European Real Money Platform for Game Goods and Service: fatfoogoo.com

fatfoogoo.com is around for a couple of month and recently (early September) opened for public beta.

The company is based in Vienna (Austria) and run by the two Austrians Martin Herdina and Daniel Petri, both former ucpmorgen/qPass/amdocs guys.
fatoogoo combines gaming, social networking and commerce, all in one platform – brings buyers and sellers of virtual gaming good together. The company offers a virtual market place for World of WarCraf, EVE Online, Lord of the Rings, Guild Wars, Second Life, Everquest II, Vanguard, Diablo II, Lineage II, Dark Age of Camelot, Hellgate London and Tabula Rasa. fatfoogoo competes with Rupture, IGE, PlayerAuctions, Sparter and StationExchange.

English and German are available languages, paypal payments are supported.

Investors include Christian Lutz (Azzurro Investments), Toto Wolff (march.sixteen), Michael Krammer and Gamma Capital Partners (GCP), technology VC operating out of Vienna. As part of an investment portfolio of more than EUR 70 Mio, FatFoogoo is the first investment out of the new Gamma III fund and Klaus Matzka, Partner at GCP, will join the FatFoogoo board as new member.

Will MMOs like that business model? How will they react?

keep posted…

European Digg Clones

A brief overview about a German, a Luxembourg and a Spanish Digg Clones as I’ve heard about some more European digg clone investment requests in the last couple of weeks – so here is just a abstract of a market review.

German: yigg.de

German (Munich) startup founded January 2006 with 2,2 mio unique users and 12.000 registered user; 52mio page impressions, features such as discussion boards, map integration, bookmarking and geotagging.. Funding was led by Baytech Venture Capital. Angel investor Metzger is founder of JobPilot, which was acquired by Adecco in 2003.

Compete ranking: # 143,819

Spain: meneame.net

Most successful digg clone in spain.

Compete ranking: # 28,782

Luxembourg: wikio

Wikio is a personalised page of news, including a news search engine that searches media sites, blogs and member publications on wikio.com, wikio.de, wikio.es, wikio.fr, wikio.it, wikio.co.uk.

The company is based in Luxembourg. It’s funded by over 4 mio € by business angels and Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds.

Compete ranking (wikio.com): # 18,593

Europe’s Tech Startup Boom – great BusinessWeek summary

“Fueled by plentiful venture capital, plus cheap talent from Eastern Europe, tech entrepreneurs are pulling in U.S.-size profits.” a great BusinessWeek article about the the European tech startup boom. Click here to read it

MOO.com (UK) loves to print

Founded in 2004, MOO is a printing company based in UK. They print beautiful products, using images you’ve uploaded directly, or designs from our designer galleries. A product, I like and I will try it out at the upcoming XMAS.

As there are clear incomes & costs associated with one order, it’s a good model to run an affiliate program.

Following consultant and VC companies invested in Moo.com: Accelator Group, Atlas Venture, Index Ventures

my opinion:

Value Proposition: ok

Exit potential: ok

Business model: ok (the company will make money)

Easiness to scale geographically: medium

Growth potential (how big can it get?): medium

Entry barriers for competitors: low-medium

Overall RATING: (5 of 10 HOT POINTS)

world’s top blogging sites – statistic

A friend of mine was doing a research about most used blogs and generated a Compete statistic. I couldn’t find any other statistic, may it’s helpful for some of you – as it was for me.

No URL People
1 blogger.com / blogspot 29,930.939
2 wordpress.com 12,006.976
3 typepad.com 7,688.692
4 livejournal.com 3,400.522
5 xanga.com 2,133.020
6 blogcheese.com 972.000
7 vox.com 790.378
8 ufem.com 626.000
9 Twitter.com 504.868
10 blogsome.com 394.263
11 xanco 335.000
12 zoomshare.com 317.929
13 tumblr.com 300.011
14 windowslivespaces.com 288.000
15 greatestjournal.com 235.508
16 blog.com 181.398
17 jaiku.com 143.775
18 pownce.com 104.042
19 blogspirit.com 63.860
20 blogster.com 61.825
21 moveabletype.org 36.757
22 insanejournal.com 27.961
23 yahoo360.com 10.964
24 busythumbs.com 10.609
25 blogr.com 3.934
26 blogabond.com 2.334
27 trippert.com 1.342

Source: http://siteanalytics.compete.com

US versus European Venture Capital Market

United States Venture Capital Market

Venture capitalists invested some $6.6 billion in 797 deals in U.S. during the third quarter of 2006, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data by Thomson Financial.
A recent National Venture Capital Association survey found that majority (69%) of venture capitalists predict that VC investments in U.S. will level between $20-29 billion in 2007.

European Venture Capital Market

Europe has a large and growing number of active venture firms. Capital raised in the region in 2006 exceeded €110bn. The European Venture Capital Association includes a list of active firms and other statistics. In 2006 the top three countries receiving the most venture capital investments were the United Kingdom (515 minority stakes sold for €1.78bn), France (195 deals worth €875m), and Germany (207 deals worth €428m) according to data gathered by Library House.

