Arrington’s Favorite Game, NY Incubator Betaworks’ Dots, Hits 25M Played In A Week

Dots,Arrington,New York,startupLast week at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, Mike Arrington had a sit down with Betaworks’ John Borthwick. After that, the founder of TechCrunch and the Managing Partner at CrunchFund was able to get Borthwick to give him an early release of a game that just hours later would turn into a megahit in the iOS app store. That game was Dots.

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Through a series of tweets, Arrington has kept us up to date with his progress, showing off a score of 290 on May 3rd

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Only to top that score and reach 442 later that afternoon.

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It’s probably safe to assume with big things happening at CrunchFund, like MG Siegler leaving for Google Ventures, Mike’s been a little busy lately and hasn’t had time to brush up on his Dots.

In the meantime though, since it’s release last week Dots has already seen 25 million games played. It’s an addictive little bugger. It’s like that game of dots you would play in grade school on a piece of graph paper, except as an app and with a spin. You can get points every time you connect two or more of the same colored dots.

I’ve been playing the game since day one as well but can’t get past a score of 357. Several of Mike’s followers on Twitter thought he was cheating, but he’s just figured out the strategy. Mike explains to Trustev CEO Pat Phelan:

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Since it’s release Dots has reached #2 on the free iOS apps chart. They also predict they will have one million players by the end of the day.

You can download dots for your iPhone here.

We’ve got over 30 startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt here.

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Shawn Parker’s AirTime Is Ramping Up For Launch, Has 2,000 Users And They’re Hiring

In 2010 Napster’s co-founders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker quietly started making noise about a new start up. At that time it wasn’t clear if the two were reunited when Fanning received an early seed round of funding in the amount of $200,000 for a startup, at the time called SupYo, as in “What’s Up Yo”. At that time Supyo’s founders were listed as Fanning and Voxli founder Joey Liaw.

Almost a year to the day later in October 2011, Fanning and Parker had competed an $8.3 million series A round. Some of the top investor’s in Silicon Valley were involved including; Founder’s Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, Will I Am, Scott Braun and Michael Arrington.  With an all star line up like that Parker and Fanning must be on to something big. All that is known so far is that it’s some kind of video chat.

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