The Next Web

Gizmoz ready for Asian and mobile adventures

Written on March 18, 2008 – 11:28 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

This weekend, fun avatar service Gizmoz dominated the tech blogosphere for a while because they raised 6.5 million dollars Series B financing from a round led by a subsidiary of the largest cell phone operator in Japan, DoCoMo Capital. Moreover, they announced new compatibility with AIM. TechCrunch, Mashable and VentureBeat were all eager to cover the news from this Israel-based company.

I thought this story could use a little background, so I’ve interviewed Gizmoz’s Founder and CEO Eyal Gever. First question that comes to mind: is Gizmoz going to focus on Japan and other Asian countries now?

Gever: “We think the US and European market are also very interesting to approach. Asia is an extremely advance market compared to the US and Europe in terms of Mobile entertainment and we therefore believe that Asia has a huge addressable market for our services. So focusing on the Asian market makes a lot of sense as they have clear and established business models of advertising and digital goods. Also, self-expression and consumption of digital goods have been extremely popular in Asia both on the web and mobile.”

“Specifically, Japan represents a large and strategic market for Gizmoz. The country is a world-leader in mobile adoption and Japanese consumers are eager to embrace innovative content and offerings. DoCoMo is a subsidiary of Japan’s largest cellular phone service operator, and NGI capital is a leading VC firm in Japan. As strategic partners, they can help us navigate and launch our services in the Asian social entertainment market in ways that would be much more difficult to do by ourselves. Details of our expansion plans remain confidential at this time, but in short we see an opportunity partnering both with media companies, mobile content aggregators as well as mobile operators.”

Gever also announced that they’ll soon introduce a full set of mobile services. (more…)

I hope you like that post!

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asia, avatars, gizmoz, mobile

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Mooh lowering the boundaries for online gaming

Written on December 19, 2007 – 6:34 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic.

This week’s start-up is Mooh, a studio and developer of massive multiplayer games for casual audiences. The games are free, don’t need a plug-in, are cross platform and Flash-based and can be played from any web browser by thousands of players simultaneously. The company is an initiative of the Dutch companies Virtual Fairground, Ranj and Ex Machina.

We’re interviewing Maarten Brands, who has just left W!Games to focus on other projects, one of which is Mooh. He also co-founded a community and dating site for Christians, called Funky Fish and is working as a consultant for amongst others, the mobile start-up yoMedia.

Brands is a creative and strategic thinker who likes to do new things and start new initiatives: “I’m interested in a lot of stuff and I like to write which is why I studied Journalism - but I don’t blog -, although I quickly found out the whole news reporting thing wasn’t for me. I guess my main passions are the Arts, Games and Innovation.”

How did you guys come up with the idea for Mooh?

Mooh for me is the result of a lot of things. Frustration about the way the current ‘traditional’ retail games industry works, the rise of casual gaming audiences and their gaming preferences, the success of avatar-based social networking amongst teens, phenomena like World of Warcraft, the use of micro-payments etcetera.

One thing in particular that stuck was the realization that the reason people play Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games and why they use social networking services is often for similar reasons. It’s about self-expression, status and communication. The gaming element just give people more fun things to do while they are hanging out on-line and more room for self-expression. If we can take away certain boundaries in terms of accessibility and available types of content, many, many more people will play community games.

The whole gaming industry is on its head at the moment, with different kinds of business models coming up and a new type of consumers entering the market. I see an opportunity for Mooh to really challenge current conventions. (more…)

avatars, five questions for start-ups, interview, mooh, Netherlands, online games, Start-ups

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