August 28, 2008
Stockholm's NYX Raises €5M For Wagering Tech
We haven't seen much action in the wagering field for some time. But here's one from Scandinavia. NYX Interactive has raised €5M from Nordic Venture Partners. The firm makes software for all the fun stuff: bingo, lottery, keno, casino, poker and other betting games. NYC has done deals with the government-owned lottery company in Sweden.
Bingo!
View - site
Posted at 08:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 14, 2008
Paris' Monte Cristo Games Lands €4.5M For CitiesXL Game
Monte Cristo Games has raised $7M from Arts Alliance, 360 degrees Capital Partners and Innoven Partenaires. Monte Cristo was founded in Paris in 1995 and has focussed on simulation games such as Trader 97, Wall Street Trader, Economic War, Crazy Factory, Fire Department Series and Dino Island
The funding will be used to grow Monte Cristo’s city-building online game Cities XL. The game looks top notch if not a bit generic. After seeing a demo of the latest blockbuster game from EA - Spore - Cities XL is not so exciting.
View - site
Posted at 11:38 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 20, 2008
Barcelona's Project Amuso VC Funded For Contest Racket
Project Amuso, a pre-launch social media startup based in Barcelona, Spain, says it is has raised funding from "top tier venture capital funds" without saying who those are. When its launched, the company plans to offer cash and prizes for games involving user submitted videos and photos.
Founding team include President Barak Rabinowitz who just graduated from Harvard Business School and before that worked at Yahoo and Sony Broadband. CEO Jordi Bartomeu just graduated from the London Business School. Details to come.
View - site
Posted at 10:13 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 06, 2007
London Mobile Game Maker Ideaworks 3D Funded
Ideaworks3D, a London–based mobile game developer, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Japan Asia Investment Co. (JAIC). Idewworkd3D was founded in 1998 as a spin-off from the London Business School’s iLab. The company operates both a game studio and a tech lab that licenses its software.
View - site
Read - DigitalMediaWire
Posted at 08:04 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 21, 2007
Games Domains Startup Spill Group Attracts Backer For Better Biz Model
Dutch games-oriented website operator Spill Group has raised an undisclosed amount from the Van den Ende & Deitmers's Crossmedia Fund [via Tornado Insider ] for a “substantial minority” stake in the company.
Spill Group’s business model is morphing from generating web traffic for advertisers to one that might be more lucrative. It has been acquiring better content and also has contracts to run affiliate marketing campaigns for the likes of the Habbo Hotel (Sulake Labs). Deals for casual games from higher quality casual games are getting done, while the startup also builds a portfolio of its own titles. It recently acquired Hispanic game traffic domain Juegos.com
To get an idea of the kind of money companies like Spill group make just on the traffic generation, we can look at Virtual Network SA, which although smaller serves up some interesting numbers.
Back in 2005, this reporter posted on a predecessor to the a:c euro that the Nyon-based firm said profit climbed in 2005 to SFr 1.7 mln (EBITDA) on annual sales of Sfr 5.8 mln, up from SFr 1.2 mln on sales of SFr 4.2 mln in 2004. It has a 30% margin on sales. It runs several popular web-sites for the French speaking part of Switzerland and recently sold a stake to Edipresse, an international magazine and book publisher out of Switzerland.
Posted at 03:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 16, 2007
Accel Takes Stake In Browser-based Gameforge
Deutsche Startups is reporting that the London arm of Accel has taken a minority stake in Germany's Gameforge, a developer of browser-based multiplayer games. It also says that it was a minority stake.
The Karlsruhe-based company has some 'traction' as the VCs say, claiming 6M active players and 40M users in total on its games (with a number like this the company has a reach way beyond Germany as it is half the population of the country), which would have put the founders in a good negotiating position.
Like some other browser games out of Germany that we are familiar with, players are willing to buy tokens that enable them to move up to higher levels in flagship title „OGame" faster.
Harry Nelis from Accel said in a statement he has had his eye on the company for a while now.
