Press
August 23, 2011
OpenFeint And CrowdStar Incubator YouWeb Raises $2 Million
YouWeb, the social incubator behind OpenFeint, CrowdStar, Sibblingz and iSwifter, has raised another $2 million in funding from a number of angel investors including Dave Roux (the co-founder and chairman of Silver Lake Partners, Dave Whorton (the founder of Tugboat Ventures), Praful Shah, Brett Wander, Winston Cho and YouWeb founder Peter Relan. The company had previously raised $700,000 in funding.
August 22, 2011
Streaming Flash Games Startup iSwifter Says Revenue Will Pass $10M This Year
iSwifter, an iPad app that allows developers to stream flash games to the tablet device, is announcing that revenue for 2011 will past $10 million. That’s impressive considering the company is only a year old.
July 15, 2011
CrowdStar And YouWeb Launch $10M StarFund For Mobile Social Game Development
Social gaming company CrowdStar is teaming up with the incubator which it was spawned from, YouWeb, to launch a $10 million venture fund, called the StarFund. The fund will make investments in promising mobile game developers.
(Video) The Innovators: YouWeb’s Peter Relan
April 21, 2011
Japanese Company GREE Buys Mobile Social Gaming Platform OpenFeint For $104 Million In Cash
Mobile gaming startup OpenFeint, has been acquired by Japanese mobile gaming company GREE for $104 million in cash plus additional capital for growth of the OpenFeint platform. OpenFeint and its team will remain with long-term incentives, including CEO and founder Jason Citron, says the company.
January 14, 2011
Peter Relan takes over as CEO of social game firm CrowdStar
Novemeber 18, 2010
Exclusive: YouWeb, Billion-Dollar Incubator?
But basically, if you go by YouWeb’s comparison estimates, Relan has turned $700,000 into around $1 billion in value in just three years, and created close to 200 jobs in the process.To be sure, the $1 billion isn’t all YouWeb’s. Relan says the incubator takes about a one-third stake in each startup, hefty compared to Y Combinator’s 5% stake of pure equity. But Relan’s involvement is also higher — he joins each startup as a co-founder in the incubation phase.
September 16, 2010
iSwifter can stream Flash games to iPads and other mobile devices
iSwifter has created a Flash streaming service that is operated in the cloud, or web-connected data centers. With iSwifter, game developers can find a way to get their content from one platform to another, even if there is an obstacle standing in their way.
July 8, 2010
Open Feint Brings Plug-And-Play Social Gaming Platform To Android Phones
Last year, Aurora Feint launched a comprehensive social gaming platform dubbed OpenFeint that has seen success in attracting independent iPhone game developers to its rapidly growing community. But Android also has potential as a vibrant social gaming platform with its growing community of gaming developers. Today, OpenFeint is announcing a soon to be released platform for Android apps.
June 29, 2010
Social game firm Crowdstar embraces Facebook Credits in five-year agreement
Crowdstar plans to get rid of its own in-game currencies and exclusively adopt Facebook Credits in all of its games said Niren Hiro, chief executive of Crowdstar in Burlingame, Calif., in an interview. Crowdstar is a big player on Facebook, with more than 50 million users in games that include the hit titles Happy Aquarium, Happy Island, Zoo Paradise, Happy Pets and Hello City.
June 15, 2010
Some Game Developers Don’t ‘Like’ Facebook’s New Virtual Currency
Two-year-old CrowdStar began accepting Facebook Credits in December for virtual goods sold through its five games, which are exclusively on Facebook. Sales of the Dublin, Ireland-based company’s virtual items—which range in price from 50 cents for a rainbow-colored cat to $129 for a mystery box containing a dragon—have since doubled, says Peter Relan, chairman and co-founder.
May 12, 2010
Sibblingz Launches Multi-Platform Social Game Engine To The Masses
“Developers already using Sibblingz include social games company, CrowdStar, and game development studio, SiXiTS. CrowdStar’s Happy Island, which has 12 million monthly average users, was built off of the Sibblingz platform”
April 9, 2010
OpenFeint Responds to Apple’s Game Center
(BURLINGAME, CA) April 8, 2010- Aurora Feint, creator of the OpenFeint platform, welcomed Apple’s launch of Game Center today and endorses it as a major step forward in online mobile games for the Apple gaming ecosystem. Aurora Feint runs OpenFeint as a free online service primarily for leaderboards and achievements, which currently reaches 19 million iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch gamers. The company will drive revenue growth for the mobile gaming industry with its OpenFeint X virtual goods social gaming platform for operating free to play micro-transaction based games with no server operations. All OpenFeint player accounts will automatically become OpenFeint X Player accounts when OpenFeint X goes live for the general public, so the OpenFeint community will continue to thrive.
March 5, 2010
Crowdstar launches rapid expansion to gain ground in Facebook games
Crowdstar came out of nowhere last fall to become one of the biggest game publishers on Facebook. Now it plans on holding onto that position with a rapid expansion.
March 2, 2010
GamesBeat@GDC Announces Startup Competition Finalists
“The finalists are Desura, which is creating a developer- and community-driven digital distribution platform for commercial and indie PC games; Minor Studios, developer of the user-generation-heavy 3D platformer Atmosphir; Sibblingz, which connects social games across multiple platforms; Turiya, an analytics platform for online games; and BeanJar, which incentivizes online prizes with real-world rewards.”
