patrick.veverka.net

Social gaming start-up Pikum closes £2.6 million financing led by Virgin USA

5 March 2008 - Pikum, an online social gaming start-up launching in the UK, has secured investment of £2.6 million from Virgin USA.

Pikum – a new kind of game created and played between friends - is the brainchild of 28-year old entrepreneur, Sean Glass, who previously co-founded higher education-focused online financial services company, Higher One (Higher One was ranked number 85 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing U.S. private companies in 2007). Pikum’s founding management team also includes Johannes Larcher, Pikum’s CEO, who was a member of Overture’s executive team until its sale to Yahoo! in 2003, and most recently was CEO of online education firm Academy123 (acquired by Discovery Communications in 2006).

The funding round included participation from leading early stage U.S. based venture fund, First Round Capital, who also led Pikum’s seed financing in March 2007.

http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=37332&hilite=

As I said previously, I am so glad that I’ve had the opportunity to work on Pikum.com. I think it is an amazing product and people everywhere will truly love it. It’s just plain fun.

UPDATE: Techcrunch UK has noticed us.

As a note, I’ve been actively using FriendFeed for quite a little while now, so my impression of Iminta is probably colored by my experiences there.
Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of bloggers are writing stories about the launch of FriendFeed and their latest round of somewhat unneeded financing. I’ve been on the site for a while now (thanks to one of my favorite new subscriptions: LouisGray.com) and I really like it. I still hit Twitter religiously, but I find the different feeds available on FriendFeed. Their implementation of Amazon’s wishlists can’t find my wishlist and their GTalk implementation never tried to add to my contact list.

Other than that, it’s pretty slick. I like the ability to “like” the feed posts of other users. If you want, you can follow me at http://friendfeed.com/veverkap if you’re so inclined.

As Sean says, we’ve got some really big news coming up soon. Things are getting very exciting here at work. Pikum.com is a really cool site that I know everyone is going to love. I am really proud to have been on board since the early stages. To work so hard for so long makes this last stretch really tough to go through. We’ve got a lot to do yet, but it’s very exciting.