Read - Accel Steigt Bei
Posted at 07:25 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 15, 2007
GoalUnited Funded For Browser Games
Browser-based games are big with the kids, and some of them are mighty addictive, so it is not much of a surprise that investors are starting to put some money in that direction. Today we received the news that the High Tech Gründerfonds, along with ICS Holding, have invested an undisclosed amount in Hamburg-based Northworx Software, the startup behind GoalUnited, a browser-based football sports manager game.
The game's sites ( 8 languages on various int'l domains) host training sessions, matches, rankings, and tournaments which apparently keep users coming back for more.
You may recognize the ICS name, its principals Sven Schmidt and Daniel Grözinger, are experienced Web and online service entrepreneurs, and recently founded (and are managing) new-style ecommerce startup site Dealjaeger.de and the quickly popular verwandt.de, a family roots site, which just raised capital from business angels and Neuhaus Partners to go international. The verwandt.de board is actually going to be recruiting a new management team for that venture soon, Schmidt informed us today.
The Northworx/ GoalUnited.de is a minority holding of ICS (the majority is still owned by management and HTGF owns a minority stake).
Northworx Co-founder Sascha Kaddatz said in a statement issued by htgf that his sites are serving 100M impressions a month to a good 300K users.
What makes this venture particularly attractive to the moneymen, according to the same source, is that it has a software development platform, geekily dubbed njin, for 'rich media' browsers games -- in addition to a hot game.
View GoalUnited
Posted at 02:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 14, 2007
Digital Chocolate Acquires Barcelona's Microjocs - Its Second Euro Buy
Digital Chocolate, the California-based pureplay games startup founded by Trip Hawkins - and backed by Sequoia and KPBC (among others) - has made its second acquisition in Europe, with microjocs, a Barcelona-based startup [via Carlos Blanco blog].
Microjocs is an imode, WAP, and J2ME games developer and publisher that was founded in 2002 and it employs 20 in Spain.
In the same announcement the US startup said it had also acquired assets from Bangalore-based Small Device Mobile Technologies. No disclosure on the size of the deals.
Small Device is known for its mobile application porting ability, according to Digital Chocolate, which will enable it to triple its capacity for such work.
This is the second Euro deal for Digital Chocolate. Back in 2004, before the company announced raising its first round VC, it bought Sumea, a Helsinki-based mobile games startup. The number of employees at that studio has grown 328 percent and still employees all the original co-founders, said Digital Chocolate in the statement.
Read - Digital Chocolate Expands Global Footprint with New Operations in India and Spain
Posted at 05:44 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 13, 2007
PE Firm Buys 3rd Mobile Entertainment Startup In Russia
Moscow-based private equity firm Marshall Capital Partners has bought a controlling stake in Russian mobile content provider Nikita Mobile. The press release does not disclose the amount paid but experts cited in Russian daily Vedomosti estimate Nikita Mobile is worth between $10M - $40M. Marshall is working a regional roll-up having previously bought Solvo and Jump, which operates in Russia and the Ukraine.
Read - Cellular News
View - Marshall Capital
View - Nikita
Posted at 08:47 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 01, 2007
Russian Casual Games Maker Hot Lava Bought
Hot Lava, a Russian casual games developer has been bought by Dallas, TX-based MumboJumbo. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. This is part of a trend of consolidation in casual games where well funded, mostly US startups are buying talent and properties globally.
View - Hotlava site
Posted at 06:50 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 14, 2007
UK's Codemasters To IPO After Balderton Buys Out Founders
Game-maker Codemasters plans on a 2008 IPO after Balderton (fka Benchmark Capital) bought out the founders. The Times reports that Codemasters is planning a for a £200 million-plus flotation. Founding brothers Richard and David Darling sold their remaining 25% interest to the existing investor Balderton Capital for what is understood to be tens of millions of pounds. The brothers may have taken £95M off the table and will now step down.
Balderton is not yet sure on which market it will float - perhaps Nasdaq. It did sell a stake to Goldman Sachs. Sales are expected to be about £75M with a target of £150M in 2007-2008. The company's big game is expected to become Lord of The Rings Online – a new multi-player game.
Read - Founders sell as Codemasters is driven towards a flotation (Times Online)
Posted at 06:09 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 01, 2007
London's Casual Gaming Biz iPlay Bought For $110M
Founded back in 1998, London's iPlay got a big payoff today as it was bought by Oberon Media for $110M. I-play's investors are Apax Partners and Argo Global Capital.
