Seattle social-gaming startup Giant Thinkwell, which just unveiled its first official celebrity endorsed game with Seattle hip-hop legend Sir Mix-A-Lot, is also announcing that it’s landed a $600,000 seed investment round. The investment was led by Madrona Venture Group, with Founder’s Co-op and unnamed angels also participating.
Giant Thinkwell, part of the first Seattle TechStars class, was co-founded by former Microsoftie Kevin Leneway, artist and designer Kyle Kesterson, and Cranium veteran Adam Tratt. Their goal is to help celebrities—and eventually even regular Joes—connect with fans and friends through Facebook-based games like Mix-N-Match, the new offering with Sir Mix-A-Lot.

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When Dave Long first started pitching movie studios on a new way to market their old titles, he encountered a fair bit of skepticism. After all, what could a boardgame entrepreneur from soggy Seattle possibly teach Hollywood about selling its own stars?

Nearly 10 years later, the “Scene It?” brand—which builds trivia games around movie and TV clips—has been adapted to iconic titles like Seinfeld, South Park, James Bond, and Harry Potter. The company that Long co-founded, Screenlife, was acquired by Paramount in 2008 and has sold some 20 million games worldwide.

And Hollywood’s major players, Long says, have a different feeling about visitors from up north. ”There is a little mystique around Seattle,” he says. “I’ve had big executives say ‘Hey, what’s in the coffee up there? It seems like there’s a lot of creativity up there.’”

That kind of reception from entertainment bigwigs is helping to fuel an emerging cluster of Seattle companies that are taking innovative approaches to selling entertainment’s products and personalities. These entrepreneurs are building on the area’s traditional strengths in digital media and gaming, with hopes of helping the entertainment industry navigate the fundamentally shifted economics of the digital age.

The roster includes Hark, a startup that aims to spread bite-size chunks of content through the social sphere; Hypershow, a quietly profitable company enabling richly layered digital movies; and Giant Thinkwell, an incubator-stage company that wants to help celebrities of any stripe reach their fans through quirky social games.

Dave Long is back on the job as well. His new company, Exponential Entertainment, is working with the studios to develop promotional digital games—and this time, they’re starting with some major first-run movies.

Building bridges to the star-studded streets of Hollywood still has its challenges, even in a highly networked age. It’s simply harder to build relationships and keep your finger on the pulse of an industry when you’re hundreds of miles away from Sunset Boulevard.

But there are also advantages to being based in the Northwest, says David Aronchick, the founder and CEO of Hark.

“It’s far more cost-effective to work out of Seattle, and you obviously have an incredible depth of technical talent here that allows you to execute very quickly comparatively, and do some really cool things,” he says. “We’re not unique, but we certainly have a lot of cross-pollination because we’re a very migratory city. We pull in a lot of people from all over the place, especially people from on the West Coast. And this is a great place to set up shop.”

Here’s a deeper look at the startups I identified as part of Seattle’s emerging entertainment innovation cluster. I didn’t include folks who produce entertainment-themed content of their own, like the blog publisher Wetpaint, for example. The focus here is mostly on companies that are aiming for business partnerships with the entertainment industry.

Also purposely left off the list was a major name—the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, which is owned by Amazon.com and headquartered in Seattle. Although it might seem kind of odd to think of … Next Page »

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Updated 4:15 pm with new photo. Anytime you get a few hundred people in a room and add a couple of drink tickets, there are bound to be some interesting moments. And when that crowd is comprised of the techies, entrepreneurs, risk-takers and rich people from the startup scene, you’re starting from some pretty fertile ground for quirkiness.

Last night’s Seattle 2.0 awards didn’t disappoint. From organizer Marcelo Calbucci’s exasperation at the crowd noise to a friendly faceoff between a couple of mascots, these are the moments that stuck out to me. Check out the Seattle 2.0 page for the list of actual winners, along with a few other thank-yous and tidbits that Calbucci called out.

—Rand Fishkin threatens to strip: When it was time for the mingling to stop, Calbucci had to plead—and almost threaten—the crowd to detach itself from the main bar, quit chitchatting, and sit down for the show. It still hadn’t quite settled down when SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin—a sponsor of the event—took the stage for a few remarks, so he took matters into his own hands. “I’m about to start taking off my clothing, unless–unless!–you sit down and be quiet,” he said. “This is a threat.”

