Earlier this week, Smith & Tinker took the wraps off its first product, the Nanovor game and its associated Nanoscope portable player. Smith & Tinker is one of our most interesting and aggressive portfolio companies, because it is trying to establish a new approach to building digital toys, one that fully embraces the idea that the current generation of kids want toys that are digital, interactive and internet enabled and are impatient with the half-steps that have been taken so far along that road.

This is a company that was originally hatched in the experience of The Geek, Gilman Louie. Ever since he sold his company, Spectrum Holobyte, to Hasbro, it’s been bugging him that toys didn’t use digital technology more aggressively. When we formed our partnership in 2006, he started playing around with the idea of a company that would do just that. We worked with our first EIR, Lenny Raymond, to outline the business plan for the company. Eventually, we asked one of the team that Lenny put together to become the founder, Jordan Weisman, and he recruited Joe Lawandus to become his co-founder. Jordan is an experience entrepreneur and creative genius. Joe is an experienced general manager and toy executive with experience at Disney Toys and Cranium Toys.

We worked with Jordan and Joe to recruit executives, directors and investors and have ended up with a remarkable team: Steve Arnold, founding president of LucasArts (the game division of LucasFilms); Jim Whims, former market executive for Sony Playstation and Worlds of Wonder; Ryan McIntyre, co-founder of Excite and investor in Guitar Hero; Randy Rissman, founder of Tiger Electronics (creator of Furby); not to mention Gilman himself.

Smith & Tinker raised a significant new financing that includes DCM (Doll Capital Management) and Procter & Gamble as new investors. And now the company is ready to go to market, having introduced the online component of Nanovor and scheduled distribution of the handheld Nanoscope this fall, before the Christmas season.

This week, TopSchool Inc. is introducing itself to its world, which is the world of for-profit, post-secondary educational institutions. That’s a mouthful, but it’s a significant mouthful because those schools, ones designed to address specific educational needs and to make a profit while doing it, have grown into about a third of the entire college-level educational system. That’s right: A third of the money paid by people attending school after high school is not paid to the institutions we all identify as our college and university system.

Instead, there is a large and vibrant system of schools — small and large, broad or narrow — that are run as profitable businesses. And our company, TopSchool, has developed the software to provide a service to these schools that is both their core function (keeping track of their students as customers) and that is still largely locked behind client server systems developed as much as 20 years ago. By providing that software as a service, TopSchool will also enable these schools to go beyond “merely” keeping track of their customers into new and innovative ways of recruiting new customers as well as providing service to existing customers. (We even think that eventually we can provide a Facebook application to our customers’ students that will help them register for classes and manage other aspects of student life.)

TopSchool is a great entrepreneurial story. The company was started several years ago by an engineer, Harout Kertajian. Harout got the basic idea right, which was to provide a school information system as a service rather than as licensed software. But he needed an aggressive, business guy to help him get the company financed and ready to roll out and that guy is Leon Lo, the entrepreneur whom we bet on in making our investment in the company.

The most remarkable part of this story is that Leon actually replaced himself as CEO of the company before we even had a chance to invest in it. Leon recruited two top executives from eCollege, now a division of Pearson Education, to become respectively the CEO (Matthew Schnittman, former president of eCollege) and SVP Sales & Marketing (Justin McMorrow, former VP Sales & Business Development of eCollege and a thought leader in alternative forms of secondary education to boot). Leon also up and moved him and his family from Southern California to Denver to create a new home office for the company. We love that Leon has the drive and vision to do everything that is necessary to help a great new company started, even if that involves relocating his family and reorganizing himself into a new job.

And we’re thrilled to be helping a new company bring the software-as-a-service revolution to a fast-growing industry that is on the leading edge of inventing new way to educate and train us.

Ribbit introduced itself formally to the world today. Talk about BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), but the company has adopted the line that it is “Silicon Valley’s first telephone company”. For the best coverage of the company’s proposition, read Techcrunch’s post, which goes pretty deep in understanding what’s possible.

Ribbit is a classic (and wonderful) startup problem: How do you decide what to do when everything is possible. Ribbit has a killer advantage, which is that — under the covers — it has a Class 5 soft switch, the innards of a traditional telephone company that allows it to set up, route, and terminate phone calls. No other startup can duplicate that infrastructure in less than 3-5 years; but, on top of that infrastructure, Ribbit has build a platform and a set of applications that integrate with standard Web applications and finally merge telephony and computing and that we believe give the company the chance to grow into a real, modern telephone company. That’s what leads to Ribbit’s BHAG.

We’ve been using the service, in alpha and pre-alpha, and despite all the reliability and performance issues of using a pre-release service, Ribbit has already transformed our telephony. So we tend to be total believers in Ribbit’s ability to reach its goal.

Alsop Louie Partners lead the Series A investment in Ribbit with participation from KPG Ventures in October, 2006. (The company is completing its Series B funding, lead by Allegis Capital.) But we love Ribbit for another reason; it was one of the two companies that agreed to be funded by us before we finished raising our capital. It takes a lot for an entrepreneur to take that much of chance on a new venture capital firm and, for that confidence, we owe a lot to Ted Griggs, Crick Waters, Ramani Narayan, Peter Leong and the rest of the founding team at Ribbit.