There are moments at every startup when the vista suddenly expands before you. Today is one of those for Jambool. We’re announcing a $5 million financing round that will accelerate growth of our virtual currency platform, Social Gold.

The timing couldn’t be better, as the virtual goods space has exploded to become the de-facto monetization strategy for social games and applications. So, more developers are going to need to create currencies and accept payments seamlessly within their applications. Social Gold is poised to provide the solutions that these companies need to take advantage of this market opportunity.

Our startup journey: it’s all about the team
It’s been a long and winding road since Reza and I started Jambool more than 2 years ago. Although we were incredibly naïve about life as a bootstrapped startup, we never compromised on assembling a top-notch team or building a superior product, which allowed us to weather more than our share of rough patches. Today’s announcement is a reflection of what you can achieve with a dedicated and incredibly-talented team.

The original idea for a startup is rarely the one that sticks, and Jambool is no different. We started as a destination site for collaborating with friends on travel itineraries. And when Facebook opened its platform in 2007, we shifted our focus to social applications, generally. We had some initial flops before finally gaining traction with a virtual gifting application called Send Good Karma, which still boasts nearly 400,000 monthly active users.

An idea is born: it should be easier to get paid
By early 2008, we had several popular applications, all of which incorporated some form of virtual currency. We started spending more and more time analyzing the “micro economy” within each app. We tinkered a lot with ways to bring money into an app without breaking the flow for users, and we couldn’t find an existing solution that met our needs. The more time we spent on it, the more we realized how critical an in-app payments experience is.

We also realized that building a sustainable virtual economy at scale requires deep analytic insights. But, unlike traditional ecommerce or even online advertising, there were no analytic tools available for virtual goods. So, payments and analytics represented pain points for us as app developers. This realization quickly led us to the next step in the evolution of our company.

Social Gold: building a virtual currency and payments platform
We decided to refocus Jambool on virtual currency, payments and analytics, so we began to assemble a dream team to tackle these issues. During our time at Amazon, Reza and I worked with a handful of dynamic, high-performing engineers, most of whom were successful entrepreneurs in their own right. We wanted to get the band back together, and we found that the opportunity to build the next great platform for social networks made it pretty easy to recruit. In October of last year, Social Gold was born.

Social Gold is a turnkey solution that manages all aspects of a virtual economy and, by extension, frees up developers to focus on the more creative (and fun) aspects of app development. Specifically, Social Gold enables developers to

* create and manage their own white-labeled virtual currency
* provide an unparalleled, in-app payments experience to their users, and
* optimize their virtual economy using robust analytics

Some of the largest social games and applications use Social Gold, but our easy-to-integrate APIs allow even the smallest applications to launch a virtual economy in a matter of hours. We have, by far, the most seamless in-app payments experience, especially for returning users. We also provide the most detailed and insightful analytics to developers for their virtual economies.

Growing through collaboration
We are very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish over the last 10 months, and we are even more excited about the road ahead. A recent eMarketer study estimates that virtual goods will become a $1 billion business in the US in 2010 (and $2.5B in 2013). We’ll be right there collaborating with any developer, publisher or platform that considers virtual goods as a key component to its go-forward strategy.

-Vikas

After months of working out of our homes, we’ve finally found some office space across the street from Vikas’s apartment at San Francisco’s Pier 38. We’ve definitely moved up in the world from working off the living room floor to an old abandoned warehouse that we share with a few other startups, including SocialMedia and SuperSecret.

Check out our new digs:

Graphing Social Patterns conference is next week, and if you haven’t already registered, we highly recommend you do — it brings together the best community of social applications developers. Going by the past conferences, the panels and speaker tracks are invariably excellent.

For readers of this blog, who are planning to come, here is a discount code that gets you 20% discount for conference registration: gspe08fos.

We’re on a roll with interviews here. Kamla Bhatt, host and producer of her own Internet radio show, interviewed us not too long ago. You can read the interview here.

When we get time, we will keep adding to this list, but here is a start.

Among all the things we find extremely useful, the ones we couldn’t do without are:

1. Quickbooks — it makes payroll, accounting, taxes just so much easier. The 2008 edition on Mac wasn’t available when we got ours, and payroll in any case is only on Windows. That’s probably the only downside I could think of.
2. Skype — Reza and I use it to talk all the time, and it is by far the best video chat for 2 people. Its performance and abilities downgrade quickly once you add more people, its quality is sometimes less than ideal and its desktop software crashes occasionally (on Mac 10.4). Aside from that, it has been quite flawless.
   
3. Online events and conference listing websites. We’ve used Facebook Events, Upcoming, Meetup — and each of them have their pros and cons. Facebook Events works best if there is an event listing over there because we anyway spend time on Facebook, and it is easy to track upcoming events on the Facebook home page. Upcoming is harder to integrate with calendars — it kept breaking for me. Meetup is ok — but its interface is clumsy and of late I’ve hardly seen an event listed on meetup that I want to go to and is not already on Facebook.