tom & Jerry, the Thundercats and Spanish names I didn’t recognize.  Occasionally you have to hack something just to apply for a job at Globant.

A class of people who can code for multinationals may not breed a next generation of product-company entrepreneurs, but it does groom many of the would-be employees for those companies. Put another way—Silicon Valley isn’t just built on the Evan Williams and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. It also relies on the highly skilled employees they hire.

4. Globant does work for non-tech big brands like Nike, but also big tech companies like Google and EA. Indeed 60% of its revenues come from Silicon Valley. Why do these very heavily-staffed, deep-pocketed tech companies need a (comparatively) tiny Argentine outsourcing firm? I’m not exactly sure. But for the employees of that firm, they’re building connections with some of the most powerful tech multinationals they wouldn’t be able to build otherwise.

5. Globant has raised $24 million from US investors Riverwood Capital and FT Ventures. I’m not saying you have raise US money to be a promising startup, indeed most of the ones I cover around the world haven’t. But with few VCs investing in Latin America, it’s impressive that Globant has grabbed such attention.

6.  The four founders came up with the idea in a bar. At TechCrunch we are firm believers that some of the best things happen in bars.

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Boulder, Colorado-based startup incubator TechStars is launching a Seattle program set to debut in the fall of 2010. Seattle-based entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack will lead the outpost. TechStars will now have separate, annual programs in Boston, Boulder and Seattle.

TechStars is a “startup boot camp” for tech entrepreneurs in which selected companies receive up to $18,000 in seed funding, three months of mentorship from successful entrepreneurs and investors, and the opportunity to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program. The incubator has signed on many high-profile Seattle investors and VC funds to act as mentors including Bezos Expeditions, Buerk Dale Victor, DFJ, Founder’s Co-op, and Vulcan Capital. Other Seattle-based mentors include Ben Huh, Chris DeVore, Glenn Kellman, Adam Brotman, Alex Algard and Adam Doppelt.

Seattle has a vibrant tech community so it makes sense for startup incubators to set up programs in the area. The Founder Institute also recently expanded to the Seattle area. And other cities like Atlanta, Washington D.C., San Diego and Boston are getting their own startup programs. Of course, well-known incubator Y Combinator has an outpost in Silicon Valley.

Seattle applications don’t open until May, TechStars is currently accepting applications for its Boston program.

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Yesterday, I wrote a post on our sister site MobileCrunch about the estimated amount of applications that were available on Android Market according to AndroLib, which aims to serve as both a comprehensive directory and a search engine for Google’s mobile applications store.

The service’s automated statistics pegged the number of apps available for download at over 20,000, free and paid combined. As we wrote, it was the closest thing to getting a confirmed number straight from the Googleplex.

Lo and behold: Google got in touch with us this morning to let us know that the company, contrary to popular belief, isn’t all that shy about disclosing just how many apps are available through Android Market based on internal metrics.

The actual number, a Google spokeswoman informs us, exceeds just 16,000.

I inquired about current growth numbers (i.e. how many new applications are published in Android market on a monthly basis and if this number is increasing over time) and what the ratio of paid and free apps is. (For your reference, AndroLib estimated that ratio at about 38% versus 62%, respectively.)

Unfortunately, Google responded that it doesn’t publicly disclose the breakdown of paid and free apps, although on the upside they did say they’d be exploring more ways to share information about the growth of Android Market in the near future.

For what it’s worth: we also got in touch with AndroLib to give them a chance to explain the difference in the number of apps in the Android Market they estimated are available for download and the number Google just gave us.

AndroLib says that either Google is only counting the number of apps available to users in the U.S. or is disclosing the number accounted for at the end of November rather than today’s number (doubtful), or they simply didn’t do the best job possible counting the apps by not including the correct number of apps removed from the Android Market after publication, either by Google or by the app developer (a more likely scenario).

We’ll keep it at 16,000 active applications for now.

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Back before Brazil was the darling economy of Latin America, all eyes were on Argentina—or at least the dot com “eyeballs” were. In the late 1990s, when VCs, private equity houses and wealthy individuals where throwing Internet money around the globe, Argentina got more than its fair share. The relatively small country was home to the fifth-largest number of registered Internet domain names in the world, and in early 2000 the now-defunct Industry Standard estimated that some 50% of the Latin America’s Web startups were concentrated in Argentina.

Of course, when the Nasdaq crashed, most of those global investments did as well. Just like in India, investors bailed on funding commitments happy to write off their far-flung bets and move on. Left in a lurch, most of these Latin American companies went out of business, many others sold, and one—just one—went public on the Nasdaq.

That was MercadoLibre, the so-called eBay of Latin America. And it took until 2003 to take off in a big way and until August 2007 to go public. The company did just $1.7 million in revenues in 2002—that jumped to $135 million in 2008. MercadoLibre’s stock has done well too. Although it’s down from its pre-recession high of $78.81 per share, it’s up some 175% so far this year, giving the company a healthy $2.18 billion market capitalization.

The trends are all going in the right direction for the company. More Latin Americans are adopting the Net, and its PayPal-like product MercadoPago is taking off as ecommerce expands more broadly in the region. There are 600 million people in Latin America, 150 million on the Internet and 40 million of those are MercadoLibre users. Not content to be the eBay and the PayPal of the Latin world, the company has recently launched free classifieds, throwing down a gauntlet to OLX, an up-and-coming Argentine company that set out to be the world’s Craigslist. OLX has a more global focus, operating in 80 countries and in 40 different languages.

