All my writing is now being posted on Founderware so if you’d like to update your bookmarks accordingly, that’d be smashing

(and no, I’m not starting a TechCrunch clone. Well, probably not anyway).

It’s almost impossible to imagine something dislodging Facebook from their social throne. Certainly, nothing short of an asteroid collision will stop them thundering onto the NASDAQ sometime in 2012. But lately I’ve been seeing some data which makes me wonder about what lurks on the horizon. In particular, I’m beginning to get scared by your mom.

Okay, possibly not *your* mom but certainly the general audience of moms. This anti-Freudian sentiment started after I had a fascinating conversation with a startup called Tweekaboo, an iPhone photo/video diary for new parents. Eugene Murphy, the founder, shared some intriguing data-points from his community, which is heavily skewed towards mothers (almost two thirds):

1. Firstly, Moms are getting increasingly freaked out by the issue of data privacy. According to Tweekaboo polling, about 72% of their users have started culling their Facebook accounts. The biggest question the team gets asked by new users is how private their photos and video are.

2. Moms take a lot of photos. About 25% more than fathers. And they upload more too-the average Tweekaboo user is uploading 1-2 photos or videos per day.

3. Moms don’t back up their phones (they make up a large proportion of the 50% of iPhone owners who don’t). The biggest challenge Tweekaboo have is pushing updates. Although they’re about 18% more likely than non-Moms to have them, regular Moms essentially treat their iPhones as cameras they speak and text on (and about 80% of Tweekboo users in their poll confirmed this behavior).

Mothers are generally regarded as the custodians of family memories. And there are a lot of them-over 84M in the US alone. And from what the Tweekaboo guys are seeing, they seem to be shifting the storage of these memories to mobile. Clearly there is something going on here.

(btw, if you’re a parent with an iPhone it’s well worth having a look at Tweekaboo-it’s free)

Fight My Monster has been one of the most entertaining and educational (in the ‘I’ve actually learned something new’ sense) companies I’ve ever been involved with (I’m Executive Chairman). I’m delighted to announce that we’re hiring. You should join us. Here’s why:

1. The under-twelve market is going to destroy the Internet
And then reinvent it all over again. This demographic is not on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and generally only use email from about 11yrs (ish). They’re the first generation to grow up with access to the Internet from the day they could touch a screen. Their standards for UI, entertainment experiences and service are utterly different to those that shaped our current online giants. What we’re learning and seeing as the Fight My Monster 7-12 boys community gets larger and larger is going to shape the Internet for the next ten years.

2. We’re serious about our technology
Dominic (founder and CEO) is a well-known contributor in the scalable computing space, and created the Pelops client library for Cassandra (the open-source highly scalable NoSQL database used in Twitter, Netflix and increasing parts off the Internet), the Cages distributed locking system, and other “scale7″ components including a clustered game server that will be released as open source soon. Beneath our brand and community lurks a super-scalable modern architecture which is part of our growing success.

3. Fight My Monster is not just a game
Fight My Monster started out as a game. But our players are using it more and more as a super-safe social network. Just look at all the YouTube videos they’re creating and sharing about their tournaments and battles.

4. We’re growing. Fast.
Six months ago, there were a few hundred thousand monster battles per month. Last month we saw almost 1.5M.

5. We’re a challenge
Being successful in the kids space is a serious challenge. Just listen to some of the excellent talks that Michael Acton-Smith (founder of Moshi Monsters, our female equivalent) has given. You can’t simply use social game design. You can’t use performance marketing. If you think you’re good and want to be challenged, come and join us.

We’re looking for Java developers, a Community Director or if you think you can bring something special that isn’t either of those, get in touch and tell us why.

Location apps in general have come to occupy the same place in my heart as X-Men movies. Promising so much yet leaving me unsatisfied and with a bunch of merchandise I need to throw away. Take Foursquare for example. Their churn rate must be enormous-I’ve installed it on at least four separate occasions only to nuke it about a week later. But then yesterday I discovered Hailo, which shows the world how a location-app should actually work (assuming you’re in London).

