The Gong Show

I’m excited to share that Kik Interactive just launched its second product. The first one was the popular messaging app Kik, which continues to have a strong base of devoted fans and is growing quickly. Today, the company launched Clik, a remote for bridging phones to bigger screens. Techcrunch has a good high-level summary.

Clik today is a very compelling demo where you use your smartphone to control YouTube videos on a larger second screen, and you can try it out now on a mobile phone. I’m really excited to see what third-party developers do with this platform when we launch the SDK for this service soon. Spark is an investor in Kik along side RRE and USV, and we are delighted to see Ted Livingston (Founder and CEO) and his team continue to push the boundaries on mobile technology. 

The core technology and UI innovation for Clik surprisingly predates Kik.  It was the original passion of Ted and his founding team. So it’s great to see Ted finally bring to life a vision he has been fostering for a number of years now.

Nabeel Hyatt has joined Spark Capital. I’m delighted by the addition of a talented entrepreneur to our team.  

I first “met” Nabeel on a winding trip down the rabbit hole of blogs in early 2007. We traded comments on blogs back and forth before meeting for the first time in person at SXSW that year. I recall being impressed by his depth in the online gaming market, and the way in which he could cut to the real story behind quantitative analytics. His Rock Band skills weren’t too shabby either.

Nabeel is a maker by nature, and he has built some very interesting companies over the years.  I remember studying the Ambient Orb in my Human Computer Interaction coursework at Stanford, which was the product of one of his startups: Ambient Devices. He brings to the table a wealth of operating experience across a number of startups, and he is a valuable member of the local Boston startup community, from his mentorship at TechStars to co-founding the OpenCoffee Cambridge sessions. I know he’ll make all of us at Spark better investors as he too becomes a great investor himself, and I’m delighted to welcome him aboard.