Gaming site Ujogo launched in public beta today, providing a free poker service that combines game play with player rewards and social networking tools.
In a busy day for Ujogo, the company also announced Series A funding and the acquisition of Gaming Everywhere. The company refused to disclose how much the Series A funding was, or who it was from; the latter in particular being somewhat strange (we did ask).
Ujogo aims to provide the thrill of playing at a real-money poker site, without any of the risk. The site includes educational and training tools, as well as giving players the ability to earn a wide range of prizes, including gift cards, consumer electronic devices, and “once-in-a-lifetime experiences.”
Ujogo’s social networking features include the ability to create profiles, choose avatars, and search for players with similar interests. Players can also read news feeds, watch training videos, browse user profiles, and review personal statistics during game play.
I don’t know, no gambling poker? What’s the point? The training tools videos are pretty cool.
Killed three birds with one stone- launched (i.e. no users, no revenue), took series A, and acquired!
Something tells me the bust is near
The end of the new 7 year business cycle since 2000.
This site seems great – now we can get back to some poker. It is about getting more people involved and playing on the net. I think these guys found a huge niche and may be the next big user generated site. People play every other multi-user game online without betting – why not poker. Great site.
Congrats to the Ujogo team; Eric, Don and all the other guys.
Looking for good things.
Any Nick’s blog ??!?!?!
round A funding: $5000
from: mom
“Ujogo aims to provide the thrill of playing at a real-money poker site, without any of the risk.” – dumbest claim I’ve ever seen a company make on TC. I can’t visit this site now on principle alone
@ Joe, adding to the dumbest claim, the domain is pretty dumb too!
yet another site betting da house on ad revenue … these guys must be very young.
has anyone actually tried to play poker on this site? It’s totally unusable. Bad layout, ads everywhere, annoying sounds… Many better options out there. Pokerroom.com being my fav. (yes I know they don’t give out “prizes”, but at least you can play).
hey Duncan – alarm:clock reported on ujogo’s seed funding in early May here – http://www.thea..._raises_se.html
To your question of who did the funding, it came from Dixon Doll’s Jrs.’s Longstreet Ventures. The connection is that the founder of the company is DCM Capital partner Eric Gonzalez. Dixon claims the investment here: http://www.link...184879461799_in
We don’t know how much was raised.
Thre of the last four comments are truly made with little knowledge of the online games space, people that don’t have gambling problems but like to actually play for fun and sites which cater to people of all levels. The mention by Pokerroom is a great job at advertising for another site – way to spend your time. This is beta-launch – for those that don’t understand beta get off the net and for those that do go through this site – this team really knows what they are doing and my bet is this site is one of the winners in this space.
ogoju (comment 6)
They’ve previously taken angel funding so it would be fair to say it was more that $5000 for their moms.
As for the gambling side…I’m a Pokerstars user myself, but not everyone is in to gambling for real money, even if personally I find it more fun
From my VentureBeat (http://www.venturebeat.com) comment:
I highly doubt this will work. Reading about the “nifty analytical analysis” and the “hands lost to bluffs” section makes me cringe. Poker is a game of partial information. Those who can uncover more information than their opponents and can do their own analysis, do better. Those that cannot, do worse. This is crucial for the game to have winners and losers. One can argue that people widely use analytical and tracking software on existing poker sites for this purpose. Poker sites, however, never offer this capability. It is never in the interest of a poker site to encourage its participants to improve. When games become tougher to beat, the bad players leave. Likewise, the good players leave, because the profitability becomes too little to bother, or entirely nonexistent. Cars and real world tournament entries as prizes? Whom are they kidding. At $1/hr per player divided by two, that’s .50c/hr, per player. How do they intend to generate enough revenue to cover the cost of a $10K tournament entry, much less a car? I highly doubt the success of this site and pity its investors. Then again, if gambling transactions are legalized in the near future in the US, maybe, just maybe, they are positioning themselves at a good time to cash in early. Then again, there’s the flipside. The major poker sites that are currently in rampant existence (although curtailed by the somewhat recent gambling ban), have all the infrastructure in place, and plenty of US based players (even after the gambling transaction ban). These poker sites will crush their competitors so fast (e.g. Ujogo) so quickly, they won’t have time to blink.
“Ujogo aims to provide the thrill of playing at a real-money poker site, without any of the risk”
First, isn’t this an obvious contradiction? How can “thrill” be decoupled from “risk”? And second, what exactly is the “risk” anyway? It is *entirely legal* for US citizens to play poker online for real money. What the recent legislation (UIGA) addressed is the transmission of funds from individuals to online gambling entities, eg it is directed at the money transmitters, NOT the players and NOT the sites.
I’m not saying that this is a bad or unnecessary service, just that if they are trying to address the niche of “giving US poker players a place to play” then that is an erroneous assumption. There are millions of US poker players online every night on sites like Poker Stars, Full Tilt, Ultimate Bet and more and those sites have actually increased business since the law was made.
Nice. Sounds like Moola. Though I am not a fan of poker (or any card game…except perhaps solitaire…find them boring).