Hailo is essentially a pretty simple service: it orders you a cab based on those available nearby. According to our driver (Ian M), about 10% of London’s 26,000 black cabs have signed up (they get their own driver app). All drivers have their own rating (by previous Hailo passengers) and brilliantly, all passengers also get a rating assigned by the driver. Naturally this scared the crap out of me so I spent most of the journey trying to be charming (difficult when a) you’re trying to quiz the driver and b) me in general).

Other than actually making my life easier, Hailo has a couple of other nice touches:

1. Emailed receipts: regardless of how you pay, you get emailed a receipt. From an expenses point of view, this is just awesome. Also, it removes the random pieces of mulch that end up living in my pockets.
2. Adding tips: Hailo lets you add a credit card so you can pay with the app (our driver said they took about 4% which he felt was pretty reasonable). However a nice touch is the ability to add a tip with every payment.

A few extra things I’d love to see in future releases:

1. Show my recent taxi-drivers.
2. Book a pickup time: if I need to book a cab for the airport or train station, I still use Addison Lee just for their reliability. Hailo has a huge opportunity to take a chunk of this market.
3.Show me my passenger score! With a public API, this could rapidly become London’s new credit crating. Jay Bregman and team may possible have unleashed a monster with this alone.

Backed by Atomico and Wellington Partners, Hailo clearly have the resources to go far with this. If you spend any time in London, check it out.

(After writing this I realised that Urbanspoon still lives on my iPhone. So there’s at least two useful location apps in existence)

On Thursday I was in Dublin to announce a new venture fund with Enterprise Ireland. The ‘Fund for International Startups‘ (yeah, we probably need a catchier name) is targeted at startups around the world who want to base themselves in Ireland. It’s essentially the FourSquare of venture capital: check in to Ireland and get funded. I’ve accepted the role of International Ambassador for the fund. For one very good reason: it’s a fucking awesome initiative.Here’s why I agreed to get involved;

1. It’s the right kind of money
Seed investment (under €400k) is some of the hardest to find internationally. This fund co-invests up to 50% (max of €500k) of your round on pretty founder-friendly terms.

2. It’s bringing in outside cowboys experience
Enterprise Ireland is a government agency, albeit one of the more active VCs in Europe. One of the criticisms leveled against them has been their lack of speed. By appointing experienced entrepreneurs as Fund Ambassadors (more will be announced soon), they’re tackling this issue. We’re not fund partners but we are part of the checks and balances to make sure this works.

3. We need short-term tactics as well as long-term strategy
One of the challenges Ireland has is its population base. We need more engineers and developers (as does the world). Short of organising some kind of mass graduate-kidnapping at Stanford (maybe just invite them all to next year’s Dublin Web Summit and not let them leave?), the solutions are mostly long-term (education, training etc.). So let’s go after the startups themselves. With a cheque-book.

If you’re spinning up a new startup, particularly in the consumer web or gaming space, you should be thinking about Ireland. If you’re thinking about Ireland, you should be talking to this fund. While I won’t claim it’s perfect, it is an excellent start. I’d love to hear suggestions for tweaks and improvements.

(Btw, for everyone about to yell about EI not funding indigenous companies-relax. There are a bunch of other EI funds dedicated to this)

1. Keep it short
For some reason, when some people start writing introductory emails they seem to go into therapy mode. Don’t tell background stories about your childhood. Trust me, it’s not that interesting. Don’t be embarrassed to ask someone to edit your mail so it’s more concise.

2. Get to the point fast
For a cold email, you’ve got about 3-4 lines to get to the point. 1) Intro and who you are 2) what’s your context 3) your question/invitation/etc. Do not ask more than one question.

3. Make it easy for them to reply
If you’re trying to organise a coffee with someone, make it easy for them to say yes. Offer to meet them in their office or anywhere they want. And make sure you read Mark Suster‘s excellent post on the topic.