[Gossipy side note: OLX was founded by Alec Oxenford—the same guy who started DeRemate, one of MercadoLibre’s chief rivals back in the day. DeRemate eventually sold to MercadoLibre in 2005, so Oxenford and his partner started OLX. And now MercadoLibre is competing with them again by going after the classifieds market. And if that’s not enough insidery coincidence, OXL is backed by Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder who made his money from selling to—you guessed it!—eBay, part-owner of MercadoLibre. Confused? You won’t be after this episode of Soap.]

MercadoLibre isn’t exactly a cutting-edge company, but here’s why it’s important. I met a lot of young, hopeful Web entrepreneurs during my trip to Argentina last week. Unfortunately, most of them said they consider success to be selling for a few million to a U.S. company. While they may be big believers in the talent in Buenos Aires, the entrepreneurial resilience found there and the strong creative class, they complain there’s not a large enough local market and tapping into inward-looking Brazil is almost as hard for them as tapping into China. One of the few local venture investors I spoke with described his model saying, “Copy cats and early exits. That’s what I’m looking for.”

I get the practicality of using any level of wins to build a venture ecosystem, but aiming small is dangerous thinking. That’s about building an ecosystem of mercenaries, not innovators. To state that as the ultimate goal is like admitting to the world that Argentines don’t think they can innovate on the Web. And if they don’t believe in it, why should anyone else? Also, who said the business of startups was supposed to be practical? You want practical? Work for a multinational and invest in mutual funds.

So the fact MercadoLibre was able to go public on the Nasdaq, create a big market in Brazil and continue to thrive makes it an important role model, even though, yes, OK, it’s “just a copycat.” (Regular readers know I hate that word as a negative description of International startups, as much as I keep finding myself using it.)

I spent some time in Buenos Aires with Ignacio Vidaguren (pictured above), one of MercadoLibre’s early executives, to get some advice for this much-too-pragmatic Argentine entrepreneur class. What had MercadoLibre done right that even all those other frothy 1999 Argentine startups hadn’t?

Vidaguren fully admitted the company benefited from a lot of lucky timing, but it was scrappy enough to take advantage of it. The company first got its start in 1999 when Marcos Galperin—then at Stanford Graduate School of Business—offered to give John Muse of private equity firm Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst (now called HM Capital Partners) a ride back to his private plane after a guest lecture and pitched him on an eBay-of-Latin-America business on the way. Muse invested. The company burned through some of that cash with some ill-advised TV ads, but learned quickly and was lucky enough to raise another $45 million round in May 2000, just as the market was crashing.

MercadoLibre pulled the handbrake on spending hard. No more expensive branding, no more business class flights, no more perks of any kind. In 2001 it got another boost when eBay picked MercadoLibre to be its Latin American partner, over larger competitors. eBay treated the young company like part of the family bringing MercadoLibre executives into company meetings and giving it advice on what had worked for eBay and what hadn’t.

So a lot of Vidaguren’s advice for Latin American startups may sound obvious. Hoard your money. Get to profitability. Don’t give up on a market that’s growing more slowly than people expected as long as it is still growing. And watch your competitors closely: Copy what worked for them, avoid what didn’t.

But MercadoLibre did make one notably gutsy move that flew in the face of advice from US investors: Focusing on the Latin American market, not the Spanish speaking US market. While many younger companies talk up the idea of “being global from day one” ten years later, MercadoLibre still focuses on its home continent. “A lot of people are aiming for the world market, but for us, Latin America is still a challenge,” Vidaguren says. “You have to be able to convey a pretty compelling story before you can be global.”

You can argue that MercadoLibre would have never made it, had it not been able to exploit the froth of the late 1990s and then used all that cash wisely. You can argue MercadoLibre would never have made it if it had not been such a copycat that eBay—one of the few dot coms doing well after the crash—took a financial interest in the business.

But all that aside, it’s an important role model for a country that suffers extreme vicissitudes in economic and political fortunes and is frequently treated like the less-sexy Brazil in today’s global economy: You don’t have to sell just because you’re from Argentina. You can go public. MercadoLibre did.

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If you have to wear a tie on a regular basis, it might as well be awesome. In that spirit, Argentina’s “Sinapsis” studio designed this “After Office Tie” for a recent DesignBoom.com competition . It’s a simple concept that makes a lot of sense: a tie with a bottle opener built into the bottom of it

Excerpt from:
Concept: Tie with built-in bottle opener

B&W makes some of the best speakers on earth. That’s a fact. The company also makes the amazing sounding, but weird looking, Zeppelin iPod dock

Read the original:
Bowers & Wilkins outs the Zeppelin Mini, audiophile wannabes rejoice

MySpace has teamed up with Fox International Channels (FIC) in an agreement under which the latter will take over management of local advertising, marketing, and promotion across a number of territories outside the United States.

According to new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, this is the first result of its international operational review, which comes a few weeks after the company gutted much of its operations abroad. Van Natta asserts that the new partnership will allow MySpace to further slash operational costs and effectively leverage FIC’s local knowledge and relationships.

Fox International Channels, obviously also owned by News Corp, operates 170 linear and non-linear television services, their websites and an international online advertising business in a number of Latin-American, Asian and European countries. Starting today, FIC will start managing marketing and advertising sales for MySpace in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Poland, Mexico, and Turkey, effectively keeping the troubled social networking company’s local operations and advertising efforts in these countries from shutting down altogether.

In my opinion, this is a necessary and logical move by Van Natta. We’ve earlier noted that MySpace laid off most of its staff in countries where it isn’t competing well against Facebook, and to me it makes sense to cut your losses when you’re in apparent trouble.

By effectively outsourcing the management of local advertising and marketing to another unit within MySpace’s parent company, the synergy can be mutually beneficial plus it allows the company to refocus most of its attention to the countries where it is still holding strong without suddenly losing whatever revenue came out of the countries cited above.

If it’ll be enough to keep the ship from sinking remains to be seen.

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