Widgets

• Social network widget maker RockYou has raised $14 million from Japan’s SoftBank (largest investor in Yahoo Japan) and $3 million from Korea’s SK Telecom.
• RockYou & SoftBank are creating a joint venture company with their sites set on three major distribution opportunities:
  • Xianoei, “Chinese Facebook” that rolled out an app platform similar to Zuckerberg’s earlier this year. Recently the site unveiled a virtual currency system that requires the fake dollars to be purchased by real cash to buy virtual goods, a space that RockYou is no stranger to thanks to Facebook. (SoftBank has invested $400M into Xianoei.)
  • Yahoo Japan, which is bigger than Google in the country, is launching its own version of Yahoo’s developer platform that RockYou could gain a foothold in, especially thanks to SoftBank’s influence.
  • iPhone. SoftBank is Japan’s iPhone carrier with a reach of 700 million mobile users. (Fun fact: iPhones sold by SoftBank come with a Yahoo Japan icon in the launchpad.)
• SK Telecom owns Cyworld, a virtual world that is gaining traction in Korea (17m new subscribers/mo). If they integrate w/ OpenSocial, RockYou’s apps could easily be implemented.
• RockYou currently reaches 100 million social network users per month.
• After a prior round for $35 milion, RockYou’s total funding now comes to $52 million.

Venture Beat

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