Motorola Mobility’s Shaker Investment A Sign Of Mobile Virtual Clubs To Come

Shaker’s certainly been keeping busy ever since they won our Disrupt competition back in September — not only did they win our $50,000 check, the team also closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures not long afterward. Now it looks like Motorola Mobility Ventures is looking to get in on the action as well, as they have recently invested in the Israeli startup.

Neither Shaker nor Motorola would comment on the amount of the investment.

If you’ve happened to miss our previous coverage of Shaker, think of it as virtual nightclub that lives inside Facebook. The team’s goal was to take a classic social paradigm — meeting people in a physical location — and translate it to work where people spend time building their social networks.

Shaker is technically still in beta (and only available in Israel), but it’s already had the chance to show off a bit. Case in point: Shaker was tapped by Dick Clark Productions to power an online social experience for New Years Rockin Eve, and while the company doesn’t have specific numbers to share, DCP was apparently “very pleased” with how the pilot event turned out.

While Shaker’s virtual club environment currently only exists on Facebook, news of Motorola Mobility’s investment points at a potential future in the mobile space as well. In a release put out by Motorola, Shaker CEO and co-founder Yonatan Maor tacitly confirms that the team has their eyes set on mobile expansion.

“As more people start using social media sites on their smart phones, Motorola Mobility offers us exciting support and expertise to expand on all platforms,” he notes. “Motorola Mobility’s support will enable Shaker to offer an amazing experience across all devices.”

Sounds pretty convincing to me, and a Shaker spokesperson has confirmed to us that a mobile push is definitely on the company’s roadmap — he said it’s not a question of “if” but a question of “when”.

Shaker’s forthcoming move into mobile is sure to be an interesting one, if only because of the problems that they’ll have to solve. Specifically, they’ll need to provide a compelling reason as to why would I want to enter a virtual nightclub on my mobile device when I could just take my mobile device to a real nightclub.