Loki Studios, makers of the location-aware mobile game Geomon, has been acquired by Yahoo! according to an announcement on their website.

The company was cofounded by Ivan Lee, Chris Meill, and Brian Laub and the goodbye note is also signed by Marco, Sam, Gene and Bart. It looks like the 7 person team will join Yahoo’s mobile team. Notably Jessica Lee, the companies UI designer, does not appear to be included in the note so it is unclear whether she will be part of the acquisition.

The Geomon game, their first and only title, was free to download but makes money when users make in-app purchases to improve their characters and purchase other premium experiences. Sources familiar with the company say they had roughly 300,000 users signed up. According to AppData they last shipped an update to the iOS app in July 2012.

Yahoo! has been on a tear with small talent acquisitions this year so far, and PandoDaily’s Erin Griffith wrote a piece titled “Can’t raise a Series A? Just sell yourself to Yahoo” suggesting that many small teams unable to survive the Series A crunch might find safe harbor there. The article goes on to describe common characteristics of companies acquihired by Yahoo!:

Her targets all generally fit the profile of a Series A crunched startup (though obviously I can’t speculate on each of their exact options when they sold). For starters, none has raised a Series A round. Most had accumulated seed funds in the form of a “party round” with long lists of angel investors but no lead investor. All are consumer-facing. None had experienced any truly notable traction before the deal. (Astrid seems to have been the biggest with 4 million users.) Only one or two had a clear path to revenue. All were well-designed by talented teams of fewer than 10 employees. None of their products were particularly revolutionary or even unique in their categories. All of them were shut down and folded into Yahoo’s offerings upon acquisition with hardly a peep of outrage from their users.

Other acquisitions by Yahoo! this year include Stamped, ONtheAir, Snipt.it, Jybe, Summly, Astrid, Milewise, and GoPollGo.

Read the full announcement:

Loki Studios Acquired by Yahoo!

I told a friend today that I really only use Facebook because I feel obligated for work. It’s true, I don’t read the feed and I don’t spend a ton of time there. I post links to stuff I write and respond to messages and chats, but I am not into the rest of the site at all anymore. I hate the feed, it is overwhelming and takes forever to process. I’ve friended too many people who I barely know and it’s too much work to purge. I just don’t care that much about my Facebook account.

I went to community college briefly and then went straight into the workforce, so when Facebook was sweeping through colleges I wasn’t able to get an account (no college email address). I remember the first time I saw it I was visiting a friend at UC Davis and it had recently come to her campus. I had used Friendster and was really into Livejournal, not that big on Myspace, and Facebook seemed pretty simple. She said everyone was obsessed with it, and I signed up when they made it available to everyone. After I signed up I just kind of ignored my account for 6 months (I would later do this with Twitter too) until one day I got an email saying someone had tagged me in a picture. I came back to see what the picture was, and then I stayed.

Shortly after I got onto Facebook I stopped posting on my Livejournal, eventually deleting it for real (not that I hadn’t deleted it tons of times to “make a statement” as Livejournalers used to do). The Livejournal community had kind of died, it had been bought by some Russian company and lost its soul. I was ready to move on and Facebook was ready to let me in. My Xanga account also lost my interest, and my AngelFire site. I had spent countless hours customizing those websites with my meagre web design skills to be a reflection of my own personality but Facebook offered a simple design centered around what I found most interesting – other people.

Fast forward to today and I use Facebook like everyone else. I share pictures, notes, new stories, participate in groups and try to present myself and express myself in that blue and white world. But I know how much I’ve lost – I have a blog I still update regularly and design myself with open source WordPress.org as the backbone. Everything meaningful goes here, not on Facebook. I know my long term social presence on the web, and in the world, won’t be on Facebook and I house my writing somewhere that I control completely. The server, the code, the design, the word… it’s the real expression of me. And while Facebook has evolved in one way I’ve evolved in another direction, and I don’t want to be inside that box.

I know that the motivation to use Facebook is broken for me because when I put out some new information like a status or a picture and no one comments I’m kind of sad, and then I feel ashamed of the fact I’m even considering filtering what I post based on whether I think it will get a “like”. How shallow!

When I put up a new post on my blog, even if I get no comments, few tweets, few pageviews, I feel good. Writing something and publishing it here feels like making a small creation, revealing a small bit of myself, offering up a tiny sliver of something new that I made today. So I think the next Facebook, at least for me, won’t be Facebook at all. It will be a place where I can control the experience of my visitors and express myself as an individual. It is more like to be Wix, Tumblr, Svtble, Strikingly, Medium, etc than anything dubbed as a “social network”.

Hat tip to Scott Hanselman, who has influenced my thinking on this for awhile and who I can finally relate to first hand. If this post resonates with you please check out his post “Your Words Are Wasted”.

It seems the day I take the protective case off my phone is the same day I spill a cup of coffee on it, and adding a case to my beautiful iPhone 5 ruins the beautiful aesthetic.

While these complaints are definitely first world problem, waterproofing electronics is a big business and according to a regulatory filing HZO has just raised $3.6M more to continue its development of nano-coating technology to waterproof devices.

As someone who loves (and misses) playing the piano, I was excited to see a regulatory filing showing that Playground Sessions has raised $682,275 to continue building the piano lessons software startup.

The company is founded by Chris Vance and co-created by Quincy Jones, a living legend in the entertainment industry and recipient of 27 Grammy Awards. The service was launched in February and Jones calls it “the Rosetta Stone of piano”.

After 3 years of hard work, I’m announcing the launch of my new product @playgroundpiano, the Rosetta Stone of Piano. bit.ly/mRPO3R

— Quincy Jones (@QuincyDJones) February 19, 2013

Michale Carney of PandoDaily covered the company in April and I enjoyed his recounting of Jones listening to a David Sides performance intently. As he described it:

“I had the privilege of sitting next to Jones during the performance. For a man who has collaborated with Sinatra, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and other luminaries, it was inspiring to watch him become engulfed in the music. While he started off quietly, a few turns in Jones was feverishly tapping his foot along with the beat and humming the melody while swaying in his seat. It was the picture of a man squarely in his element.”

Here is a video of that performance:

According to Carney, Sides scored a 99% in the app for the rendition of One Republic’s “Apologize”.

Investors in this round include two agency execs: Andrew Howlett – CDO of Rain and Neil Munn – CEO of Zag at Bartle Bogle Hegarty of London. The company previously raised $160K in October 2012 from these same investors.

Aspiring recording engineers – it’s important to know how to read music – Quincy Jones has a learning tool for that ow.ly/jI9WX

— Womens Audio Mission (@womensaudio) April 3, 2013

Becoming a member of the service costs $9.99/month to access the community and bootcamp materials. From there members received discounts on tutorials and sheet music, which can also be purchased by non-members at a higher price. Members also get access to badging, leaderboards, scoring of their practice and many other social features to encourage them to practice and play.

Not sure who Quincy Jones is? Listen to this barbershop quartet style tribute to The Dude featuring Ludacris, Naturally 7 and Rudy Currency doing “Soul Bossa Nostra”: