In the spring of 2008, we announced our initial investment in Seattle-based Smith & Tinker, a company founded by veterans of the toy, internet and gaming industries. At that time, the company was heads-down in development mode and wasn’t quite ready to talk about the product they were developing, so our initial blog post was somewhat short on details about what the company was up to. Beyond repeating Smith & Tinker’s mission, “reinventing play for the connected generation”, we said little.

Today we can be much less coy. On August 3rd, after nearly two years of development, the company launched its first game, entitled Nanovor, an online-offline hybrid game targeted at boys aged 7 – 12. To quote the company’s description of the backstory behind Nanovor:

Nanovor is based in a rich fictional world where nanoscopic monsters, known as Nanovor, live and battle inside computers. These nanoscopic dust mites ruled our still-molten Earth, long before any other species could survive. As Earth cooled and the atmosphere became oxygen-rich, the silicon-based Nanovor slipped into deep hibernation for billions of years. In 1958, when silicon was embedded within a computer chip and electricity pulsed through it for the very first time, the Nanovor sprung back to life. Fast forward to present day. Lucas Nelson accidentally discovers these tiny monsters living inside his computer. With the help of his high school science professor, he uncovers the fact that the Nanovor must fight in order to produce the adrenaline necessary to avoid going back into a crystallized state. As fate would have it, Lucas has stumbled onto what Smith & Tinker believes will be the next boys’ mega-hit.

To us, some of the most compelling aspects of Smith & Tinker and Nanovor are the extensive backstory supporting the Nanovor universe and the company’s plans to make the world of Nanovor truly immersive by simultaneously releasing collectible figurines, internet video webisodes, comic books and graphic novels to enrich kids’ experience of the game.

Nanovor’s rollout begins with the Online Battle Game for the PC, The game lets kids collect and battle their Nanovor online. Nanocash, the game’s virtual currency, lets kids expand their collection by buying online booster packs of more monsters and by trading their Nanovor with friends. Nanovor encourages kids to improve their logic skills by playing an included puzzle game to evolve Nanovor into new species. Kids explore the game’s many facets as they discover and share strategies to battle their teams of nanovor to victory.

While the Nanovor Online Battle Game provides a superb kid-vs-kid gaming experience online at the PC, Smith & Tinker’s vision is to enable kids to take the Nanovor universe with them wherever they go, and that they be able to play both solo and head-to-head with other children when they are away from a computer. To enable this, Smith & Tinker will soon release the Nanoscope. Borrowing again from the company’s announcement of Nanovor:

The Nanoscope is a handheld digital gaming device that lets kids take their Nanovor play offline. With the Nanoscope, kids can battle face to face with friends, and play solo-games to further enhance their collection of monsters. Players can download their collection onto the device via a USB connection. Kids can also connect up to four handhelds for head-to-head combat, making it possible for battles to occur anytime and anywhere. Monsters literally jump between screens as each battle is played out with thousands of awesome combat animations. All play on the Nanoscope is recorded, allowing kids to upload their progress to an online account. This provides for a cohesive online and offline play experience for the first time.

The key to the Nanovor experience is the notion that the game can be played both online and offline, and that it enables kids to collect and battle digital artifacts both in the virtual world of the game and when they are face-to-face in the physical world. We view the platform Smith & Tinker has created as an important step for the toy industry, and as an example of another step in the evolution of human-computer interaction enabled by the availability of computing components sophisticated enough (yet cheap enough) to bring a compelling and unique gaming experience to a children’s toy with a sub $50 price point. As we’ve discussed previously in this blog, we believe there will be rich opportunities for companies that recognize and take advantage of the evolving nature of human-computer interaction, and we believe Smith & Tinker fits neatly into our human-computer interaction theme.

In the spring of this year, with development of the online battle game and the handheld Nanoscope device nearly completed, the company set out to raise an equity round to support the rollout of Nanovor and to build a war-chest to enable the marketing launch of the game in time for the all-important holiday retail season. Today, the online battle game (for PC) is available for download at nanovor.com, and the game and other related merchandise can be had at Amazon, Best Buy and Toys ‘R’ Us. The launch of the handheld Nanoscope device that enables offline and head-to-head battles will follow in October nationwide at these and other major retailers.

