Now that InstantAction is shut down, former CEO Louis Castle has been hired as VP of Studios at Zynga. Castle, who is also a former Electronic Arts executive and co-founder of Command & Conquer creator Westwood Studios, was InstantAction's CEO since 2009.
Since the time InstantAction began "winding down" late last year, Castle has reportedly held the role of senior advisor at PremiumFanPage, another social media company.
InstantAction was a relatively short-lived effort at providing a social platform around games on the web, and launched a streaming service for embeddable games. It's owned by IAC, the large Internet-specific conglomerate that also owns sites like CitySearch and Match.com, and was shut down late last year.
InstantAction's final launch was a browser and Facebook-based music game, Instant Jam that was shut down when IAC closed InstantAction's operations.
GarageGames, owner of the Torque engine, was InstantAction's founder in 2007. GarageGames recently relaunched itself separately from IAC, and continues to offer the Torque technology.
I don't know where you get "InstantAction was a relatively short-lived effort" but two years is not a short-lived effort. InstantAction.com went live on March 31, 2008 and taken down on March 13, 2010. They tried to make that thing work for two years - it was not a flash in the pan project, it was a Herculean effort that Lou and the InstantAction management squandered culminating in $22 million losses for IAC reported last month, a fact which escapes the scrutiny of this article. From massive, expensive, drawn out, multimillion-dollar company-bankrupting failure, to Zynga VP - now there's a story!
Please read http://gamasutra.com/view/news/32790/IAC_Incurs_22M_Writedown_On_InstantAction_C losure.php and you will see that Joshua was correct. There was a $22 million dollar loss incurred on the last year of InstantActions operations.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32790/IAC_Incurs_22M_Writedown_On_InstantActi
on_Closure.php
Please read http://gamasutra.com/view/news/32790/IAC_Incurs_22M_Writedown_On_InstantAction_C
losure.php and you will see that Joshua was correct. There was a $22 million dollar loss incurred on the last year of InstantActions operations.