TinyCo Launches $5 Million Fund To Invest In Casual Mobile Game Developers: From TechCrunch

Andreessen Horowitz-backed mobile gaming company TinyCo is launching a new $5 million investment fund, called the TinyFund, to help support mobile game developers.

TinyCo, which just raised $18 million in new funding, has created a number of popular, casual iOS games including hits Tiny Chef, Tiny Zoo and Tap Resort, which have all appeared on the Top 10 free games charts in the App Store. In total, TinyCo’s games have over 20 million downloads.

The TinyFund will give developers up $500,000 per title, to help create innovative, engaging games played on the iPhone, iPad or Android including paid and free titles. In addition, TinyCo will offer marketing, development and business assistance as needed. Funded games will also gain access to TinyCo’s userbase.

A fund is a virtuous way to give back to the game development community, and is certainly noble considering that the games developed could be competitive with TinyCo’s own titles. But if TinyCo believes in the potential virality of a particular game that it funded, the TinyFund will give the company the opportunity to poach the title and talent pretty easily.

TinyCo image

Website: tinyco.com
Location:San Francisco, California, United States
Founded: 2009
Funding: $18M

TinyCo makes beautiful, fun and engaging games that can be played anywhere on mobile devices. Their mission is to make millions of people happy five minutes at a time.

TinyCo was co-founded by Suli Ali and Ian Spivey in 2009 and is headquartered… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

New book: Architecting the Internet of Things | Readable Online! Grazie!

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From the site:

"Architecting the Internet of Things (Uckelmann, Dieter; Harrison, Mark; Michahelles, Florian (Eds.): "Many of the initial developments towards the Internet of Things have focused on the combination of Auto-ID and networked infrastructures in business-to-business logistics and product lifecycle applications. However, the Internet of Things is more than a business tool for managing business processes more efficiently and more effectively – it will also enable a more convenient way of life. Since the term "Internet of Things" first came to attention when the Auto-ID Center launched their initial vision for the EPC network for automatically identifying and tracing the flow of goods within supply-chains, increasing numbers of researchers and practitioners have further developed this vision. The authors in this book provide a research perspective on current and future developments in the Internet of Things. The different chapters cover a broad range of topics from system design aspects and core architectural approaches to end-user participation, business perspectives and applications."

Keywords » Agile logistics - Internet of Things - RFID - Sensors - Smart environments

Related subjects » Business Information Systems - Computational Intelligence and Complexity - Information Systems and Applications - Production & Logistics - Production & Process Engineering

Here comes Twitter 2.0 | VentureBeat

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Original post from Peter Yared, vice president of apps at Webtrends.

"This is the first of two articles on likely changes to Twitter. This article focuses on changes to Twitter’s consumer-facing side and the second article focuses on Twitter monetization.

Twitter reportedly acquired TweetDeck today, and that’s likely to be the first of many changes. There is a broad consensus that Twitter had stalled out in terms of product innovation, which even creator Jack Dorsey noted upon his return to Twitter as head of product. With Dorsey’s return, we should expect more changes, and very quickly.

BusinessInsider recently suggested that Twitter only has 21 million active users, and a lot more people who read of those users’ tweets. While at first blush this number may look really bad, it is actually an indicator that Twitter has matured. Twitter is a microblogging platform, and has followed the same trajectory as blogs. At first, everyone blogged. Now only a few blogs really matter.

Consumers want Twitter to be their source of information. Lady Gaga on Facebook has 35 million fans, and on Twitter she has 10 million followers. The numbers don’t tell the whole story: The 10 million Twitter followers actually care what Lady Gaga has to say every day, while a large portion of the Lady Gaga Facebook fans simply added Lady Gaga to their profile as one of their musical preferences, which Facebook later automagically turned into becoming a fan of the Lady Gaga Facebook Page.

As Twitter becomes the go-to source of information for news, celebrities and more, it’s differentiated from Facebook, which is very focused on what your friends are posting. With this shift in mind, below are some features Twitter could quickly add via targeted acquisitions that could bring back the company’s mojo, scale users, and add multiple revenue streams."

Yared details the following:

1. Add a news view
2. Offer news streams for events and locations
3. Show photos, videos and other media inline
4. Inline comment threads
5. Improve search
6. More Twitter widgets for websites