The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘private-equity’

Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse’s total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity.

In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site’s users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins that currently has over 1.6 million active users

But Curse isn’t just about World of Warcraft. The company owns blogs, wikis, community sites, and download hubs for a number of other popular games. Curse has built out about half of the communities itself, and it also actively acquires leading websites related to gaming (sometimes these sites are run by one guy in his garage, other times they’re more substantial). For example, Curse acquired DiabloFans.com, which is currently the second ranked Google match for “Diablo 3″. Diablo 3 isn’t actually out yet, but you can be sure this will be prime real estate as soon as it launches (and its community is already growing).

This forward thinking is a big part of the company’s strategy: Thieblot says that Curse tries to stay ahead of the curve, strategically trying to figure out which games are going to be hits and then positioning themselves accordingly. He’s very optimistic about MMOs on the PC, and also anticipates some major massively multiplayer hits on consoles games soon.

The Curse client is free, as is most of the site, but there’s a premium offering available for $30 a year. This includes the ability to update all of your plugins simultaneously (you have to update one by one in the free version). The premium version also allows users to save their UI setup to the server, allowing them to restore it should they start playing from a friend’s house or during a break at school. This may not sound like a big deal, but gamers can spend a very long time mapping out exactly where each of their UI elements and shortcuts appear on the screen. Thieblot says that Curse currently has over 34,000 paid subscriptions since launching the premium option eight months ago. The site shares a chunk of this revenue back to the plugin developers.

Things are looking bright for Curse. The company has “a bunch” of money in the bank, is profitable, draws 7.4 million uniques monthly, and has plans to expand internationally in the near future. Oh, and Thieblot says that he’s back on good terms with his parents.

Also see Raptr a gaming social network that offers its own downloadable client.

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Social productivity startup Spigit raised $10 million in Series B funding from private equity firm Warburg Pincus. This brings Spigit’s total funding up to $14 million. Spigit’s CEO and Founder, Paul Pluschkell says that the company will use the funds towards product development, and sales and marketing efforts.

Spigit’s products help businesses and teams contribute ideas, offer feedback and evaluate concepts to streamline idea generation and promote innovation. Spigit recently launched integration with Microsoft SharePoint, which includes a dashboard that provides real-time updates on activity, hot topics and employee contributions within a business, an advanced analytics engine that identifies the best ideas among all contributions and a customizable workflow systems to manage ideation. The software also evaluates employees and offers an incentive and rewards program.

Spigit’s software has some big name clients IBM, Pfizer, Lloyds Banking Group, Walmart, MedPlus, Southwest Airlines and Choice Hotels International. The startup faces competition from Jive and BrightIdea.

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Madrid, Spain-based eRepublik, makers of what the startup refers to as a ‘massive online social strategy game’ (MOSS), has just raised €2 million - approx. $2.8 million - in Series A funding from AGF Private Equity. The company had previously raised up to €750,000 in seed funding from the VC firm and a host of angel investors, bringing the total invested to €2.75 million or a little over $3.8 million.

eRepublik, its first MOSS, is set in a browser-based mirrored version of the real world in which players (called citizens) can participate in politics, set economic policy, start businesses, engage in wars with other countries and interact socially with other players while they’re at it. The company pitches the virtual world to have an edge over other strategy games played online because it’s not nearly as time-consuming; 15 minutes per day they say should suffice.

According to the company, traffic numbers are going through the roof: the eRepublik website is said to have received over 3.7 million visits in May, with citizens from some 200 countries having spent over 55 million minutes and generating 95 million page views navigating the virtual world during that month. Pretty impressive for a small European company (eRepublik Labs only has 30 employees).

The fresh funding will be used to extend eRepublik in terms of new features: eRepublik co-founder and CEO Alexis Bonte says they’re only at about 25% of what the game should become in the near future. The company is also expanding the eRepublik platform into other languages - the company just launched a Spanish language version this month - and is busy preparing the launch of multiple new games.

Here’s a video of Bonte interviewing Guillaume Latour, a partner at AGF PE who will be joining the startup’s board:

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My esteemed colleague MG Siegler just posted about an admittedly quite in-your-face campaign from Microsoft down under, criticizing Redmond for a ‘pathetic’ attempt at trying to make people switch from using whatever browser other than IE they’re using at the moment in exchange for a chance to win $10,000. I don’t necessarily disagree - it’s fair to say there are far better ways to market browsers than covert bribery and making the competition look like bad eggs - but it doesn’t really surprise me and it won’t work anyway.

But do the browser wars us geeks follow so closely matter to John Doe at all?

Here’s a video some NY-based Google employees put up on YouTube a while ago, titled ‘What is a browser?’:

Pretty funny, and as Orli Yakuel said on Twitter, it kind of puts these browser wars (IE8! Safari! Firefox! Chrome! Opera!) in a whole different perspective.