The buyer is NYC-based gaming company Oberon Media.To pay for the deal, Oberon raised an undisclosed sum in a new financing round, from investors including Goldman Sachs, Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers.
With this move, Oberon solidifies its position as a top company in casual gaming and a top IPO or big M&A candidate. The combined company is strong cross platform and will own more than a thousand casual game titles. It also count more than 350 partners, including Microsoft, Comcast, Sprint, AT&T, Yahoo Games, Electronic Arts and AOL Games. Oberon calls itself the fastest growing company in the casual games category, with a growth rate greater than 100% year-over-year.
Read - Casual Games Firm Oberon Acquires I-play for About $110 Million (Digital Media Wire)L
Posted at 04:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 14, 2007
Mobile Wagering Biz Cometa Raises £1M
Sheffield, UK-based Cometa has raised £1M at a £2M post money valuation. The principal investor is Mfusion, mobile phone gaming company. Other investors include a consortium of business angels led by Dr Tony Marchington former founder and CEO of Oxford Molecular Group.
Cometa sells a white label mobile gaming package to companies like Bet.com. Cometa is projecting revenues rising from £250K in 2007 to £6.8M by 2011.
View - site
Posted at 04:50 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Benchmark Plays Football Match W/ $8M Into Anglo-Swedish PowerChallenge
Power Challenge Sweden AB has closed a $8M round from Benchmark. Power Challenge develops online-games with 3D technology + community. Its first game, Power Football, claims more than 1.5M registered players and is currently localized into 4 languages.
The startup is run by co-founder Tomas Ahlström, who lives on a farm outside of Linkoping, Sweden and who has been doing 3d games for a decade and who launched Power Games in 2003 but has only been at hit full time since February. His co-founder is London-based Johan Christenson, who had founded ManagerZone, which merged with PowerChallenge.
Read - Swedish Game Site Power Challenge Raises $8 Million From Benchmark Capital
Posted at 07:08 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 11, 2007
French Gaming Group In-Fusio Acquired By France's Zenops
Bordeaux, France-based In-Fusio together with its its subsidiary Mobile Scope has been bought by French company Zenop. The amount of the deal was not announced. Zenops CEO, Pascal Boiteux, claims that the acquisitions mean that Zenops is the number two player in Europe”and is in sixth place in the western world.
In-fusio has made headlines in January for its lawsuit against Microsoft. In-fusio claimed that Microsoft is breakaing its contract with In-fusio to create a mobile game based on Halo. In-Fusio agreed to pay $2M for the license to the game, but when Microsoft refused to approve its game designs the French company withheld payment of its second installment, prompting MS to end the agreement. The troubles may have forced In-fusio to find a new owner.
Read - Zenops acquires In-fusio (Games On Deck)
Posted at 04:12 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 03, 2007
Blockbuster Sells Its Games Station Business For £74M
On the same day Blockbuster announced poor earnings but a sharp upramp in new subscribers, it also announced that Game Group has acquired its British video game unit, Games Station, from Blockbuster U.K. for £74M ($148M). Game Station is a British PC and video games retailer employing more than 1,800 in 217 stores.
In 2006, Game Station had Ebitda of £6.5M on revenue of £203.5M. The buyer said they expect the acquisition to deliver synergies of approximately £7M per year by the second full year following completion through improved efficiency, inventory management and leveraging existing overheads.
Posted at 07:16 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 06, 2007
London's King.com Opens For Biz In Hollywood
Our sister site alarm:clock met with the founders of King.com as they were on an American tour. The social network for skill games has opened an office in Hollywood to continue the deal flow that it has been doing with makers of TV game shows.
The prevailing trend these days is for startups to figure out how to make money from video content on the Net. King.com is making a King's ransom using TV brands and themes but not their video. Rather it creates casual games based on TV shows.
This morning we did coffee the founders of the terribly successful, UK-founded casual gaming network King.com. They are in town for the Game Developers Conference, passing trough Las Vegas en route for a consultation with their lawyer.
