AOL has launched a mobile phone gaming portal powered by Cellufun.
The games are available via wap.aol.com and are provided on a free, ad supported basis, and no downloads are necessary. Advertising inventory will be sold by AOL’s Platform-A’s Third Screen media.
AOL will offer games including Cellufun’s Call of the Pharoah, a game that relies on a social networking “pyramid scheme” to finish it.
New York based Cellufun was founded in 2005 by two former Wall Street security experts Arthur Goikhman and Steven Dacek and has attracted 5 million unique visitors to their games in the past year and 500,000 registered users.
Congratulation.
They were our main competitors at http://www.cotopia.com
We are doing very similar stuff as they were doing; Platform for mobile multiplayer games, together with games (Chess, Reversi, Connect4, ….) and community itself.
If somebody is interested, please let me know.
Tomas
There are other companies doing the “free to play, ad supported” mobile game model. Greystripe.com and Hovr.com most notably. Although I never had anything against Cellufun, I always saw them as the inferior product/portal of the three, so it’s VERY interesting to see them nab this big deal. A space that I thought was shaking out (with Greystripe as the clear leader) now looks like it’ll have some more fight left in it.
Justin,
Greystripe.com and Hovr.com are mobile marketing platforms, they put ads into other peoples games. They are not programming games on their own, I think.