CRV and GDC partner to revolutionize gaming industry

Posted by Susan Wu on Feb 21, 2008 in charles river ventures, games

We at CRV are producing a new program at GDC called Startup Launchpad. Essentially, it’s a way for game developers - indie to amateur to professionals within studios - to learn how to become entrepreneurs and to become unshackled from the confines of the traditional game industry structure.

As I’m sure many of you know, many game developers/designers toil long and hard for game studios, only to receive very little if any equity for their efforts. It’s an inequitable system. I was an indie game developer for many years (MUDs, Mods) but I never ...Read More

Introducing Conduit Labs

Posted by Susan Wu on Aug 22, 2007 in charles river ventures, games, venture capital, virtual worlds, web 2.0

We just announced our recent Series A investment in Conduit Labs, a Boston based company that’s focused on building a social networking / casual MMO hybrid. Well, what does that exactly mean? And aren’t there a hundred companies now doing this exact same thing?

This new space – the intersection of Web 2.0 and online gaming – is a very difficult one to define. This categorization encompasses companies like Kongregate to Areae to Three Rings – each of whom is vastly ...Read More

Recent CRV Investments: Twitter & Social Media

Posted by Susan Wu on Aug 19, 2007 in charles river ventures, venture capital, web 2.0

We’ve made a couple of interesting investments recently in the social media space – Twitter and well, the aptly named Social Media. Social Media, the company, is building a highly viral network of micro-applications that live across multiple social networks. The announcement regarding the Social Media funding is here. Social Media is a 1st cousin to companies like Slide and RockYou – both of which are essentially virtualized social operating systems, coordinating massive networks of widget-based microtransactions.

What I find compelling about ...Read More

Areae and the rise of the Social Networking / MMO hybrid

Posted by Susan Wu on Aug 14, 2007 in charles river ventures, games, venture capital, virtual worlds, web 2.0

When I started writing this blog, very few people were talking about the melding of MMOs and Web 2.0. My goal for the last year was to proliferate this concept widely and to help bring together what I observed to be two very segregated, but highly complementary communities. This was my motivation behind putting together a Virtual Worlds/Casual MMO panel at the Web 2.0 Expo and for including the panel on “Virtual Items: Mainstream or Not” at the Virtual Goods Summit.

Yesterday, BusinessWeek published a special report called “Getting Serious ...Read More