King.com started out localizing standard casual games like Bejewled. The startup's initial angle was to localize for even small European countries and to employ social networking. Casual gaming had mostly been a solitaire practice but King grew by bringing in some wagering and pages/blogs where entrants can chest thump at taunt.
King.com raised a huge round of financing primarily from Apex ($34M Euros) as well as from Index Ventures. This represented a partial exit for the founders, who had launched the company in 2003. But it was also a war chest to enable the company to partner with popular game shows in Europe and in the US like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Deal or No Deal. These programs and their sites drive traffic to King.com created games.
King.com competes with the likes of EA's Pogo.com, Miniclip and Fun.com. But competition does not seem to have now slowed growth. King.com has 10M registered users who played 8M man hours of games in January and it growing at 800K new users per month. King.com did $13.8M in revenues last year and has been profitable since January 2005.
Germany is King.com's biggest country but the US is in 2nd place and its growing fast. King.com can only legally offer its games in 34 sites.
Visit - site
Posted at 05:45 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 05, 2007
Ireland's Demonware Rumored Acquisition By Activision
The Irish press is reporting that Activision, the company behind Call of Duty multi-player games, is set to buy Irish DemonWare for around $20M.
Demonware was by Dylan Collins and Sean Blanchfield, and reportedly raised about €1M in VC in what was a very tough tech fundraising environment, circa 2002.
DemonWare developed State Engine and Matchmaking+, which provides services for multiplayer games such as matchmaking, user profiling and gaming statistics. Its online performance enhancing gaming software is used by Activision, as well as THQ and Ubisoft.
Read - Press coverage Silicon Republic and ENN
Posted at 05:55 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 12, 2007
Why VCs Are Investing In Gaming Again - Insights From Go4Venture
Go4Venture has some good analysis of venture capital's new interest in games developers in its newsletter this month. Referring to the New Enterprise Associates big investment in Scotland's RealTime Worlds, the corporate finance firm writes, "Gaming investments are back in favour. For many years VCs were concerned with the risks linked to the long cycles of game consoles successive generations."
Investors are seeing risks "somewhat reduced by new ways of exploiting the same content online and on mobile" and they are backing the creative minds, as opposed to the studios, points out Go4Venture.
The choice is whether to back the franchise or to back the creative guy with a track record. This is a case in point with Realtime Worlds: CEO David Jones was behind many iconic titles since the early 1990s such as ‘Lemmings’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto’. Chairman Ian Hetherington is also an experienced hand, having founded and run Psygnosis, which he sold to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for an undisclosed sum in 1993. Such résumés give investors comfort even before considering that Jones and Hetherington had worked together from as early as 1991.
And Go4Venture notes that NEA has also pulled an about face in its stance on European investment.
It was only 18 months ago that a NEA cofounder commented that Europe was a nice place to visit rather than invest in. Now NEA has made an investment that is considerable by European standards.
View - Go4Venture
Read - Silicon Valley VC Invests $31M In Famous Scottish Games Dev Team
Posted at 05:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 02, 2007
SAP Founder Makes 10tacle Share Price Jump
Publicly traded 10tacle, a German games development studio, closed 2006 with a spike in its share price. Not because it reported a big jump in its sales, although it did have good numbers. Nor did it do a snazzy acquisition, although it did acquire a larger chunk of a Singaporean subsidiary.
No, it was the news that an investment fund managed by Daniel Hopp, the son of SAP co-founder Dietmar Hopp, had acquired a small chunk of its shares.
There is nothing like bagging a well-known investor with billions in the bank to drive media coverage of a tech company, and evidently the valuation of the company too. In the US these days, it's getting Sequoia on board. But as we've pointed out here before, in Germany it's getting one of the SAP founder's and their investment vehicles.
10tacle had sales of about €13M in the first half of 2006, up from €1.7M in 2005.
Read - Die Aktie von 10tacle wurde im Dezember wachgeküßt (FAZ)
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December 09, 2006
Silicon Valley VC Invests $31M In Famous Scottish Games Dev Team
Your a:c euro reporter just got back from the Scottish Tech Tour (the body is back at least) to hear the news that New Enterprise Associates, a 30 year old Silicon Valley VC giant, has put $31M into Dundee, Scotland-based Realtime Worlds, an independent games development company, whose founding team created the Grand Theft Auto video game. (Disclosure: the a:c euro's accomodation on the tour was sponsored by The European Tech Tour Assoc.)
