AG Mobile VP Bryan Biniak Leaves; Starting VC Firm

AG Invests In Fund

You're reading it here first...Bryan Biniak, the SVP of AG Interactive division of American Greetings (heading its mobile efforts for the last three years) has left the company, and is starting a new VC fund. The fund, not yet named, will look not just at mobile content, but all kinds of interactive and social media efforts. American Greetings is initially contributing to the fund, and Bryan is also putting in his personal money into it. The fund raising effort is still on.
I spoke to Bryan this evening, after he announced his move internally earlier today: he said that AG's mobile efforts have been ramped up (with its multi-cultural efforts, through Univision Movil and Def Jam Mobile, among others) and the mobile division has been merged with two other AG divisions: the messaging division and the social communications division, in an effort to drive a unified interactive media strategy at American Greetings. He spent the last six months merging the three divisions together...Josef Mandelbaum is the CEO of AG Interactive and is now heading all this.
Prior to joining AG, Bryan exec VP of sales and marketing for (then owned by) Vivendi Universal's Moviso and before that was COO of YourMobile Networks. His heart is in startups, he told me, and with this new fund, he will help incubate new companies. More details down the line when they announce the company and portfolio investments.