Investments to the tune of $17 million are a rarity these days, but app-factory RockYou has done just that: the San Francisco-based company has announced that Japanese mobile giant SoftBank and Korean telecom investment company SK Telecom Ventures have invested $17 million to create a new joint venture to build apps for the Asia-Pacific market.
RockYou's Series C venture round, which pulled in $35 million, was in June--with the fresh $17 million, the company has raised $67 million so far.
This marks the entry of RockYou, which is best known for its Facebook and MySpace widgets, into the mobile space. "In Asia, over half the social networking occurs on mobile," CEO Lance Tokuda told CNET News. "It's both Web and mobile, and we think we'll get good penetration. The results on (Chinese social network) Xiaonei so far have been very good." RockYou says it is the first non-Chinese company to build apps on Xiaonei.
There will be a separate team handling RockYou's new Asia-Pacific operations, with operations coming from the new joint-venture investors as well. "In a lot of cases it's more cultural, where they'll take our assets and they'll port them and localize them," Tokuda said.
But there will be synergy as well, with mobile apps likely coming to the U.S. market after they're released in Asia. SoftBank is the Japanese carrier for Apple's iPhone, and iPhone apps created for it may eventually be converted to U.S. versions.
"We have no U.S. iPhone apps, and yes, we will port them back (from Asia)," Tokuda said.
So is the company giving up on Facebook's platform? No, Tokuda said, adding that they plan to keep building for it. Nor is the round specifically designed as recession padding, he added.
"There's still opportunity out there," he explained. "That said, it's good to raise a lot of money and have money in the bank, and this latest strategic round helps."
European telecom giant Vodafone announced Friday that its Vodafone Europe BV subsidiary has acquired ZYB, a Danish company that specializes in online contact and calendar management. The price, as stated by Vodafone, is 31.5 million euros, or $48.7 million.
"Using a Web portal as a link between the PC and the mobile device, ZYB provides an interactive way for people to nurture, contact, and develop their relationships with their most important friends and colleagues and builds links with those contacts' wider networks," Vodafone's Internet Services Director, Pieter Knook, said in a statement. "This is Web 2.0 in action."
ZYB is, in a broad sense, a lot like a more mobile-focused version of Plaxo, the contact management service that was acquired by cable giant Comcast earlier this week. It stores members' address books and calendar data online and also connects them with friends who are also using the service.
Later this year, ZYB will be expanding its social-networking operations through a new project called Phonebook, which sounds a lot like Yahoo's OneConnect. Members will be able to see their friends' locations on a map, pull in feeds from external social services like Flickr and Facebook, and share calendars.
Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong telecom mogul who invested $60 million in Facebook last year, has upped his stake to $100 million and may invest even more, MarketWatch reported Thursday.
Facebook was valued at an eyebrow-raising $15 billion when Microsoft purchased a 5 percent stake at $240 million.
According to MarketWatch, Li made the initial announcement during the earnings call for his company, Hutchison Whampoa. "Facebook is doing very well and we could have some synergy between the 3G services of Hutchison and Facebook, so the customers could use Facebook on mobile phones," Li reportedly said.
Among Li's other investments is peer-to-peer video start-up Joost.
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