Realtime Worlds sold an undisclosed amount of equity to NEA in order to invest in its "global centre of excellence" for games development and to staff it up (image right).
The investment in the four year old company comes in advance of the launch of its Crackdown title, to be released in 2007 and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360 platform. Another game, All Points Bulletin, a massively multiplayer online game, will be published for the PC and for Xbox 360 by Korean online games giant Webzen.
This deal is interesting because we just learned that the Grand Theft Auto franchise is one of the examples of Scotland's claim to being a world class tech location. Indeed, according to NEA, the Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings games franchises generated some ...
$2.5B in revenues worldwide... Who knew it was a Scottish team behind it - we didn't until Thurday.
But NEA's investment in Realtime is also interesting for another reason, it is yet another example of a trend that sees brand name US VCs investing in European tech companies.
And the fact that NEA invested alone adds one more deal to a list that is blowing the notion that the US VCs are only co-investing in later stage ventures with local partners.
Other US VCs that have completed similar deals include Highland Capital (France's Photoways' Series A round), Sequoia (Austria's JaJah's seed round), GRP Capital (France's Actimagine Series A round) and Baker Capital (Finland's DigiTV Series A round).
Realtime Worlds was founded by CEO and creative director David Jones who was one of the co-founders of DMA Design, the games dev firm that spawned the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
As we learned last week in an intense two and a half days of presentations and meetings with Scottish entrepreneurs and their supporters in castles, chapels, research centers, airplane hangers, Edinburgh's City Hall chambers, and universities, not to mention the stretch Hummers and the whisky distellery, when Scottish investors and economic development execs trot out recent examples of the country's capacity to spawn world-class and high-growth tech, they list the Grand Theft Auto company DMA Design, the cloning of Dolly the sheep at the Roslin BioCentre, eye diagnostics firm Optos, and Wolfson Microelectronics whose market cap is well over a $1B.
The other claims to fame that Scotland has are much older and sexier, the TV, the telephone, the photocopier, hypodermic needles, antiseptics and anaesthetics, and interferon type I (although Amercians may disagree with some of those claims).
Read - Realtime Worlds Receives Financing From New Enterprise Associates (press rel.)
Posted at 05:33 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 21, 2006
VC + DVD Player + Remote = Sofatronic Casual Gaming
Germany's Neuhaus Partners just let us know that it has invested an undisclosed amount in Sofatronic, a Hamburg-based developer of casual games that can be played on standard DVD players. It's an original idea and fits with casual gaming trends that see browser games and light-weight mobilephone games catching on.
The tech is enabled by Adobe Flash and there's is no need for a new remote control or embedded software in the DVD hardware.
Sofatronic was founded early this year by a team that previously founded mobilephone games studio Elkware, which was acquired by Infospace for $26M at the end of 2004. The firm's MD is Nils Hammerich and its CTO is Rouven Malecki, along with Elkware co-founder, René Baisch who is in charge of business development.
Neuhaus says this is a very early stage investment and that the startup has potential for international growth, but the German market is first to be targeted. The company is looking to hire some wizards in Flash, testing, and gaming graphics, by the way.
Posted at 06:32 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 17, 2006
Just Your Average German Gamer
Researchers in Germany surveyed 3,000 over-fourteen year olds to find out who the average gamer is and found that the clichés are not very accurate, except for the fact that the most frequent players are male.
This is your average frequent gamer. He's 44 years old and the PC is the platform.
This is his fridge,
And his living room.
Gaming in Germany generates more sales that cinema. The full report (which was sponsored by Electronic Arts, German gaming magazine GEE, and Jung Von Matt, a corp comms company) can be downloaded if you provide your personal details.
