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Join Us for SF TechCrunch 5th Birthday Meetup This Friday

Posted June 10th, 2010 by MikeQ

techcrunch_meetupHappy 5th birthday, TechCrunch! This Friday, Social Gold is co-hosting the San Francisco TechCrunch 5th birthday celebration along with Twilio here at 501 Folsom Street. We’ll have food drinks, games like TechCrunch Jeopardy, Powerpoint Karaoke & Halfbaked, and a conference call with other TechCrunch meetups from around the US.

This event is one of over 300 meetups taking place around the world in celebration of TechCrunch’s 5th anniversary, and we anticipate the San Francisco event will be one of the largest. Thanks to Rob Ross, who stepped up as the SF event organizer and reached out to us to provide a place to party. We can’t wait to have all of you in our office!

RSVP for the event here

Special thanks go to the our sponsors for stepping up to help us make the event a success and supporting the community:

Social Gold

SocialGoldlogo

Social Gold™ is an industry-leading virtual goods monetization platform owned and operated by Jambool, Inc. The Social Gold platform enables developers to create and manage their own white-labeled virtual currency, provide an unparalleled payments experience to their users, and optimize their virtual economy using robust analytics. Through an innovative in-Flash payments solution and direct integrations with the most relevant payment methods in global markets, the Social Gold platform streamlines the purchasing experience and drives conversion. Jambool, Inc. was co-founded by Amazon.com veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein and has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Singapore. For more information, please visit http://getsocialgold.com.

Twilio

twilio-logo

Twilio is reinventing telecom by merging the worlds of cloud computing, web services and telecommunications. Twilio hosts a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud, allowing web programmers to integrate phone calls and SMS messages into their applications. Twilio’s simple, powerful API minimizes the learning curve required to build advanced, reliable communications applications, and its Pay-As-You-Go pricing model means customers pay for capacity only when they need it, not before. The company is funded by Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, Mitch Kapor and other prominent investors, and has offices in San Francisco, CA. http://www.twilio.com/

IMVU

imvuIMVU Inc. (www.imvu.com) is an online community where members use 3D avatars to meet new people, chat, create and play with their friends. IMVU has reached 50 million registered users, 10 million unique visitors per month and a $40 million annualized revenue run rate. IMVU has the world’s largest virtual goods catalog of more than 4 million items, almost all of which are created by its own members. Founded in 2004, IMVU is backed by venture investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Bridgescale Partners and Best Buy Capital and is located in Palo Alto, CA. The company was awarded a Best Places To Work 2010 by the San Francisco Business Journal and was named an OnHollywood Top 100 company in 2009.

Mashery

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Mashery is designed to make it cheaper and easier for companies to build and control channels for web services than it would be to do everything in-house. Mashery offers all the ingredients needed to get APIs widely distributed and successfully used – an API marketplace, tracking, metrics, usage/access management, commerce, security and performance tools. http://www.mashery.com/

Charles River Ventures

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Founded in 1970, Charles River Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that takes a value-added, hands-on approach to support its portfolio companies. Portfolio companies include Blippy, Yammer, Zendesk, Twitter, Scribd, and many more. http://www.crv.com/

TriplePoint

triplepoint_logo

TriplePoint is the leading agency serving the interactive entertainment and digital lifestyle industries. Founded in 2002 as Kohnke Communications by Erica Kohnke Kain, the agency has grown to be the market leader in public relations, marketing, business development, and product consulting within the games and digital media market. http://www.triplepointpr.com/

Battery Ventures

BatteryVentures LogoBattery Ventures invests in technology-driven companies run by exceptional individuals and management teams.  For more than 25 years, we have partnered with great entrepreneurs across stages, sectors, and geographies.  Our mission is to support these entrepreneurs as they build extraordinary companies. Portfolio companies include GroupOn, TrialPay, LiveIntent, and Omniture. http://www.battery.com/

ViVuLogoVivu.tv

Multi-participant desktop video…on top of Skype. http://vivu.tv/

iamhello

Badges, greetings and more – all for your next event or meeting. http://imhello.posterous.com/

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Posted in Events, Jambool, Social Gold, Startup, Tech | Comments Off

New Horizons for Social Gold

Posted August 18th, 2009 by Vikas

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

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Posted in Jambool, Payments, Social Gold, Startup | Comments Off

We have office space

Posted July 30th, 2008 by Reza

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:

Team Jambool at the San Francisco office

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Posted in Jambool, Startup | Comments Off

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