4. Keep attachments readable on a phone
In general attachments are a terrible idea for these kind of emails. If you really have to send one, keep it to a single page and in a format that can be opened on a smartphone (PDF is probably best).

5.  Make sure your phone number is in a dialable format
This is a European thing so apologies to American readers who won’t know what the hell I’m ranting about. Putting in the international dialling code AND the local zero in brackets means that when I tap the number to call it from my iPhone, it dials the entire thing. Which obviously doesn’t work. Just use the international format in your email signature. I promise it won’t frighten any local people. Plus I might call you directly (this has genuinely stopped me from calling a few out-of-the blue emailers in the past).

We started our first games company (DemonWare) in Ireland in 2003 to hoots of laughter and utter incomprehension from the local investment community. In 2008, we were laughed at (again) by local investors when we started Jolt Online (again in Ireland), who told us that people wanted more sophisticated games, not simpler ones they could play from Facebook. 

DemonWare was acquired by Activision Blizzard and today is the multiplayer backbone behind the Call of Duty franchise. Jolt Online was acquired by GameStop and leads their online gaming strategy in a division which now includes Kongregate and Spawn Labs. And we’re no longer laughed at when we talk about the video games ‘industry’.

Both DemonWare and Jolt Online remain headquartered in Dublin, with neighbours like Zynga, Popcap, Blizzard, EA, Havok, Big Fish and many others. The cluster has developed to the point where people rightly point to Ireland as the online gaming hub of Europe. Amazingly, this has happened without any specific government policy aimed at the games community (although there is genuinely superb support from Enterprise Ireland for games startups-they have consistently invested in our companies over the years).

I had been quite heavily involved in the consultation process which led up to yesterday’s announcement by the Irish government on their video games action plan. So I was a little surprised to see that it was really more an announcement about an announcement than any material policy. The argument given for this was that the current transition phase within the games industry makes it hard to enact policy which won’t be out of date within six months. While we can all smile at the obvious spin going on there, with Zynga and Facebook’s respective app platform announcements over the last week (which will all in turn sit on Apple’s platform), I wonder if they don’t have half a point.

With the exception of the Bay Area, the biggest games clusters in the world are still largely structured around console game development. Console games are labour-intensive, high risk and single-product focused. With the exception of the risk factor (which is still many, many times less), social and mobile (SoMo) gaming is the exact opposite. In an industry which has now firmly passed console as the leading edge, Ireland has an opportunity to create the world’s first SoMo development eco-system. It’s like the opportunity JJ Abrams had to reboot Star Trek.

The Forfas report which outlines the structure for the policy planning is worth reading. Some interesting suggestions include;

1. Reducing income tax for video games professionals
2. Extending and specifying the existing R&D tax break to include video game development
3. Significantly extending the existing games investment fund to essentially compensate for the lack of local venture capital investment

One of the rumours I’ve repeatedly heard is that there will be an attempt to reduce the VAT payable on virtual items for companies operating from Ireland. This would be a genuinely radical move and would cause huge waves within the European games community. It would be very interesting indeed.

Getting this right isn’t hard. Speaking to several friends of mine who run games companies, their wish list extends to three things; talent, investment and competitive tax breaks.

Many people have criticised the latter as being inherently unfair. At this stage it doesn’t matter-the cat hopped out of the bag a long time ago and it expects grants and subsidies as standard. The critical element is to incorporate these into a policy which creates a long-term and sustainable industry. When you look at the growing number of successful games spin-outs happening in Ireland, we are tantalisingly close to this goal.

Of course the greatest risk about non-specific policies is that they get wiped off the table at a later date for political reasons. The UK saw precisely that scenario in last year’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t Labour-led (and Tory-removed) tax incentive plan for game development. The Irish government needs to execute a policy which matches the nature of SoMo game development itself: deploy rapidly, test and adjust. I and the rest of the community would like to see some concrete policies being announced before the Game Developer Conference in March 2012.