Read - Spielplatz Deutschland
Posted at 04:22 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 15, 2006
London Company Starts Up NanoWars
Tim Harper from Cientifica, whose firm does a lot of consulting on nanotech commercialization, wrote in to say that his firm is advising Playgen on its new NanoWars video game. The idea is that the game should be based on fact as it's meant to be an educational tool to make learning about nanoscience interesting for 12 to 18 year olds.
Here's how they describe it:
The game's plot is to save the world from destruction by Dr.Nevil and his army of nano-machines and nano-materials, whilst the player stealthily learns about real world nanotechnology. The game hero (player) supported by Dr. Goodlove and his assistants use nano-imaging and quantum theory, create nano-machines, develop nano-materials, and utilise an extraordinary shrinking machine to shrink the player to nanoscale to stop Dr. Nevil and save the world.
It seems like a good idea but we think Playgen should consider making it Dr Nevilla and her army of nano machines versus Dr Goodlove and her army of assistants - that way female gamers might be attracted too.
Posted at 09:20 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 25, 2006
French VC-Backed Boonty Acquires China's Gamehub
Five year old Boonty (www.boonty.net), an online casual games distributor, said it acquired Beijing-based Gamehub, a one year old multiplayer casual digital game title developer and publisher. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Boonty was founded in France but has its legal HQ in New York. It is backed by syndicate of French VCs and raised $10M a few months ago. It operates in the US, European, and Asian market and makes it money by leveraging the popularity of its games by selling advertising. It also runs a micro-transaction platform selling personalized avatars or game play items.
Read -Boonty Accelerates Social Casual Games Strategy with Acquisition of Gamehub (press rel.)
Read - Boonty Profile circa August 2005 ( the a:c)
Posted at 08:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 03, 2006
EA Buys Swedish Battefield Master DICE for $175M
Electronic Arts has acquired Stockholm, Sweden's Digital Illusions CE, or DICE, known for the Battlefield game franchise, for about $175.5M SEK ($24M). Apparently it was a lengthy court-ship. As part of the agreement, DICE CEO Patrick Söderlund will become an EA Studio GM. DICE and EA have had a tight working relationship over recent years.
DICE is currently working on Battlefield 2142 (pictured), which is set to release later this month for PC.
Posted at 01:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 10, 2006
eWave Enables MMOGs-For-Mobilephones - VCs Sign On
The High-Tech Gründerfonds, a €262M fund created by KfW bank, the government, Siemens, BASF and Deutsche Telekom, has invested €600K in eWave Interactive, an eight month old startup that sells enabling software for hosting massive multiplayer online games (MMOGS) on mobilephones.
The company is a spinoff of 10 year old Navus, a developer of specialized software. Both firms have same founder.
The new capital wil be used to hire staff to code new product features, and to establish itself in the market. It already has a deal with e-sports in Hamburg, which makes Flash-based browser games onto its mobilephone platform. Over the next year it will grow the business in its home market and prepare to enter the Asian market and expects to raise capital to make that move.
The startup's products include
-- eWave GameServer is a comprehensive platform for massively multiplayer mobile games using GPRS or UMTS.
-- eWave LicenceServer is a powerful tool for copyright protection of video and mobile games.
-- eWave Synapse is a next generation AI engine based on argumentation technology.
Read - Geschäftsideen im Wettbewerb (Uptech Network news)
Posted at 07:40 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 11, 2006
Frogster Moves Into MMORGs With Two Acquisitions
Frogster, the German games publisher and distributor that had a mini-IPO in February, has taken stakes in two German startups to push itself into the massive multiplayer online role-playing gaming market.
In recent weeks it acquired a 50 percent stake in OnlineWelten, a MMORG news and reviews portal. It also took a 44 percent stake in Yusho AG, runs a payment and management platform for role-playing games and esports for its own games, and is also a distributor of MMORGs.
It says it is counting on players to spend "up to 40 hours" a week (!) in virtual worlds and the increasing willingness of gamers to pay for virtual goods and services.
Operational for a little over a year, Frogster raised €4M on the Entry Standard, the German junior stock exchange, earlier this year, has a market cap of €12.5M, and was profitable last year on €4.2M in turnover. It also owns a stake in OnlineEmbassy.
