IceBreaker Gets $7.2 Million For Social Mobile App

Mobile software company IceBreaker just announced a $7.2 million round co-led by Frazier Technology Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. IceBreaker is putting the money into marketing marketing and expanding their Beijing development office.

IceBreaker’s main offering is their mobile dating applications, “Crush or Flush”, which is like a WAP version of Hot or Not. You join the site through your mobile phone, and can then start perusing a feed of single’s photo profiles within your browser looking for a match. As you flip through photos and short descriptions, you can “Crush” or “Flush” the person. If they “Crush” you as well, you can text with that person anonymously. Integration with an anonymous phone call service like Jingle seems like a good fit, but there has been no word on incorporating phone calls into the product.

Crush or Flush claims 150,000 registered and 20 million users since their launch 120 days ago. Nearly 100% of the users access the site through their mobile browsers, although the site is accessible through a desktop browser. Users log in an average of two times per week.

The core service seems fairly basic to implement. FunkySexyCool is another competitor in the market, but the original deal, Hot or Not, has remained silent on mobile specific products. I’ve spoken to the founder James Hong about the possibility of a mobile application at the Web 2.0 Expo, but the recently restructured service has no immediate plans to extend the network with mobile optimization.


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Frengo Takes Mobile Social Networks to the Next Level

Frengo will announce the launch of its mobile social network today, bringing games and other forms of entertainment directly to your cell phone. Co-founded by industry veterans, including Mahi de Silva and Dan Mosher, Frengo has received $2.3 million in venture capital, led by Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and private investors.
Frengo allows for continued communication amongst friends and across devices, and enables users to even create their own games. Considering the direction in which social networking and the mobile realm are going, it’s no surprise that a product such as Frengo has emerged. Games and other features included in Frengo focus on sports, music and pop culture, as well as useful planning tools and easy integrated widgets for your pages on MySpace, hi5, Piczo and other sites.
The founders’ experience in the mobile and Internet industries proved most helpful when creating Frengo. The company “is partnering with mobile operators such as Boost Mobile” according to a written statement, and has leveraged many of their existing relationships within their field to offer the best product to the consumer, the mobile companies, and game developers as well. Last week, I asked Mosher what the most challenging aspect of creating a social network for mobile phones was. He explained:
“The first challenge is getting critical mass of users with all of the noise around social networking. We approach this two ways - one by creating a broad portfolio of games so that we can have at least one game that will be interesting to all potential customers and the other is building functionality that leverages existing social networks (postings on myspace as an example of this) and two by reaching out through many distribution channels (TV, web, carrier, college campus etc..).
The second challenge is just the nature of how phones work - the fact that functionality is limited on SMS versus the web. We approach this challenge but building intelligence into our network that makes it easy for customers to set up groups, manage multiple messaging services across groups and send simple commands into our shortcode that can get distributed across the network to a group of friends.”
Needless to say, Frengo offers much in the way of group interaction for existing friends as well as cross-device communication, and aims to provide a more comprehensive option for social networking across our mobile platforms.

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