During Paul Graham’s office hours at Disrupt NYC, one of the startups chosen to pitch to the Y Combinator co-founder was Emotely, a company that converts your smartphone into a wireless controller of web apps and games. Emotely Founder and CEO Francois Labergewas nowhere to be found, at which point TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington said that he remembered liking Emotely and that it was too bad, because he was “looking forward to hearing [Graham] give him advice”.
It was indeed a missed opportunity, but it turns out that Laberge had a good reason for not attending. We’ve since learned that Laberge and Emotely were busy being acquired by Brass Monkey, a company that makes software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS, and others, among them a more fleshed-out kit for turning smart devices into controllers.
Though the two companies are not yet sharing the full terms of the deal, it is clear that Laberge will be joining Brass Monkey as a member of the board as well as chief innovation officer, in which he will head the startup’s business strategy and HTML5 and mobile technology. The aqui-hire is a great fit for the two companies. Because Brass Monkey has a more fully developed controller-building SDK, with support for Flash, Unity3D, and desktop games and apps, Emotely’s ability to build controllers using HTML5 for both the interface and communication layer (with HTTP and WebSockets) provides a killer complement. It essentially allows Brass Monkey controllers to hit web browsers without the need for a plug-in.