Posted at 02:08 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 13, 2006
German Games Developer 10tacle To Float
Germany's 10tacle Studios, a high-end games developer, aims to raise about €20M on the Frankfurt stock exchange next week. The shares, mainly new ones, will be offered on the General Standard market (not the lightly regulated Entry Standard).
10tacle, which develops racing games with rich graphics, as well as role playing and combat games (first person shooters), has annual sales of €17M, a positive EBIT, employs 180, and has studios in Germany, France, Singapore, UK, and Bratislava, it reports.
Back in April, 10tacle raised an undisclosed amount from Munich Venture Partners, along with other unnamed investors. It was an interesting VC investment - more about access to technology than it is about money.
Although a newcomer to the VC market here, Munich Venture Partners has close ties to the Fraunhofer Institute whose claim to fame is the development of MP3, among other goodies. The deal is meant to give 10tacle access to Fraunhofer's R&D teams to build on the startup's exisiting gaming engine, or middleware, platform.
Read - Spieleentwickler 10tacle bietet Aktien zu 11,75 bis 13,50 (reuters)
Posted at 03:43 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 13, 2006
It's Party Poker For Women
A British newspaper provides an update on the addition of social network features and the news about plans to expand into the US for King.com, the small-stakes casual gaming company.
The Independent Online published a "Day in The Life" profile of co-founder Toby Rowlands. It requires reading about the entrepreneur's glamourous wife, food choices, and the wealth of the family he was born into, but if we stick with it there are a few nuggets about the business.
(Image right, shows some of the online aliases of the ladies who play for money and online fame.)
Launched at the start of 2004, it hosted 40 million games in January as 84,000 paying customers logged on. In peak hours, 35,000 people play at the same time. The stakes are tiny, averaging 35p, but people don't really play for money, Mr Rowland says.It's the female Party Poker. Poker is all young guys between 18 and 35, what we do is women from 25-plus. They love the mental stimulation and the very small stakes."He adds: "There was nothing of this kind existing in Europe, and we thought the US sites weren't very good. It's a games site, but it's also a place where people talk to each other and make friends. They instant-message each other and have photographs of themselves and their dogs on the site."
The report says that King.com is going to expand its efforts in the US market. The business idea was originally copied from a US concept, but Rowland says they improved on it. They've been successful in the multi-lingual, multi-currency European market, and the next step is the US market. The firm is backed by Apax Partners, which owns a minority stake.
"European markets are the hardest ones to do because of the different languages and currencies, so we thought we'd do them first and then go for the US."
Read - Toby Rowland: The Acceptable Face of Capitalism Hits
Posted at 05:13 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 29, 2006
Another Big Wagering IPO
The London Stock Exchange’s market AIM saw one of its largest IPOs as Playtech went public valuing the online gambling software maker at nearly $1 billion.
Seven year-old Playtech began trading at $4.50 per share, raising $55.6M. Playtech has 39 licensees for 94 online casinos, 15 online poker sites, and 15 online bingo sites and its profits have grown to $35.6M in 2005 from $8.3M in 2003.
Playtech was founded in Estonia where most of its programing still takes place, but its HQ is in the British Virgin Islands, where we understand taxes are not a problem .
The company's 32-year old CEO is Avigur Zmora. He was CFO of New Age Ventures, a Tel Aviv listed company that served as an incubator to tech startups, including Playtech.
Playtech's Software
Posted at 05:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
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 at 12:22 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 17, 2006
Online Paperdolls Capture Index Ventures' Fancy
Index Ventures has a knack for finding out what's popular on the Internet and then backing these otherwise low profile ventures. Its latest investment, a €4M injection into Stardoll.com, an online celebrity and doll dressup site, is an example of that.
The a:c euro is aware of the popularity of playing with paperdolls online due to market intelligence gathered from our ten-year old female in-house expert. The activity rivals time spent on sites like Neopets and Barbie.com.
It is apparently a "sticky" type of web site, one that users go back to frequenty. "Stardoll.com is a web phenomenon," said Danny Rimer, general partner, Index Ventures, in a statement, citing stats from TNS Metrix data that show more than one million unique visitors each week. The firm generates sales with online ads as well as selling a premium membership that turns off the ads and gives access to so-called VIP dolls.
