Strands, a social recommendation startup whose core product is focused on music, today made another move aimed at expanding into other areas with an agreement to buy NetworthIQ for an undisclosed amount. With the acquisition of NetworthIQ, Corvallis, Ore.-based Strands is looking to further build its moneyStrands personal finance application by giving users quality recommendations based on their entire financial portfolio. Competing personal finance startup Mint is similar in functionality, but only gives recommendations based on individual aspects of a user’s financial situation.

Todays news comes on the heels of Strands’ acquisition of Expensr, also a personal finance application. Over the last six months, funding for the four-year-old company has risen to some $55 million from investors including Spanish Bank BBVA, Grupo Zeta, Dabaeque and Sequal, so Strands appears to be using at least some of that money to try and replicate its success with music in personal finance.

Today, telco gear maker Dilithium Networks launched a software product for carriers, content publishers and content delivery networks that can handle all of the transcoding necessary to take content formatted for one screen and move it to another in real time. The Dilithium Content Adapter is the first software product from the seven-year-old telecommunications gear maker. The company has focused on 3G video since its inception, and Dilithium says the product is already deployed with some operators and CDNs.

But Dilthium’s not alone in its focus on delivering faster video to mobile devices. In a few months, Limelight Networks will launch a mobile CDN product for its customers, and Dave Hatfield, an SVP of marketing sales at Limelight, says customers are testing such a product now. While it’s not a huge focus at Limelight right now, he says phones like the iPhone have changed the potential size of the market by making it easier for consumers to get mobile video — and that could spur market growth.

After the launch of of the iPhone, which opened the Internet to mobile users in ways that were previously cost prohibitive or downright impossible, mobile video may be inching closer to reality. I’m even inclined to shed my doubts about mobile video (although not mobile TV). As such, operators may have to worry about delivering everything from video ringtones to YouTube content on devices. And that could mean a new market for content delivery networks.

Delivering images and video over the Internet to a PC via a CDN is an established fact of doing business for content publishers, but adding mobile screens to the mix have a few gear and service providers seeing green. Such vendors are trying to capitalize on three opportunities in the mobile infrastructure to sell products.

First is some sort of transcoding service, through which content formatted for TVs or PCs is encoded and decoded in real time, or encoded in a variety of formats and stored for delivery to the appropriate device. The second is a sizing service that fits the content to the mobile screen on one of more than 5,000 different mobile devices out there. Finally, the third is any sort of tweak that can reduce the amount of space and time to deliver mobile video on a wireless network.

There are skeptics. Barrett Lyon, CTO of BitGravity, a P2P CDN, scoffs at the notion that any sort of specialized services need to be offered for delivering content to a mobile phone. He points out that CDNs are already delivering ringtones and other content to mobile devices. He may be right, which means Limelight may not find a huge market for its services.

However, I tend to believe that real-time transcoding and other ways of rendering content delivery across multiple devices seamlessly will propel sales of gear or software in the years ahead. Especially if mobile Interent devices take off like chip makers hope.

New York-based cloud computing startup 10gen launched today with backing from CEO Kevin Ryan’s startup network, Alleycorp. It makes sense, since with several ventures already under his belt, Ryan probably has enough customers to both justify the buildout and break even right away. And the founders know scaling, having built out ad network DoubleClick.

But is it always a good idea to build your own cloud when you get big enough to do so?

Yesterday, for example, I had a great chat with Lana Holmes, a Bay area startup maven, about product management and how to focus on doing the one thing that matters to your company. “The example I use is Amazon,” she said. “They just focused on selling books. And look at them now.”

At their root, Amazon’s EC2 and S3 offerings are the result of excess capacity from sales. The offerings have paved the way for an online world in which compute power is a commodity. The company has subsequently built, on top of those offerings, a layer of billing, services and support for them.

The motivation behind the creation of 10gen is similar: If you successfully launch a number of web firms, at a certain point the economies of scale of others’ clouds starts fall away and you may as well run your own.

It’s easier than ever to launch your own cloud. You’ve got grid deployment tools from folks like 3Tera and Enomaly. Virtualization management can be had from the likes of Fortisphere, Cirba and ManageIQ, to name just a few. And license management (built into cluster deployment from companies like Elastra) is knocking down some of the final barriers to building a cloud that you can offer to third parties as well.

