Rick Thompson is hoping that lightning strikes another time. Thompson was the chairman and co-founder of Playdom, the social game company that Disney bought last year for as much as $763 million. Now he has started a new game company, Wild Needle, focused on social games with a location twist.
“Wild Needle represents a shift in the way smart money is thinking of social games,” Thompson said in an interview.
It used to be smart to invest in a game company making social games for Facebook. But Thompson is putting money on the idea that mobile is becoming a larger opportunity. His six-person company will focus on making games for the iPhone and then expand to other mobile platforms. Japan’s DeNA validated this “mobile first” strategy when it bought iPhone game publisher Ngmoco earlier this year for $403 million.
Thompson said he isn’t looking for a similar transaction anytime soon. But because of Zynga’s dominance and Facebook’s crackdown on viral distribution, he doubts that small startups can make an impact on Facebook.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Wild Needle has raised $2.5 million in funding from Thompson and Shasta Ventures. Thompson said that he didn’t need the money to start the company, but he did want access to Shasta’s managing director, Robert Coneybeer, who is joining Wild Needle’s board. Wild Needle’s other top executives include Heidi Carson (vice president of product), Chris Kirmse (vice president of engineering), and Minglei Xu (software architect). Thompson also was founding chairman of online ad networks Flycast and Adify. Kirmse is a veteran game developer who worked at Xfire and was the co-creator of Meridian 59, the world’s first 3D massively multiplayer online game.
Thompson said that there is enormous untapped potential in mobile games that use a device’s location awareness and its always-on connectivity to a social network. Mobile games have lower distribution costs and potentially new kinds of game play around location awareness. Smartphones are also likely to be ubiquitous.
“Things go in cycles,” Thompson said. “Facebook is very challenging for startups now because of high-distribution costs and lack of virality. He said he has investments in a couple of Facebook game companies, one of which is Funzio.
Thompson said Wild Needle is aggressively hiring now. Dan Yue, co-founder of Playdom, and John Pleasants, who was CEO of Playdom, remain at Disney. Thompson said the company’s first game will be targeted at women and feature cool game play. He said he doesn’t think he has direct rivals, but other location-based game companies include Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah.
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Love shopping? Aprizi is the Pandora of online fashion.
Fashion and machine learning don’t often make their way into the same conversation. Enter the new era of online shopping: Meet Aprizi, an etymological twist on the French word meaning to learn and the Italian word for prize. “We want you to discover on our site, and we want you to feel like you’ve won something,” explains one of the site’s co-founders Giff Constable.
The home page carousel displays four fashion items at once, and gives you the option to like and dislike each one. After twelve items, the carousel pauses to think, then returns with a new set of items that are smarter and catered towards your taste. This algorithmic approach to shopping is why people in New York City’s start-up scene are calling Aprizi, “the Pandora of online fashion.”
The carousel refreshes slowly but trust me, it’s much faster than a sales attendant learning your taste based on which items you leave on the dressing room floor. While at first, I only liked about 10% of what was offered to me, after two rounds of liking and disliking, the carousel noticabely started to catch on to the fact that I like the color purple, prefer natural looking, funky jewelry and outfits with bold patterns in bright colors.
The site pulls from hundreds of different merchants and includes hundreds of different items, adding about 50 new items a day. Items are selected by Aprizi’s 10 curators who were cherry picked from hundreds of applicants. All items on the site have to meet 3 categories: They have to be special, beautiful or meaningful; they can’t come from a big brand or celebrity and they have to be for sale.
The algorithm learns based on certain repeating semantic tags such as eco-friendly, artisan, handmade and based on which curators you tend to graviate towards. If you dislike heels or chunky bracelets enough, it’s smart enough to pick up on that and not show you heels or chunky bracelets again. However the constraints are flexible to keep a bit of diversity in there, particularly because their user base, mostly women, can be so fickle.
Aprizi also has a neat blog that includes articles titled “Dress Me” for categories like “Warm Weather Escape,” and entries by other cool NYC fashion start-ups, like this recent one from the founders of Of A Kind.
Celebrating independent design isn’t cheap. Almost every item I liked was between $250-$500. So then I started browsing by price and specific category and found neighborhood’s worth of beautiful, affordable clothing and accessories. The site saves all of your likes, as well as items you find on other websites through it’s bookmarklet.
It’s fun to walk down the street in the East Village, but it’s not fun to shop on the web, and we want to change that. -Giff Constable
Co-Founders Giff Constable the design guy and CEO and Liz Crawford, the CTO with a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon were introduced by venture capitalists intrigued by Crawford’s work in machine learning. They beta launched in late September 2010 and have been doubling users every month since. In October, they had 2,500 users which grew to 10,000 visits in December. The start-up is currently working within New York’s not-so-secret yet still hush-hush co-working space, General Assembly.
The early-stage bootstrapped business is talking to investors and plans to start making money in the traditional way, you know, by selling stuff. From their users, Giff and Liz are learning a lot about which designers are trending and what’s popular. They plan to use all of that data to sell curated, limited runs of certain items in the near future.
After finding these Robot cufflinks from Etsy on Aprizi, I officially have a new favorite shopping site.
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