We’re packing our bags and leaving the unseasonably warm Toronto weather behind to present at the Under The Radar conference this week in sunny San Francisco! Under The Radar’s M.O. is “tracking early stage innovation” in tech and social media development, and we feel very fortunate to have been selected to present our Spark social gaming technology. Past participants in Under The Radar’s conference include powerhouses like Admob, Pandora, and iLike, so we’re obviously thrilled to be included in this year’s group of talent. We’re looking forward to meeting our fellow presenters and are super excited to ‘pitch’ SocialDeck to a roomful of spectators, not to mention a panel of expert judges. Wish us luck!

If you’d like to join in the fun, visit Under The Radar’s blog for more information on how to attend.

Shake & Spell was featured in an article in USA Today, err, today.  They had a chance to speak with Elizabeth Atkins, one of our fellow shakers!  My personal favorite quote:

“I usually play before I even get out of bed,” says Akins, 54, of Louisville, who says a day without Shake & Spell leaves her with feelings of withdrawal. “I play every day.”

Read the article here: http://bit.ly/1Tb0S

Thanks Elizabeth — we feel the same way!  Happy shaking!

I had the pleasure of chatting with Dustin Rideout recently.  Dustin is the Sr. Account Director and Digital Strategist for Tribal DDB Toronto, and is a frequent contributor to Mobile Marketer, one of the industry’s key publications.  We discussed the changing dynamics of mobile content and the implications it has for mobile marketers in particular: http://bit.ly/z9wDn

We’re extremely excited to announce our financing by the BlackBerry Partner’s Fund and the release of Shake & Spell for the BlackBerry. Per our vision, the BlackBerry game is connected to Shake & Spell on iPhone and Facebook, taking us one step closer to “anywhere, anytime, anyone” gaming. Please find the full press release below.

SocialDeck Launches First BlackBerry–iPhone–Facebook Connected Game

Shake & Spell enables real-time game play across leading smartphones and social networks;
can be distributed through viral channels

TORONTO and SAN FRANCISCO – August 20, 2009 – SocialDeck has launched Shake & Spell for the BlackBerry, the first iPhone–Facebook–BlackBerry connected game that lets players on these different platforms compete against each other in real time.

Shake & Spell for the Blackberry is an exciting development in both the mobile and social media markets. It demonstrates how mobile games and social networking platforms such as Facebook can be seamlessly connected so users can engage with one another, regardless of the device, service or platform being used. A Shake & Spell player, for example, can use their Blackberry to compete against a friend that is using the game on their iPhone or Facebook on their desktop computer.

“Shake & Spell was developed on the socialDeck social gaming platform, which lets people connect, communicate, and interact with friends across multiple mobile devices and social networks,” said Anish Acharya, socialDeck co-founder and CEO. “We’re now even closer to a truly ubiquitous and social gaming experience where it’s not about how or where the game is played, but rather with whom.”

Shake & Spell was introduced for the iPhone and Facebook last fall. It currently has over 500,000 users.

Viral Content Discovery and Distribution
Shake & Spell also benefits from a unique feature set in the socialDeck platform that enables and encourages the discovery and distribution of games through viral channels, or via cross-game promotion. Shake & Spell can be shared through Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well as email, SMS, and Facebook invites, making it easy for new users to discover the game.

“The top-ranked applications featured in mobile app stores continue to get the lion’s share of downloads,” said Acharya. “The ability to cross-pollinate Shake & Spell between devices and social networking platforms means that the game can now reach new and potentially untapped audiences by driving its discovery regardless of the game’s ranking within a mobile app store.”

The following video clip demonstrates Shake & Spell’s cross-platform game play: http://bit.ly/NqWse

About SocialDeck
SocialDeck was founded in 2008 with the vision of enabling “anywhere, anytime, anyone” gaming. The company has launched several titles for the iPhone, Facebook, and BlackBerry using its social gaming platform technology, which enables simultaneous game play across multiple mobile devices and social networks. SocialDeck’s technology also facilitates viral content discovery, distribution and monetization.

SocialDeck raised its first financing round from the BlackBerry Partners Fund in March 2009. The company’s core team splits its time between Toronto and San Francisco. Additional information is available at www.socialdeck.com.

