Viximo

Ravi Mehta, Viximo’s VP of Product and Content has a great blog post on his personal blog on reasons why people send virtual gifts.    To see the full post visit here:

http://virtualgoodsinsider.com/2009/06/23/five-reason-why-people-send-virtual-gifts/

In his post he goes into detail about the 5 following reasons why people send virtual gifts:

1.  Virtual Gifts as Greeting Cards

2.  Virtual Gifts as Signals

3.  Virtual Gifts as Accolades

4.  Virtual Gifts as Social Play

5.  Virtual Gifts as Reciprocation

View Full Post

Social Gaming Summit is coming up in June in San Francisco.  This is one of a few small conferences that Charles Hudson of Serious Business organizes.  Others include Virtual Goods Summit and iGames Summit.  Charles and his crew always do an amazing job at bringing together some incredibly smart people.  These summits are by far the most productive conferences Viximo has participated in. I’m sure there will be a lot of great conversations about virtual goods.  Details and discount code are available below.  Early bird tickets are going fast, so register now.

Social Gaming Summit 2009
June 23rd, 2009
Hotel Nikko, San Francisco
Website: http://www.socialgamingsummit2009.com
Registration: http://socialgamingsummit2009.eventbrite.com

The Social Gaming Summit 2009 is a one day event focused on the intersection of games and the social web. This year’s event will focus on helping social games developers build, monetize, and grow their social games. We’re bringing together the leaders in free-to-play games, social networking, and payments infrastructure for a full day of panels and talks. We’ll have executives from Zynga, Playdom, Playfish, Serious Business, Offerpal, Super Rewards, PayPal, Zong, Challenge Games, Kongregate, Xiaonei, hi5, MySpace, Facebook, and other leading companies in the social gaming space.Register now to take advantage of our limited number of $299 Early Bird tickets. If you miss the Early Bird window, you can save 10% on General Admission tickets by registering with the code VIXIMO.

We recently announced a $5M additional round of financing from our previous investors, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Sigma Partners.  We started Viximo back in in August 2007, and since the virtual goods industry and Viximo have grown significantly.  We are excited to be a critical leader in an industry that is rapidly innovating and expanding.  See below to some links for further coverage of our funding.

TechCrunch: Viximo Lands $5 Million For Virtual Goods Platform

Venturebeat: Viximo Raises $5 Million, Replaces CEO For Virtual Goods Business

VirtualGoodsNews: Viximo Repositions As Content Provider With $5M In Funding

I can’t believe I forgot to publish this weeks ago.

Here’s a little video our in-house studio illustrated (and was then animated by our friends at Jantze Studios) for us to help explain digital goods, virtual gifts and what Viximo has to do with all of this. Please enjoy and don’t mock me for my god-like* animated physique.

For those of you in an RSS reader, here’s a link to the video on the ViximoElves YouTube page.
* That god is Buddha.

File this away under the recently non-vacant “Emails From a Product Manager I’m Glad I Read” label. From one of our PM’s, Melanie “Grandma” Butcher:

“I’m pleased to announce that a new publisher has gone live today. We’re Related is a genealogy Facebook application with over 330k visitors per month and over 14 million installs. To put this in perspective, they have twice as much traffic as Birthday Calendar, our next biggest publisher.”

So there ya have it. In one day we double the amount of exposure each one of your items can receive. Publisher sales and trend data for We’re Related will be available soon inside the Creator Community.

Questions? Comments? Statements of joy or pain? Leave ‘em in the comments.

The much anticipated* Virtual Goods Summit is this Friday in San Francisico.

The whole sha-bang is about virtual goods, the markets they’re creating and all the awesome that surrounds it.

The fine folks over at the VGS have extended us a promo code for Viximo blog readers for 10% off the ridiculously priced $449 entry fee with the promo code “VIXIMO”. So there ya go. One day, $400-something bucks. This is great if you’re a website considering virtual goods or a competitor attempting to do what we’re doing.** Sign it up here.

Assuming most of the people who read this blog are creators though, you probably got an invite to the Viximo meetup the day before. $4 THOUSAND dollars worth of awesome, free to you.

It’s good to be on the supply side of things, eh?

* Much anticipated because we’re officially launching there.  Also, because I personally have never been to San Fran.
** If you’re a competitor trying to do what we’re doing, give up now. Not only do you stand no chance of overcoming the awesome we’ve created, I control a band of squirrels in our back yard that will show up and annoy all the women at your competitive office. What? You have no women working there? SNAKES.

I just found out today that the Globe article I blogged about earlier ran on the front page of the paper.

No, not the front page of the technology section or the front page of the back of the paper. The front page of the entire damn paper. 

Which tastes like awesome, am I right?

More importantly, major shout-out to Viximo Creators Juxsen and Lumen whose items were featured in color on the front page.  You can see a picture of the article by scrolling down or by being Viximo’s Facebook friend.

Apparently we made the papers on Saturday. Sweet.

Although “It’s like self-expression, almost” is the worst quote from the entire interview.

I just realized that all of the colors I picked out for the conference rooms in the new Viximo office are the same colors as the Teletubbies!

This is phenomenal for one reason: I think I know how we should name our conference rooms now.

• Tinky-Winky: Purple Room
• Tipsy: Green Room
• Po: Red Room
• Laa-Laa: Yellow Room

I’ve struck gold here. GOLD.

Apparently we could also name either our cleaning lady or our Friday afternoon entertainment Noo-Noo.

Hot on the tails of the post announcing the new Viximo Bungalow, I’m hitting you up with my color palette for the conference rooms. The colors look a little distorted since I took it with my 1972 Polaroid camera, but I think you get the point.

How do you name a set of conference rooms?