This post originally appeared as a guest editorial in Gamesindustry.biz

I polled thirty-six game startups about what platform they were basing their companies on. It was a pretty diverse group, representing Ireland, UK, US, Norway, India, Lebanon, Italy and Turkey. Based on this sample, it seems as if Facebook has been completely dropped as the game platform of choice for most new games companies.

Here are the headline results:

1. 45% of startups are working on iOS (phone and/or tablet)
2. 14% are working on Android  (phone and/or tablet)
3. Only 11% are working on Facebook

Fight My Monster is one of the most entertaining startups I’ve ever been involved with. It’s also been one of the fastest-moving. The entire kids space is going through a transformation as companies start to realise the potential of online games and communities to drive more conventional channels (hat-tip to Moshi Monsters and Angry Birds). Although Fight My Monster is still early, it’s created a big enough impact with 7-12 boys to warrant the attention of the Oscar-nominated (twice!) Brown Bag Films. Today they’ve announced a joint-venture to develop a TV series based on the game.

I dropped this in directly from the press release:

FIGHT MY MONSTER® JOINS FORCES WITH BROWN BAG FILMS TO DEVELOP ANIMATED TV SERIES BASED ON THE HIT ONLINE GAME

Brown Bag Films, the multi award winning animation studio, has teamed up with online boys game FightMyMonster.com to produce a 3D animated TV series.

Fight My Monster is a free-to-play online game for 7-12 year old boys in which gamers create and trade monsters and challenge others to battle. Launched in January 2011, the game has grown to over  300,000 users in its first 6 months from playground word-of-mouth. Over 3 million monsters have already been created, with over 7 million battles fought. The combination of Fight My Monster’s unique design, its collectible virtual trading card element and core battle mechanic have made it the fastest-growing online game for boys in Europe.

Fight My Monster was founded in 2010 by developer Dominic Williams. Dylan Collins, the well-known video games entrepreneur behind companies such as DemonWare and Jolt Online, joined as Executive Chairman in 2011.

Commenting on the partnership Cathal Gaffney, CEO of Brown Bag Films, says “We are very excited to work on this project. We have been looking for a character-driven boys show for some time and are extremely excited about a show designed for all screen platforms from its inception”.

Dominic Williams, CEO of Fight My Monster says “Having seen the amazing work that Brown Bag Films have done on Octonauts and Olivia, I’m incredibly excited to be working with them to bring Fight My Monster to TV screens around the world.“

Brown Bag Films will develop and produce the TV series at their animation studio in Dublin. They are currently attaching writers and will present the television concept to international kids’ broadcasters at the MIPCOM conference in October.

ABOUT BROWN BAG FILMS:

Brown Bag Films® is a creatively-led award-winning animation studio, producing high quality computer animation for the international market. Brown Bag Films® is located in Dublin city and also operates an office in Los Angeles.

In 2002, their short film Give Up Yer Aul Sins was nominated for an Academy Award® and in 2010 Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty was also Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Short Film.

Brown Bag Films have worked with the world’s biggest entertainment brands to produce high profile international television series. Recent productions include Chorion’s Olivia for Nickelodeon US, Enid Blyton’s Noddy in Toyland for Chorion/FIVE UK and The Octonauts for CBeebies. Current productions include Doc McStuffins for Disney Junior.

Employing more than 70 full time staff, Brown was voted European Producer of the Year at the Cartoon Tributes in 2009.

For further information, please visit our website at www.brownbagfilms.com or Twitter at www.twitter.com/brownbagfilms

ABOUT FIGHT MY MONSTER:

Fight My Monster® is the fastest growing online game for boys in the UK. Founded by Dominic Williams (CEO) in 2010, the free-to-play game lets you create, trade and battle monsters from any computer with an Internet connection. Featured in both TechCrunch and The Guardian as a startup to watch, the company recently added Dylan Collins, the highly-respected games entrepreneur, as Executive Chairman.

Want to find out more? Just log-on to www.FightMyMonster.com and start creating your monster collection!

For further information and images please contact: jennie.stacey@brownbagfilms.com