Susan Wu of Charles River Ventures and the GDC have selected rmbr as a finalist for the first annual “Startup Launchpad” at GDC. We’re super excited to be in the illustrious company of the other finalists (there are only 4-5 of us), and we’ll be sharing our product vision on Friday, Feb 22 at the GDC. If you’re interested in attending, the session info can be located here.
We’d love to see you if you’re going to be at GDC.
Jessie Scanlon of Businessweek has written an excellent and incisive article about rmbr and Funware. It just launched in the Innovation and Design section of the site, and you can take a look at it here.
Wendy Bounds, award-winning author and columnist for the WSJ has been playing around with rmbr a bit - and she likes it. Take a look at her excellent article for Independent Street. And, if you haven’t been actively reading the IS column, and you have an interest in emergent business, you really should give it a whirl! It’s awesome. Her perspective is very much grounded in reality, and it’s great to read about so many interesting new startups.
Happy New Year to all - here’s to an awesome 2008!
About 2 months ago I was introduced to Sramana Mitra, a friend of John Welch’s and the publisher of an influential blog on business strategy (primarily focused on the web). Sramana asked me to write a series of articles for her audience all about the games industry.
Now, that’s a pretty big topic to bite off, but I did give it “the good old college try” and wrote a 6-part series for the site. You can read the first installment and follow the appropriate links to catch the rest of the series.
I hope you enjoy. 
Pay special attention to the discussion of the casual games sector. While it’s my favorite part of the business, my opinions on the topic are a smidge controversial - and I’ll be interested in reading your comments on Sramana’s site.
If the thanksgiving weekend didn’t set you into a perpetual, turkey induced coma - perhaps you’d enjoy reading an article that makes mention of the Funware concept and rmbr? It’s written by Matt Slagle for the AP and you can read it here. There’s lots of great information about social networks and games, the emerging category of Funware as seen by casual game developers.
Read/WriteWeb, a great blog, has it’s own take on rmbr, and it’s a great overview of what we’re doing. Also, it’s an excellent blog and well worth reading/getting to know Josh Catone’s perspective on all things digital. He’s very insightful and has a rash of great things to say about new products and trends in the business.
Dory Devlin, the Blogging Mom at Yahoo!, has written a great article about rmbr. She really enjoyed our perspective on Funware and photos, and asked some awesome questions. I’m actually super excited to get her on our beta and get some early feedback on what we’ve got in store.
Today GameZebo posted their first look at rmbr - and it’s a super well-written article by Justin McElroy. (Disclosure: I periodically help GameZebo strategically) Justin and I spent a bunch of time together talking about rmbr, the Funware concept, and how photos belong at the center of a strong casual game offering. I’m glad that what we’re doing made as much sense to Justin as it does to us.
As a separate note, I realized that I haven’t had a chance to talk about GameZebo here - and I do want to point out the good work that they’re doing. Nobody does more to cover casual games in an honest, straightforward and relevant way than Joel and the GZ gang. If you’re in any way interested in casual games, you should be visiting GameZebo often. And yes, it does help that we share the same initials.
Wolfgang Gruener, the dashing and insightful editor of TGDaily, has taken a sneak peek at rmbr and likes what he sees! Take a look at what he’s got to say about it (and our first official screenshots - woot!) at the TGDaily site.
Wendy Bounds, a brilliant writer, has a Small Business blog at the WSJ, called Independent Street. If you don’t read the blog, you should. But today, Wendy started a scintillating discussion about photo archiving and organization. I really found both the underlying story and Wendy’s commentary insightful. I did post a response, FWIW.