Dressing up Beyonce and 50Cent is popular with Stardoll's registered members
Stardoll's creator is a fifty-something Scandinavian woman who relied solely on word of mouth for marketing. Her son did a lot of the early programming for the site. Index brought in Mattias Miksche as CEO along with the money. Miksche founded E-trade in Germany and Scandinavia and the once high-flying Boxman, which was recently sold to UK-based Lovefilm, according to Index Ventures.
Read Index Ventures Invests US$4 Million in Stardoll.com
Posted at 06:31 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 08, 2006
Gaming search biz garners €3M
Germany’s Wellington Partners has invested in the Eastbeam Group, a German-Japanese that operates Wazap!, a publisher of a games portal that also runs games search advertising business. Before readers get too excited about Bubble 2.0 investment activity, you need to know that Wazap has a business model, two business models, actually. Both of which have been...
Both of which have been proven in the Japanese market where Wazap has 70,000 users, according to the firm’s backer.
Wazap's games search and context ads keep out the scammers and popups, it says.
It also has a management team that includes Andreas Rührig and Timo Meyer who together founded and led two German web companies prior to this, namely Uni.de and Gamez.de. For some reason Google finds no reference to these companies. But using Jux (the mighty meta-search engine) we found some articles in Golem that explain that the Gamez.de portal was shut down when sales did not cover costs. The Uni.de site is a social networking site for German university students and it is up and running.
A third key man is Tomoko Matsuoka formerly an executive at Ubisoft, the publicly traded games publisher that does €500M in sales a year.
Wazap's search business model is identical to Google AdSense or the Yahoo equivalent. It offers an edited keyword search engine in Japanese and German, and a context-based advertising program for games publishers and distributors that want to reach games consumers.
We could imaging that Wazap’s portal might become an issue. It is in effect competing with its search ad customers. What is more, Wazap’s content is user created, which will keep its costs down, but we also gives it an unfair advantage over sites that have to pay editorial staff. As a result, those sites probably won't want to buy ads from rival Wazap.
The press announcement was a bit vague on what will be done with the capital, saying only it will “establish” the portal as number one in the German market. One place it is not being spent is on human resources. There is only one job on offer at present.
Wellington seems to have spent some time mulling an investment in this market. It wrote a thought-piece entitled The Web is Ours that discusses content, collaboration, and new Web transactions trends.
Read - press release (Wellington Capital Partners)
Read - Wellington's thoughts on Web 2.0 and broadband (Wellington Capital Partners)
Posted at 01:08 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 24, 2006
Taatu launches HabboHotel clone
The success of the Habbo Hotel, an animated chat room or “virtual world”, developed by Finland’s Sulake Labs has not gone unnoticed by Europe’s enterprising founder community. The clones are a-coming.
The most recent is Taatu, a Belgium-based venture. Taatu raised capital from SF Investments and two business angels, Philippe Moitroux (founded and sold venture-backed ITMasters to BMC) and Maurice Olivier (an investment adviser who was an exec at Cambridge Technology Partners when it was acquired by Novell).
In the US, the highest profile clone is Second Life, which shares one of the same backers as Sulake Labs, Benchmark Capital.
They all target teens and people that spend a lot of time online. The business model is pretty much the same too: get users to spend real money to buy tokens that can only be used inside the chatroom to pay for virtual things. When I interviewed the founder of Sulake Labs, he told me that it is a business with good margins.
Yes, that would be what be right: users pay real money for virtual money.
According to Rodrigo (a Paris-based tech-sector blogger), Taatu has 30,000 new users signed up in the past 4 weeks, mainly in Belgium, France and The Netherlands. It apparently plans to expand into Anglo-Saxon countries in 2006. It offers a few more features than Habbo, such as a cinema where users can view film trailers, and seems to have some billboard ads like in the real world, but the idea and look is the same.
These companies are being built to be acquired by the likes of Yahoo, Liberty Media, IAC, or one of the other larger entertainment media companies looking to buy new business models and “audiences”.
Taatu screenshot
Read - Benchmark invests in Sulake Labs (The Deal)
Read - Just discovered another 3D world (Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz blog)