But imagine a world in which there are hundreds of clouds to choose from. Moving a virtual machine is supposed to be as easy as dragging and dropping, and cloud operators will hate that. They’ll resist, putting in proprietary APIs and function calls. Applications and data won’t be portable. You’ll be locked in to a cloud provider, who will then be free to charge for every service. Sound familiar?

My guess is that as the cloud computing market grows and matures, one (or more) of three things will happen:

• Standardization and portability, in which consortia of cloud vendors agree to a standard set of APIs and coding constraints that guarantee interoperability. This isn’t just about the virtual machines; they’re fairly standard already. It’s about the data storage systems and the control APIs that let cloud users manage their applications. This is the mobile phone model, where number portability is guaranteed and there are well-known services like voice mail and call forwarding.
• Shared grid computing, in which smaller clouds sell their excess capacity to bigger clouds. This would let the big cloud dominate while paying the smaller cloud just enough to stop it from launching an offering of its own. Think of this as the electric company model, selling computing between clouds the way a solar-powered household can pump excess electricity into the power grid.
• Specialization, where clouds are good at certain things. You’ll get OS-specific clouds (Heroku is already providing optimized Rails deployment atop EC2.) It’s only a matter of time before we see clouds tailored for specific industries or the services the offer — anything from media to microtransactions. Sort of like the cable channel model, with specialized programming that allows niche channels too survive.

Whatever happens, it’s clear that good old-fashioned branding, plus a healthy dose of experience, will be key to winning as a cloud provider.

During a panel at Interop last week that I sat on with folks from Amazon, Opsource, Napera, Syntenic and Kaazing, I asked the audience how many of them would entrust Microsoft to run a cloud with Microsoft applications, and how many would prefer to see Amazon running a Microsoft kernel on EC2. Roughly 75 percent said they’d trust Amazon to run Microsoft’s own apps rather than Microsoft.

So when’s the right time to launch a cloud computing offering of your own? Unless you have the branding and reputation to support that launch — or you can re-sell excess capacity to partners or specialize — maybe never.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

This week I caught up with Ethan Diamond, one of the co-founders of email startup Oddpost, which in 2004 was sold to Yahoo and became the Ajax-y interface for Yahoo’s Mail. I first met Ethan that same year, when I was researching my “The New Road To Riches” story for Business 2.0. It was back in the early days of Web 2.0, when everyone knew everyone.

I was introduced to Ethan, Oddpost’s other co-founder, Iain Lamb, and former Oddpost CEO Toni Schneider by Anil Dash. Long story short, but that meeting essentially set off a chain of events that led to me leaving my job, going solo and getting financial backing for GigaOM from True Ventures, where Toni is now a partner.

Today, Toni is also an investor in Ethan’s new startup, BandCamp, which rather than email is focused on music. While Iain isn’t part of this reunion, Shawn Grunberger, also from Oddpost/Yahoo, is.

So what is this four-man startup — which is currently completely virtual — doing? Ethan was coy when I first met him, and he hasn’t changed. The first offering from his new company is ClubWiki, a venue info and booking wiki. He explains why they started it on the company blog. It seems to be getting good reviews from the musical crowd, despite early days.

The casual games market is booming, generating over $2.25 billion in yearly revenue despite virtually no brick-and-mortar representation or advertising and marketing costs. But is this market rewarding for investors? For VCs interested in this space, here’s rundown of how it works.

A casual game is defined as a stand-alone entertainment software title that is digitally distributed by one or many “portals,” or independently owned Internet retail sites. Casual games typically operate under a try-before-you-buy business model –- the downloads allow players to play for a set period of time (usually 60 minutes) before shutting down. If the player wishes to continue playing, they must pay the retail price, which they can do electronically from inside the program, instantly unlocking the game for unlimited play. The average rate of purchase to play is lower than 1 percent, and games that convert higher than 2 percent are considered “hits.” The largest market for these games is women ages 30-60, a significant departure from the standard computer games market.

Development costs

The development cost of a casual game typically hovers somewhere around $100,000. That money goes into paying developers, including artists, programmers, game designers, project managers and audio engineers, as well as the developer’s overhead. This investment usually pays for between eight and 12 months of work. Of course, there are ways to reduce costs. In recent years, many developers have outsourced art and coding to companies overseas, in places like Eastern Europe, India or China. But such a move needs to be carefully managed, as many outsourced games are shipped with little quality control, often sporting poor or confusing English.

The primary profit center for casual games is online retail. Games in the genre retail for $19.99, minus retailer discounts and incentives. Since conversion rates for a casual game usually linger below 1 percent, the only profitable games are hits – mid-level successes rarely recoup their development costs. Causal games are not a high-margin business. Because the market involves so many middlemen, the final slice of the pie that makes it to developers is usually quite small.

