TechCrunch
Sequoia Makes Another Bet In Gaming By Leading $9M Round For Android-Focused Kiwi
Kiwi, an Android-focused gaming studio from an experienced team that made titles at Playdom, just raised $9 million in round led by Sequoia Capital.
The company is run by Omar Siddiqui, who oversaw games like Gardens of Time and City of Wonder at Playdom, the social game maker that Disney bought for around $750 million including earnouts back in 2010. Siddiqui, who has had stints at McKinsey and Bain Capital, joined Playdom after he and his co-founder Shvetank Jain built and sold their startup Trippert Labs to the company.
Kiwi is their next gaming company and it is laser focused on the Android platform with casual simulation titles like Shipwrecked. Siddiqui has quietly built up a 160 person company with employees in both Bangalore and Palo Alto. They have five titles on Google Play’s top grossing charts for the U.S. right now.
They decided to focus on Android back in 2011, when it wasn’t clear at all that the platform could or would close the monetization gap with iOS. But that gap is gradually closing as Google has stepped up efforts to get Android users to register with credit cards. Siddiqui said that the amount of revenue a top 10 grossing game makes on the platform appears to have doubled in the last year.
While I’ve written that venture capitalists are a little more skeptical than they used to be about gaming investments, it looks like Sequoia made this bet on the strength of Siddiqui’s track record and their relationship with him.
Sequoia’s Alfred Lin, who was the COO of Zappos before joining the firm, is leading this deal, while another investment partner, AdMob founder Omar Hamoui, also already sits on the board as an earlier personal investor. Guitar Hero co-creator Charles Huang and SV Angel also participated.
“Everyone likes to pick on Zynga,” Siddiqui said. “But the reality is that there are very few kinds of companies that can go from 0 to $1 billion in revenue inside of five years. We’ve been doing games and game-related stuff for years and we thought — if we had a chance to do it all over again, what could we do to create the best of what a games company could be?”
Sequoia has one other bet in a first-party mobile game developer through Pocket Gems, which also competes with Kiwi on Android through titles like Tap Paradise Cove.
Escape Game Shown Off For Google Glass, But Games On Your Face Seem To Have Limited Appeal
A new game for Google Glass claiming to be “the first Google Glass game” (it’s not, Battleship clone got demoed earlier this month) offers a look at what kind of things might be possible for developers building these kinds of experiences on Google’s unique wearable platform. In a word, it looks simple, and is reminiscent of the old, very basic games that would come pre-installed on your black and white Nokia feature phone like Snake.
The game looks diverting enough, but it also looks painfully dated and questions abound about its real-world playability. Others have suggested a voice-operated mechanism for controlling in-game action on Glass, but any kind of consistent and repeated use of voice is not going to work in any situation where there are other human beings around. Not to mention that people play casual games on commutes precisely because they help them look away from fellow travellers. These games seem primed to result in at least a few uncomfortably long, unconscious locked gazes.
Google Glass gaming might be appealing if it was an AR-layered experience like a mix between Oculus Rift and Google’s own Egress game, but as a way to basically play checkers in the corner of your field of view while you’re doing your best to also be a real functioning human I have my doubts. Everyone I’ve talked to about mobile gaming on the development side seems to have found people still like to plunk down at home or at work for dedicated gaming sessions; I doubt very much they’re going to want to do that while staring off into space at less-than-impressive visuals.
Now gaming as a use case for Google Glass is hardly fully explored at this stage, but what I’ve seen isn’t something that offers a lot of promise. There are a lot of question marks around Glass, but its viability as a gaming platform (a key factor in determining mobile success) might be the biggest of all right now.
Mobile Shopping App Wish Expands Into Re-Commerce With Debut Of “Wish Closet”
Will algorithms or crowdsourced recommendations lead the way when it comes to the mobile shopping done via aggregators like Fancy, Wanelo, Polyvore or Fresh? A startup called Wish is betting on the former, likening itself to “an AdWords for shopping.” Today, the company is expanding its automated matching technology, which pairs people to product, into a new area: a mobile marketplace called “Wish Closet,” This feature will now allow the company’s nearly 15 million users to buy and sell items found in each other’s closets.
Launched by former Google, Yahoo and Facebook employees, Wish’s technical co-founding team believes that the best way to connect consumers to items they would want to purchase, is through an algorithm combined, of course, with an engaging mobile experience.
“At Google, we worked on matching billions of different queries with web pages,” explains CEO Peter Szulczewski, who spent seven years at Google where he worked on AdWords, AdSense and Search. “And we think the best way to match millions of consumers to the best products is actually through technology.”
Unlike other services like Wanelo or Polyvore where “trending” and popular products are ranked to help drive e-commerce sales, Wish is more focused more on finding just what an individual user likes.
The company originally began as a wish list website, allowing users to add items they like to various lists – not much different from creating Pinterest boards, for instance, but instead focused only on shopping. As new items are added, Wish gets smarter about a user’s preferences. It then helps merchants target those shoppers who are interested in items similar to what they have to sell.
For example, says Szulczewski, if a merchant has 100 blue, lace dresses to sell, Wish can point them to users who also have blue, lace dresses saved on their wishlist. The merchants can reach those consumers with promotions when they’re browsing their feed, or even with push notifications.
Currently, Wish works with around 500 Amazon and eBay merchants, who reach the company’s some half a million daily active users.
Introducing Wish Closet
Now, the company is bringing its product matching technology to the users themselves with the debut of Wish Closet. Similar to Poshmark or Threadflip, Wish Closet lets users sell pre-owned items to other app users.
But unlike competitors which rely more heavily on user-initiated searches, “sale” parties, and other means of active discovery, Wish will attempt to connect buyers and sellers also through its algorithm.
After the sale is made, Wish will verify the buyer’s details, handling the payment processing, and providing the shipping labels which can be printed out and placed on the box before being dropped off at the Post Office. The company will take a 20 percent commission on these sales, it says.
The expansion comes at a time when Wish is reporting recent growth, now with week-over-week engagement up 15 percent, and users adding 5 to 10 million products to their wishlists every day, as well as sharing 200,000 products and lists with family and friends. The consumers spend around 30 minutes per day browsing the app, and saving 19 items on average to their lists.
While these metrics are promising, the company doesn’t disclose how many transactions it has processed (“hundreds of thousands” is the ballpark figure) or what the dollar amount of those transactions are. It also can’t say how much better its technology works than those competitors relying on the popularity sort alone.
“Typically when a new merchant comes on, we ask them to select three to five items, they will sell hundreds of items in the first 48 hours,” Szulczewski says. However, he admits that the company does try to help the merchants get a lot of transactions in the first few days, since the company is still trying to prove to the retailers that Wish is a meaningful distribution channel for them.
However, if the company now plans to apply that same focus to getting users’ closet items to sell, too, then it could establish itself as a worthy competitor to others like Poshmakrk or Threadflip, especially since it will now marry the secondhand marketplace concept with buying new all under one roof. It also aims for a slightly different demographic (women 15-25), while Wanelo skews a little younger and Poshmark a little older, or so Szulczewski believes.
The new Wish Closet feature, which had been tested already with some 10,000 sellers, is now available in the company’s mobile applications here on iOS or here on Android.
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