Gamer social startup gamesGRABR has been selected as an alternate finalist in the Entertainment and Gaming Technologies category of this year’s SXSW Accelerator competition.
We’ve covered gamesGRABR before, but here’s a quick recap: gamesGRABR is a social network created for both casual and hardcore gamers, and is dedicated to gaming culture. The network is built around direct links to retail goods as well. Think of it as Pinterest-meets-Amazon for gamers.
Anyway, back to SXSW. Over 500 companies submitted to present at the marquee event for SXSW Interactive Festival’s Startup Village, which hosts 56 finalists showcasing some of the best new tech innovations to a panel of hand-picked judges and a live audience.
The SXSW Interactive Festival, which will be held between the March 11 and 13, will feature finalists from a variety of categories, including Innovative Web Technologies, Social Technologies, Entertainment and Gaming Technologies, and many more. Judges for the Accelerator program will announce a selected winner in each category on March 12.
I say all of that to say that winning the SXSW Accelerator can be a huge boon for social startups, as it was for Storify and Pinterest. Tony Pearce, the CEO and co-founder of gamesGRABR, said that being chosen as an alternate finalist was “a real honor.”
“We’re hoping to provide consumers with a fun new way to discover, share and buy games online. Our aim is to become one of the largest e-commerce platforms for games and gaming related products in the world. Earlier this month we launched in open beta with affiliate deals in place with Apple and Amazon. Since then we’ve gone from strength to strength and have begun to finalise additional partnerships with a host of smaller indie retailers.”
Pearce told us that he’s “over the moon” regarding gamesGRABR’s selection, and we asked him a bit about what’s next for the startup.
“gamesGRABR only launched 4 weeks ago and is still in Beta 1.1, so it’s very early right now, however so far it has wildly exceeded our expectations,” he said of site traffic. “Visitor numbers are confidential right now but I can say that 52 percent of our visitors are returning, nearly all of users are GRABing content from across the web and creating their own collections.”
We argued before that gamesGRABR definitely has a huge audience out there it can engage with, and though the social network is bare bones right now, the concept seems to be taking off.
“We will be launching Beta 2.1 next month which includes comments, search by title, top 20 across all platforms and a brand new GRAB button which uses Semantic Bookmarking Technology – it’s very clever tech!”
You can check out gamesGRABR for yourself here.
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