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 entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Markets, Portfolio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.