MySpace Founders Chris DeWolfe, Colin Digiaro, and Aber Whitcomb have partnered with Austin Ventures to acquire MindJolt, an online social gaming platform with more than 20 million monthly active unique users on Facebook, MindJolt.com and other social sites.
MySpace Founders Chris DeWolfe, Colin Digiaro, and Aber Whitcomb have partnered with Austin Ventures to acquire MindJolt, an online social gaming platform with more than 20 million monthly active unique users on Facebook, MindJolt.com and other social sites.
MindJolt is a platform that provides game developers with a way to monetize their games by aggregating them to a wide audience of players across several of the world’s most popular social networks. Currently MindJolt’s catalog includes more than 1,300 casual games from more than 1,000 developers.
“MindJolt has quickly become an ‘onramp’ to the Internet for the world’s independent game developers,” said Chris DeWolfe, former CEO of MySpace, who will be heading up the new MindJolt executive team as CEO. “We’re building out the company to become the next generation platform for game developers. Our goal is to make it even easier for developers to get their games noticed and make more money from their work. At the same time we will deliver the most social and viral gaming experiences to our millions of users everywhere”
Colin Digiaro (MySpace’s former head of Monetization and co-founder of SlingShot Labs) will take over as MindJolt’s Chief Operating Officer; and Aber Whitcomb (MySpace co-foudner and former Chief Technology Officer) will become Chief Technology Officer at MindJolt. MindJolt’s executive team also includes Senior VP of Business and Corporate Development Josh Yguado (Former VP of Business Development at Fox Networks Group), and Richard Fields, the founder of MindJolt and head of product strategy.
According to a statement released today, the new team will extend the platform by focusing on three major initiatives: (1) increased monetization through major brand partnerships and virtual good offerings, (2) expanding MindJolt’s global presence to all relevant websites and smart phone platforms, and (3) working closer with game developers to create tools for single player and multiplayer social games.
“Independent game developers have always been the lifeblood of MindJolt. We’ve done a great job of connecting with the independent casual game community and we’re looking to expand our efforts to social game developers as well,” said MindJolt Founder Richard Fields. “The new MindJolt team is united on its vision to empower game developers of every size to build their businesses. We now have the resources to extend our product vision and build what they’re asking us for.”
MindJolt is based in San Francisco.
