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Games - Thursday, September 30, 2004

Wild Tangent - Profile

HQ: Redmond, WA

Founded: 1998

Management: Founder/CEO is Alex St. John, formerly with Microsoft where he was responsible for the DirectX multimedia platform.

CEO Alex St. John Plays The Heavy in Online Games

Investors: In May 2004, ATV, led a $16.5M round. Previously, the company blew out a $34M Series C in April 2001. a href="http://atvcapital.com/">Advanced Technology Ventures, ATI, CIBC Capital Partners, Greylock, IDG Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Millenium Technology Ventures, New Millenium Partners, Sony, Washington Mutual.

Business Model: Creates and distributes online games, powered by advertising dollars. Game driver software is intalled on close to 100M PCs. Company has a strong list of distribution partners, most noteably AOL which allows AIM users to game each other, and advertisers including Sony and Daimler Chyrsler.

Competitors: Jamdat, Sorrent, Airborne Entertainment.

Dirt: Company has developed a bad privacy rap among the trade press and online boards over privacy concerns - Wild Tangent sniffs users computers systems. After JamDat's successful IPO, one might expect to see Wild Tanget take the same route soon - ceretainly it has much greater market penetration and revenues, but it is rumoured to carry very high operating expenses which blemish its books.