The tactic may have had the opposite effect, however, because once Fishkin tossed his dress shirt toward the crowd and stood there in a white v-neck T-shirt, someone rushed the stage and appeared to try to tuck money into his waistband.

—Soul-searching: The overall tone of the program was a mix of boosterism and self-criticism that you encounter constantly in Seattle’s tech startup community—on one hand, the town’s instigators are beating the drum about why Seattle is good and how it can be great. On the other, there’s plenty of hand-wringing about why this next-level evolution hasn’t happened yet, and what else could be done to ignite people.

Calbucci hit this sentiment early on with a heartfelt speech in which he compared his Seattle 2.0 website to a community restaurant—it doesn’t make money, and in fact can be a drain on personal resources. But the owner clearly sees that it has value to the community, and worries what would happen otherwise. “If I close it, I fear that no one is going to do what I’m doing right now,” he said.

—Mark Suster, from crowd control to inspiration: Suster, a Southern California entrepreneur-turned-VC, was the keynote speaker. He created a bit of anticipation for the speech by publishing this Seattle-themed piece about building a startup community, and the talk itself didn’t disappoint. It started with Suster over by the bar area, wearing a Tony Robbins-style headset, telling Calbucci that he was going to take another run at shutting up everyone who was still mingling and refreshing their drinks.

Then he waded into the crowd, and gave them a once-over that was broadcast over the PA system: “I was standing right next to Marcelo and it was so fucking hard to concentrate with you guys talking,” Suster said to the surprised patrons.

His speech detailed what he felt was needed to build capacity for more entrepreneurs and startups in a place like Seattle: Get “wantrepreneurs” off the sidelines, get would-be investors off the sidelines, pull the trigger on your big ideas, be cheerleaders for your community, but also don’t believe the hype of what’s hot now (complete with Public Enemy album cover shot).

“Do we need another fucking check-in application for restaurants?” Suster asked. “I like Foursquare—I’m not critical of it. But do we need another deal site?”

—Mascots: Promotional hackery, yes. But mascots do the job (I’m writing about them, aren’t I?). The team from Deal Springer—offering a kind of reverse-Groupon engine that allows local businesses to set and promote their own online discounts—hauled out a blue lycra full-body suit that some unnamed fellow rocked along with all-white sneakers. He startled at least one lady who was not expecting to encounter a shimmering, shrink-wrapped dude, but also got his picture taken plenty of times.

Not to be outdone was the group from Giant Thinkwell, which is building a way for celebrities to engage their fanbase with online and mobile games. They brought a giant squid mascot, complete with glowing orange eyes, that bobbed ominously in front of the stage as Kyle Kesterson accepted his award for best designer.

I didn’t see it happen myself, but Deal Springer’s Nick Huzar sent along the photographic evidence that the pair accepted my earlier Twitter challenge for a mascot confrontation. No word on who dominated.

Update: Giant Thinkwell’s Kesterson sends this additional photo (also shown at top), which may be showing some sort of mascot dance-off in progress.

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Are you ready to rock? We’ve already received quite a few submissions from Seattle-area musicians in the tech and life sciences community who want to compete in the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands. The big competition is happening at the WTIA Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Ale House on July 30. (Event details and band application info is here; the deadline for applicants is June 12.)

But we also got a submission we didn’t expect. It looks like tech luminaries Bill Gates and Paul Allen, a known music buff, are planning to enter the competition—at least in one alternate reality. Donn Harvey, the president of Bellevue, WA-based Protingent Staffing (and bass guitarist with Hettel Street Blues), sent us a rather unusual e-mail. It seems his company has a comic-strip superhero who works with Gates and Allen.

I’ll let the cartoons, drawn by David J. Locher, tell the rest of the story (see below):

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(To be continued…)

OK, so it’s a little self-promotional (for both of us), but we laughed out loud when we received it. Besides, it’s all in the spirit of fun and a great cause, right? We’ll be announcing the judges and prizes for the Battle soon. In the meantime, please help us spread the word, and e-mail us at techbands@xconomy.com if your band would like to enter.

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Paid, Inc., a Boston startup that provides services such as online community building, Web design, merchandising, and VIP fan ticketing to musical and sports celebrities including Patti Labele, Keith Lockhart, Doug Flutie, and the group Aerosmith, said yesterday that it has closed a $2.5 million revolving line of credit with Lewis Asset Management of New York. The company said the money will enable it to win contracts with musical artists who require advance payments for VIP ticket packages.

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