After being berated by friends, family, and investors about the quality of our previous platform demo we’ve recorded a new video, available for your viewing pleasure below.

Wow, it’s been over a year since we last updated our blog!  It’s safe to say that in the interim the face of the mobile industry, particularly from a software standpoint, has been vastly reshaped.  It’s been encouraging for me to read some of our old blog posts and see validation of those ideas in the marketplace today.  Since we last spoke socialDeck has been very, very busy.

We brought our first fully web-mobile connected game to market last September (Line Connect).  This was the first application to enable Facebook – iPhone play (http://gigaom.com/2008/10/06/cross-platform-social-gaming-now-on-the-iphone/), and numerous games soon followed suit.  With the advent of Facebook connect that number has increased significantly.

We released our flagship game, Shake & Spell [http://bit.ly/10d2hS], in Dec 2008.  This has become our key content property, with a very significant user base across iPhone and Facebook (primarily iPhone however).  This game had validated many of our hypothesis around alternative distribution, social gaming on mobile devices, and cross-platform game play.  It has also driven us to scale our system up to a massive number of concurrent users.

We continue to develop our mobile social gaming platform which acts as the cornerstone of our company from a technology standpoint.  We’ve seen a slew of competitors release similar offerings, and we’re excited to keep pushing the state of the art in social gaming for the phone, both from a platform and application standpoint.  Our team is growing, the space is super-heated, and we’ve never been more psyched about the opportunity to deliver a kick ass social gaming experience on the phone.

Stay tuned for more news soon ..

We found out today that we’ll be presenting at StartupCamp Toronto, which will be held as a part of the Canadian Innovation Exchange conference. The format will be as follows:

5 Startups will have 5 minutes each to pitch themselves. The audience will then have twice as much time to grill them on everything from their marketing plan to the product itself.

http://www.startupnorth.ca/category/startupcamp/

This will be an exciting opportunity for socialDeck, we’re definitely looking forward to showing off what we have so far.

We recorded a short elevator pitch for VenCorps at the Canadian Innovation Exchange, which was posted on YouTube:

Our first game launched (in alpha) last Tuesday, you can find it here: http://apps.facebook.com/blockbust/

The game is an addictive multi-player puzzle game. I spent a crazy cottage weekend in California this summer playing board games (it was less dorky then it sounds), which was the inspiration for our puzzle game: BlockBust.

We’re spreading strictly by word of mouth right now as we work the kinks out of the system. We’d love to hear your feedback! You can e-mail us directly, or join the beta testers group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/edit.php?gid=10339704069

Look out for Blackberry & IPhone versions in the very near future.

Incidentally, our pitch at Startup Camp rocked! Lots of positive feedback, lots of questions about the socialDeck as a platform. We’re working hard to ensure that socialDeck will be a viable platform; to that end our API is completely game-agnostic, and we’re building generic client framework packages for each phone and social network. This means that whipping out new games (or enabling others to do so) should be a cinch.

We presented at a conference a few weeks ago and we received our first bit of press. To give you some context, we presented right after a panel on mobile gaming including Capcom, Telus Mobility, Nokia, and Hands-On mobile, amongst others. Their message was largely that mobile gaming is stagnant, sales are flat, and no one seems to have any ideas how about to stimulate interest.

From the blog post:

The panel itself didn’t really have any solutions to offer but, as a nice dose of serendipity, one of the demos in the DemoCamp session that followed this panel was by a new mobile startup looking to help bridge the viral gap and get users playing collaborative games on cell phones, regardless of device or provider – Called Social Deck they’re looking to launch in the middle of 2008.

They had a working demo and the premise looks sound. Initially they’re targeting iPhones, Blackberrys and (wisely I think) tying into Facebook so gameplay won’t be limited to mobile devices only. At this time they’re developing their own content but during the Q&A people were already poking around for opportunities to push existing IP into the app.

A system like this could be just what the industry needs to push a little of that viral mojo into the mobile device market.

http://wirelessnorth.ca/2008/03/28/mobile-gaming-desperately-seeking-viral/