Today, the company announced a new round of funding, with DCM joining the financing, along with existing investors including us, Vulcan Capital, Alsop-Louie Partners and Leo Capital Holdings. At Foundry Group, we are particularly excited to have DCM join the investor syndicate, as it provides us with another opportunity to collaborate with them. In the past, we co-invested (via Mobius Venture Capital) with DCM in Sling Media, and we are excited to be working with them again. An article in today’s WSJ provides further details about the company and the financing, as does a detailed post over at TechFlash.

If you are interested in diving in to the Nanovor universe, you can follow Nanovor on twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel to watch the weekly webisodes, or, better yet, go download the game and start playing at www.nanovor.com.

Check out the introductory video below:

We’ve been flattered with the feedback on our new Foundry Group website design.  We had a lot of fun putting it together and are really happy with how it turned out. Websites for venture firms can be a challenge and in our case we wanted to create a site that was informative, serious but not stuffy and corporate. It was also important to us that it reflected our personalities.

The front page picture for us is the real highlight of the new design.  Our intent was to poke fun at ourselves; not to imply that we were about to form the new Foundry Group band (although Jason and Ryan are indeed in a band together). The shot is actually a take-off on the iconic Reservoir Dogs picture (not of U2 as some have speculated). 

The picture came about almost by accident. After taking a bunch of individual candid shots (some of which ended up on our respective bio pages) we headed out to take some more industrial looking “Foundry” pictures in an alley near our office. Just before we left Seth’s wife, Greeley, called to suggest that we stage a Reservoir Dogs picture for fun. It was the last photo we took that afternoon and it wasn’t our intention at the time to use it anywhere on the site (we took a bunch of different group shots that day specifically for that purpose).  Fast forward a few weeks to when the photographer sent us the proofs. Upon opening these final shots of the day the unanimous and immediate thought was “this has to be on the front page of our new site”.

We’ve kept much of the content from the prior version of our site and continue to have the focus of much of the site on our blog as well as information on the companies in which we have investments.

During a run several weeks ago, I was pondering the arc of several of our investment themes.  When we made our investment in Gist, we talked about it being at the intersection of our Email and Implicit Web themes.  It turns out to also include our RSS theme (which previously included investments in FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati.)

I’d just finished reading A Semantic Web Primer and was thinking about the various semantic web protocols that were the basis for our Implicit Web theme such as RDF, OWL, and XML.  At some point I realized that the bucket of Internet and web-related protocols that we have been investing in since the mid-1990’s included SMTP, RSS, XML, and of course HTTP.

During one of our weekly partnership lunches, we talked about all the various protocols that we liked and realized that “Protocol” was a great label for our theme that includes Email, RSS, and Implicit Web.  So – from this point forward, our new theme “Protocol” will join the three other core themes we are currently investing in: Glue, HCI, and Digital Life.

Reposted from Feld Thoughts.

I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT.  Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism.  There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers.  That said, as a messaging tool – it still dominates for me.

Several years ago I started saying that “my social graph is in email.”  I found it interesting that Facebook and LinkedIn used email as a primary messaging layer to remind me to come back to Facebook and LinkedIn respectively to check what was going on.  This signaled confirmation to me that these systems were making sure they were using the most persistent messaging layer to build and reinforce their social graphs.

For whatever reason, the primary email product providers have been either painfully slow at realizing this or have decided to ignore this.  Facebook and LinkedIn have benefitted massively from this, but the biggest recipient of this neglect is Twitter which has created an entirely new messaging protocol (think Twitter API as analogous to SMTP).

Suddenly, in the past year, entrepreneurs have woken up to the potential of the email social graph.  As I’ve mentioned before, we invested in Gist to directly address this opportunity.  Xobni is another well known company that is attacking this.  But another intriguing fact is the number of younger entrepreneurs that are working on this problem.  Each of the TechStars locations (Boulder and Boston) has a company that – at its core – is built around the premise of email as the original social graph.  In addition, as a mentor in the fbFund Rev 2009 program, I’ve recently started working with another company working on yet a different angle to this problem.

Now, these companies aren’t creating new email clients.  They are working on products or web services that take advantage of all the implicit information generated by your email activity.  They aren’t limited to just email (if you are a Gist user, you understand this well), but use email ([email protected]) as a key information pivot point.  If you step back and think about it, while https://www.facebook.com/bfeld is new and full of yummy chocolaty goodness, [email protected] is really my “unique” identifier.

I’m not going to talk about the three new companies I’m working with on this problem yet – I’ll let them “launch” on their own timetable and I’ll talk about them when they are ready.  In the mean time, I’ve continuing to look to talk to more people that share this premise.  If that’s you, feel free to email me.