Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 6)

SM. How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM (Total Available Market)? JW: The casual games market is expected to hit $1.5 billion next year. More than 200 million people play casual games via the Internet today, with about 60 million downloads each month (Computerworld). Analyst firm DFC Intelligence predicts that casual games

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Online Music & Web 3.0 (Part 5)

M&A and VC activity In May 2007, CBS Corp. acquired Last.fm, a UK-based music community site that allows fans with similar tastes to connect, for $280 Million, in a bid to attract young audiences. Napster acquired AOL Music’s subscription service for $15 million in cash in January 2007. The acquisition gave Napster 350,000 subscribers of

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Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 4)

SM: Sounds like Shockwave was a great place to experiment and learn! JW: During this time I built a friendship with the principal software architect of the project, Brad Edelman, who is now co-founder and CTO of PlayFirst. I also met three other great people who now work at PlayFirst. Unfortunately, Shockwave spent most of

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Local Search Bonanza Stirs Patent Investigation

Last year in Feb the Kelsey Group made the eye-catching forecast that the global online local search market is set to explode from $3.4 billion in 2005 to $13 billion in 2010. This put the growth rate at a handsome 30.4% over the next 4-5 years. Interestingly, the same report was emphatic that the classified

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iPhone’s Inside Beneficiaries

The first few attempts at understanding the guts of the iPhone have started emerging. Here are 2 pieces that take a crack at the topic from EETimes and TechOnline. Key points on the iPhone’s components are below:

iPhone Objections So Far

The iPhone isn’t perfect, acc. to the reviews. Here are the objections so far: 1. Fragility of the device, compared with equivalent mobile handsets. The glass case may break if you drop it. 2. Battery Life. Apple says, the iPhone will have 8 hours of battery life. The battery is not removable, hence the option

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BOP Shared Mobile Access (WRI)

Another innovative business model—shared access, in which an entrepreneur with a phone provides pay-per-use access to a community—has extended the social and economic impact of mobile phones beyond the subscriber base. In South Africa more than half the traffic on Vodacom’s mobile network in 2004 came not from its 8 million subscribers but from 4,400

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BOP Markets: Mobile Telephony (Excerpt from the WRI Report)

Perhaps the strongest and most dramatic BOP success story is mobile telephony. Between 2000 and 2005 the number of mobile subscribers in developing countries grew more than fivefold—to nearly 1.4 billion. Growth was rapid in all regions, but fastest in sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria’s subscriber base grew from 370,000 to 16.8 million in just four years (World

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