Note the difference in culture, though. While Microsoft is trying to lure people away from using browsers like Firefox or Chrome with cold hard cash (or at least a chance to get some of that), Google employees don’t make a big fuzz about letting people use the brand names of competitors in their videos and they humorously handle the fact that none of the people interviewed knew what Google Chrome is to begin with.

And by the way, the guy that said he’s probably not the right one to ask because he’s not into computers that much, is not that far off:

“I don’t know, I guess the Internet is just where you, you know, find anything and I guess you browse the same way.”

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I love the range of Microsoft’s campaigns to get people to use Internet Explorer 8. They spread from offering to feed the homeless if you download it, to offering you the chance at $10,000 dollars. It’s quite impressive, really.

I think we all know my feelings about Microsoft using charity in a misleading way to drive IE8 downloads, but this latest promotion is just kind of pathetic. Microsoft has a campaign in Australia to give away $10,000 that it has buried “somewhere on the Internet.” But the catch is that in order to find this money, you need to be using IE8. Apparently, if you stumble upon the site where Microsoft placed it using that browser, you’ll get some sort of notification and the money is yours.

Sadly, I don’t have IE8, so instead I get this rather rude message on the page: “But you’ll never find it using that browser. So get rid of it, or get lost.” That’s a nice FU to Mac users who don’t even have the option to use IE. Not that it should be surprising.

What else is interesting about this campaign is that it’s also directly tied to Twitter. Microsoft is suggesting that users who wish to play this IE8 treasure hunt also follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter to get daily clues.

Finally, at the bottom of the page it reads, “Tell your friends. It’s not as stupid as it sounds.” At least they acknowledge that it sounds stupid.

Actually though, it’s not that stupid, it’s just kind of desperate. If Microsoft really wants to get people to use IE8 it should rely less on tacky gimmicks and more on making a great product. If you do that, the users will follow — and you won’t even have to pay them.

[thanks Andy]

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If you were to distill Facebook down to its core magic, you’d have Twitter’s real time news stream with a really expensive-to-maintain photo site bolted on.

And while Twitter isn’t exactly posing much of a current threat, Facebook isn’t taking any chances. Just as Friendster and MySpace tried to buy Facebook in the early days (and nearly did), Facebook is now trying to take Twitter out. First was the acquisition attempt. Then came a focus on real time content streams. Today we say phase 3 - a search engine for public status updates and other content that a small percentage of users are able to test.

Next week, we hear, phase 4 of Facebook’s systematic attack on Twitter is scheduled for beta testing: the Everyone Button.

Facebook currently has complicated privacy settings to let users control who sees what content they post. There are 27 different settings for most Facebook content, plus another 17 for applications. Most users don’t bother.

If Facebook is going to leapfrog Twitter and become the place for the real time news stream, they need more than a new user interface and a search engine (they must be livid to see things like this - Twitter will forever be associated with the civil unrest in Iran, just the most recent example). They need public content as well. And that means encouraging users to post at least some of their content publicly.

The current privacy settings don’t allow for specific status updates and other messages to be treated differently than other messages. That’s going to change. Users will be presented with a variety of privacy choices every time a message is posted to Facebook - everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends and friends. They’ll also be allowed to customize setting further.

But the top choice, and the one most people will choose, is “Everyone.” That means you can have an entirely private profile but occasionally choose (or, Facebook hopes, always choose) to have status messages, links, photos, events, etc. be public and findable in that shiny new search engine.

It’s not clear that Facebook will be able to quickly convince its users to make content public. Just a couple of years ago there were revolts over the launch of the news steam itself, and it wasn’t all that long ago that college students were super not happy about all the old people being let in. But none of that matters. Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s world, and we just live in it. He’ll bend us all to his will.

Watch your back, Twitter. I hear Phase 5 is a doozy.

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The semantic web platform, OpenAmplify, is today launching its new community area to encourage more collaboration in developing semantic tools for the web. And alongside the launch, it has a new promotion to hopefully improve Gmail.

The community area is exactly what you’d think it would be: An area for people with like-minded thoughts about the semantic web to gather and hash out ideas. The semantic web, of course, deals with looking beyond simple links that make up the web, to try and understand a deeper meaning and context behind that content. The development of the semantic web has been what OpenAmplify is trying to foster using its Natural Language Processing technology.

So far, OpenAmplify highlights three things that its members have built:

LogLogic, a security and log management firm that helps companies sort though log data and manage their IT systems, has raised $8.8 million in an extended series D round of funding, led by Focus Ventures with Sequoia Capital, Telesoft Partners, Worldview Technology Partners, INVESCO Private Capital, SAP Ventures, CM-CIC Private Equity, Crédit Agricole Private Equity and ELAIA Partners participating. This brings LogLogic’s total funding to $58 million.

LogLogic plans to use the financing to fuel growth into new markets, including database activity monitoring. LogLogic recently acquired security management company, Exaprotect, for an undisclosed amount.

LogLogic offers companies a suite of software products that helps IT departments make sense of logs of IT audits, compliance, threats, and other operational data. Competitors in the secerity management space include RSA, IBM and ArcSight.

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