(sources: wikipedia, National Venture Capital Association, European Venture Capital Association)

What’s not hot: European second tier social networks

I’ve received more than one hundred European investment proposals of 2nd/3rd tier social networks within the last 8 weeks. Most of them are universal social networks – trying to compete against facebook, studiVZ, myspace, etc.

In my understanding the don’t have a chance against the established players, as most of them don’t differ in their feature set and target audience. I still believe in niche players (travel, …) who are implementing very specific features that might be too unique to be implemented for example as facebook widgets.

In the last 2 month I recognized that hundreds of my friends in Europe signed up at facebook. All of them were using local social networks (such as studiVZ, xing, uboot) but now churned to facebook. Even a lot of ASW (a small world) members turn into extensive facebook users.

Conclusion: starting another local social network in Europe doesn’t make sense and is not hot, unless it provides great functionality and doesn’t require a huge user base that it works (where you don’t need all your other friends to be signed up). If there is no potential to grow the user base by utilizing a snowball effect – it doesn’t make sense either. If you can’t defend it against big players who are offering more and more functionality via widgets, it doesn’t make sense either.

nice techcrunch post: Why Are Founders and Execs Leaving Second Tier Social Networks?

“Three Virtual Worlds from Europe Worth Watching”

There is a big hype in the US around Virtual Worlds. Virtual Worlds Companies Funded from October 2006 to October 2007 include Club Penguin (acquired by Disney), Doppelganger (ventured by Greycroft Partners and Charles River Ventures and Prism), Double Fusion (Norwest Venture Partners, Time Warner, Accel), Electric Sheep Company (Gladwyne Partners and CBS), Emergent (Jerusalem Venture Partners, Worldview Technology Partners, Adena Ventures, Walker Ventures, Copan, and Cisco Systems), Gaia (Benchmark and Redpoint), HiPiHi (NGI Group), K2 Network (Intel Capital), Media Machines (Mohr Davidow Ventures), Network Game Interaction (GSR Ventures), Media Machines (Mohr Davidow Ventures), Trion World Network (Canyon Partners, Time Warner, GE/NBC Universal’s Peacock Equity Fund, and Bertelsmann Digital Media), Winking (NIF SMBC Ventures Asia). According to Virtual Worlds Management $1 billion has been invested in 35 virtual worlds companies since last October.I strongly believe it’s hard for non-European companies to enter the European virtual world market, based on diversity of cultures.

But what (else) is going on in Europe? What could be next bigger deals there? Beside Sulake (finish) with HABBO Hotel, what’s hot? Here you are:

clipped from gigaom.com Even across the Atlantic, you get the same sense of a mini dot com boom in virtual worlds, and the explosion of start-ups mainly looking to capitalize on the success of Second Life on the one hand (3D, open-ended spaces for adults) or Habbo Hotel (2D, controlled environments for kids) on the other– either as would-be competitor, middleware technology provider, or third-party marketing/services firm serving the existing market.Since it’s based in Europe, however, the VWF gave me a chance to glimpse promising, EU-centric MMOs that will probably take extra time to reach the States:- MoiPal: Tamagotchi-esque MMO for cellphones There’s been a relative dearth of virtual worlds centered around mobile phone networks, surprisingly enough, but MoiPal from Finland’s Iron Star Helsinki is looking to fill that opening. Founder Joakim Achren gave a quick tour of MoiPal on one of my panels: basically, you create and foster an avatar who exists in your phone, and you send it out to accomplish tasks and interact with other avatars while you’re offline, then check updates at the game’s website– a clever integration of mobile functionality with asynchronous play.- Papermint: MMO for hip girlsFrom Austrian-based Avaloop, Papermint is now being localized to English, offering a social world that’s been visualized with a quirky, hip flair. (Think Zwinky for cool kids and thanks to its look, perhaps an even larger fanbase of older players.) It was presented at VWF by lead artist Dr. Barbara Lippe, who with her cerebral background, pixie looks, and blue hair, I’m hereby dubbing the Bjork of the virtual world industry.- Moshi Monsters: The next Webkinz-ish breakout? I was also impressed by Moshi Monsters, from the London studio behind last year’s innovative alternative reality game Perplex City. Like Webkinz, the kid-focused MMO that counts nearly 4 million active users, you own a physical analog of a virtual pet, but Moshi Monsters seems to come with more customized controls and functionality, and the ugly-cute creatures will probably attract a larger and slightly older crossover market of boys and girls. There were many other virtual worlds/MMOs I missed, and other tech demos I’ll probably feature in future writing. As is often the case, indefatigably great game blogger Alice Taylor also has an imminently readable report from the scene. Image credit: MoshiMonsters.com. Disclosure: I was a partly-sponsored moderator for the VWF– given the gut-punchingly bad exchange rate of the US$ to the British pound nowadays, emphasis on “partly”.

Papermint.com link …fortunately Papermint is part of the i5invest portfolio.