OCT. 21, 2010 • Intel Capital has made a $3 million investment in OpenFeint. The latter is best known for its mobile social gaming platform Aurora Feint. The investment brings Aurora Feint’s total funding to $12 million. The company took a $5 million investment from Chinese gaming company The9 earlier this year. Aurora Feint includes online game services such as leaderboards, virtual currencies and achievements for smartphones.

Impact: The iOS and Android platforms are novel for the simple reason they are dominant platforms for mobile phones and other devices. With actual stable platforms all kinds of software and services can sprout up. Before the iPhone, the mobile content business was awash in dizzying diversity. Now there are more than 400,000 apps between Apple’s (300,000 apps) and Google’s (100,000 apps) platforms. In the coming months there is going to be tremendous interest in companies like OpenFeint. Both as investment and acquisition targets.