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March 22, 2006
Wazap founder on games portal and search
The alarm:clock serves up an exclusive interview with Andreas Ruehrig today. He's the co-founder of Eastbeam Group, the company behind Wazap, a German-Japanese games portal that also runs games search advertising business. In the Japanese market, Wazap has 70,000 users, according to the firm’s backer Wellington Partners in Münich.
alarm:clock euro Tell us about your past startups.
Wazap! AR The previous startups were gamez.de and uni.de. Gamez.de was the biggest gaming network in Europe in 2000. We sold the company to Gameloft, an Ubisoft spinoff. But with the crash in 2000 and the changed field of operation for gameloft (changed from online to mobile gaming) gamez.de was shut down and I decided to leave the company.
The other startup, uni.de, was the biggest student portal in Germany back in 2000 / 2001 when we sold it to Firstream, a French company that had plans to expand the business model world-wide and establish a large worldwide student community. I left this company in 2000 as an active manager to focus on gamez.de. By the way, uni.de is still online and generating revenue.
alarm:clock euro This is your third online venture, what is different this time?
Wazap! AR It`s my third online venture and it looks like that it could be the biggest. The venture money we got in the first round is the highest amount I raised so far. The reason that I believe it could be the biggest venture in total outcome is, that the field of activity is the hottest field right now (search and gaming) on the internet.
alarm:clock euro Was this the first time you raised venture capital?
Wazap! AR I raised venture capital money for all three ventures.
alarm:clock euro What was the most difficult thing to negotiate with the VCs?
Wazap! AR There were no difficulties in negotiating the vc round. The reason for that was, that more than one VC was interested in investing in wazap. We decided to go with Wellington based on a really good feeling about the people working for Wellington and their network, and of course the [Wellington's] speed of deciding to invest wazap.
alarm:clock euro Does Wazap search advertising product have much competition in Europe ?
Wazap! AR At the moment, we don`t have any competition in Europe. With our specialized gaming search we are unique worldwide. We will work together with the big players (google, yahoo, web.de, etc) for search ads and white label cobrands but also with smaller gaming portals and websites.
alarm:clock euro You already have an established user base in Japan. How did you manage that?
Wazap! AR To do business in Japan, you have to have Japanese people working for you and a lot of patience in negotiating business deals.
alarm:clock euro How many employees do you have? Are you hiring more this year?
Wazap! AR We have about 20 employees in Germany and 8 in Japan and we will hire new people this year.
alarm:clock euro What three tech ventures in Europe do you think are the most interesting right now?
Wazap! AR FON, openBC and Wazap!
Read- Wazap financing round (a:c euro)
Posted on March 22, 2006 12:22 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | Permalink
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