Investing

Investment in casual game development can come in two forms: as a publisher or as a development partner. Each carries its own risks and rewards. Typically most VC investment in the casual games industry goes to the publisher, and most of the major publishers (including PlayFirst, Big Fish and iWin) were founded with VC money. Publishers then contract with individual developers to create games, paying them an up-front amount as well as a percentage of sales. Once the game is completed, publishers then distribute the game to portals and handle receivables from those portals. Most of the major publishers also maintain portals of their own, retailing both titles they publish as well as other games.

VC money does not, of course, guarantee a hit game. PlayFirst is the best example of using venture capital to successful ends, commissioning Gamelab (where I currently work) to develop their first set of titles, including the very successful Diner Dash. But another Playfirst-commission title we developed, Subway Scramble, didn’t do nearly as well.

Recently, a few studios have worked with VCs on the development side and then self-published the resultant games. This method eliminates the publisher’s revenue share, meaning more of the total income goes to the developer. Studios that have followed this method are typically more established in the marketplace, with at least one successful title under their belts. However, the lion’s share of the game’s sale price still goes to the portals and distributors, and recoupment can be slow.

Revenue streams

Developers and publishers depend on the revenue from hit games to subsidize their output, and there is still no dependable method to predict which games will be hits. With an average of one new game getting released every weekday, the market is already becoming saturated. Because development time is relatively short, a successful game will see its mechanics and theme copied and cloned within six months to a year of being released. So while the development cost of a casual game is low compared to a standard PC or console title, the chance of a single title turning a profit is also reduced.

Secondary revenue streams from casual games include advertiser-supported, “free-to-play” versions, which are generating a higher revenue-per-download rate than purchased games, as well as boxed
physical retail copies (usually handled through another third-party distributor) and ports of the game to other devices, including mobile phones and portable gaming consoles. Because casual games are
typically small in file size, with simple input mechanics, they make this transition more easily than complex PC games.

Investing in the casual games market is much like investing in any content market – dependent on a large number of unpredictable forces. There are proven marketing and content models that are exploitable, but the saturation of the market with products slavishly following those models steadily reduces their effectiveness. For a VC, the best bet is to work with an established developer with a strong, marketable idea and keep costs low. Anything else is way too risky for a market this crowded and volatile.

Written by K. Thor Jensen, who’s worked in the games industry for nearly 10 years and is currently an associate producer for Gamelab.

Image credits: playfirst.com, bigfishgames.com, and iwin.com.

Update: Our sister blog, OStatic live blogged the event. Their and my summary of the event with photos to follow soon. Thanks for coming to the event. As you might have guessed we are all a little tired this morning :-)

Our first event for GigaOM PM, a meetup with open-source project Hadoop, has sold out, but we will be livestreaming it here, starting at 6:15 pm PT tonite.

GigaOM PM is a series of occasional meetups at which we will gather to discuss topical and important technology breakthroughs. Hadoop is sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation, and is subsequently able to take advantage of huge clusters of computers to produce fast results for queries and more. We’ll hear from Doug Cutting, head of the Hadoop Project; Eric Baldeschwieler, VP of grid computing at Yahoo; Larry Heck, VP of search and advertising sciences at Yahoo; and Chad Walters, director of engineering, search and platform at Powerset.

If you’re interested in becoming part of the GigaOM PM series — that is, if you want to suggest some technologies on which to focus — please get in touch with us at info at gigaom dot com. For other inquiries, such as sponsorship opportunities, e-mail events at gigaom dot com.

Normally I don’t get too excited about billionaires making investments in start-ups: I mean that’s what they do, but this news about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos investing $3 million in casual gaming company Kongregate, is worth noting. Is this a simple investment? Or is it sign of things to come from Amazon? I think it is the latter.

Kongregate is like YouTube of games, offering free, ad-supported Flash games and an online community. “This is a rainy-day recession fund,” CEO Jim Greer told Red Herring. The company still has more than $3 million of its previously raised cash. After this cash infusion, Kongregate has raised $9 million including $5 million from Greylock Partners. It was angel funded by Jeff Clavier (who apparently is too busy to call his friends) who introduced us to the company. We wrote about them, had them on The GigaOM show as well. Anyway the whole casual gaming sector is catching fire, and we are following it closely, and will be ramping up our coverage on the CGS.