Cofounded by Steven Gong (CEO) and Andy Croll (CTO).

www.impulseflyer.com

ImpulseFlyer joins Neoteny Labs family – Neoteny Labs, blog

I am happy to announce that we led an investment in ImpulseFlyer, and would like to welcome them to the Neoteny Labs family.

Despite the apparent dominance of regional players in the region like Agoda, Zuji, Asiatravel, Asiarooms and entry by global players such as Expedia, Hotels.com and Booking.com, the travel sector is still a growth industry as the middle class in emerging economies of Asia Pacific continue their climb up the rungs of the economic ladder. The growing segment of middle class consumers – emboldened by higher per-capita GDP and their interactions on the internet through computers and mobile phones – will experience wanderlust and yearn for travel. Tourists from beyond Asia Pacific are also drawn to this region by its diverse sights and value-for-money.

I was first introduced to Steven in July last year. He had cut his teeth in the online travel space as an investor and executive at Wego for 2 years before cashing out when Wego merged with HolidayIQ. He pitched ImpulseFlyer to me as the only founder, with its prototype still in the works. I sat on it for a bit as I wasn’t keen on single founder companies, and really wanted to see how he would put his team together and execute.

To his credit, Steven responded admirably, adding Andy to his team as his CTO and co-founder, and delivering his MVP with an initial batch of luxury and boutique hotel inventory. Venture Capitalists typically assess people, markets and idea, but when considering investments at such an early stage with little information, one can only practically consider people and execution. On both counts, ImpulseFlyer passed with flying colors.

I’m excited at the combination of Steven’s travel industry experience and leadership, and  Andy’s finesse in design, and look forward to a sleek travel product that middle and upper class travelers would come to love and use.

I will be joining ImpulseFlyer’s board as part of our investment into their seed round.

I wish Steven and Andy all the best, and look forward to helping them in their growth, both as an investor and impulsive flyer .

On 20 Oct, ViKi announced that it had raised US$20 million from strategic partners SK Planet, BBC Worldwide and existing investors, Neoteny included. To date, the company has raised a total of US$24.3 million. Joi blogged about our investment in ViKi almost a year ago and have been actively involved on its board since. All of us chipped in, but in the end, the ultimate kudos goes to Razmig and his team for growing the international video site to more than 10 million viewers and translators, with shows translated into more than 150 languages; can’t wait to see how much further ViKi can go with the new content they have licensed from BBC Worldwide, NBC Universal, A+E Networks International, HISTORY and BIO.

On 15 Nov, Animoca raised an undisclosed amount from Intel Capital and IDG-Accel. It is always an honor to work with seasoned entrepreneurs like Yat. We’re happy to have participated in their first round of financing, and would like to congratulate Yat and his team for this latest round, and for working hard to release over 150 apps for the Apple iOS and Google Android platforms which have garnered in excess of 40 million downloads, all in the span of 10 months.

Both companies are growing at a blistering pace. ViKi represents the sort of disruption we love in our investments. Animoca embodies the dogged execution of seasoned entrepreneurs we respect. We wish both teams all the best in the months ahead.

Formlabs is developing a high quality, low cost 3D printer that works out of the box. It enables designers and makers to create 3D forms by simply hitting the print button. Formlabs products fuses a novel additive manufacturing technology with a unique design-centric approach to achieve an incredible user experience yet to be seen in 3D printing.

All logic and circuitry is pre-engineered, so you can play with electronics without knowing electronics. Tiny magnets act as connectors and enforce polarity, so you can’t put things in the wrong way. And all the schematics will be shared under an opensource license so you can download, upload, suggest new bits and hopefully see them come to life.

www.littlebits.cc

Building cutting-edge Web and mobile software using Ruby on Rails, jQuery Mobile, and Backbone.js

www.2bkco.com

“Everything We Know About Caterina Fake’s New Startup, 2kbco” – The Atlantic

Based in San Francisco, SeatMe is a venture-backed technology startup working to revolutionize the restaurant industry with an innovative suite of software solutions.

www.seatme.com

Lanyrd is a directory of conferences, events and speakers. Visitors can sign in with Twitter to see events their friends are attending or speaking at, submit new events, add talks that they have given and build up their speaker profile.

www.lanyrd.com

It is believed to be in the video chatting space. Originally codenamed Supyo, it will launch as Airtime.

www.airtime.com

Game Closure offers an HTML5-based multiplayer game development kit.

Game Closure, which is essentially the gaming version of Heroku and Appcelerator, allows game developers to write a game in pure JavaScript and use standard HTML5 APIs. The startup’s SDK then compiles, deploys, and accelerates the game. No plug-ins are required, just a Web browser, and any old browser will do. When your game runs on non-browser platforms like mobile devices and tablets, the SDK creates an actual native app using APIs like OpenGL. Like their competitors, Game Closure offers developers everything they need to build, host, and deploy their games at warp speed.

TechCrunch, 17 Feb 2011 – “Game Closure makes it a Breeze to Build Multiplayer, Cross-Platform Games“

www.gameclosure.com