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In a first round of financing, PONTIS Venture Partners, a venture capital company headquartered in Vienna, Austria, as well as a group of business angels are participating with a EUR 2.3 million investment in Xendex, one of Europe’s leading developers for mobile games. The former founders of 3United mobile solutions PLC, an Austrian company that was bought for EUR 55 million in early 2006 by global market leader Verisign, are among the business angels. Xendex also has offices in London and Krakow and has generated sales growth of 80% in the last year and now has over 70 channel partners, including T-Mobile, Orange and O2.

Business Standard are reporting that Hungama Mobile, South Asia’s premier mobile entertainment company has has formed a strategic alliance with Dailymotion, video entertainment website to provide video content catering to the Indian community.

Hungama will be Dailymotion’s anchor partner and business associate for the India operations. Hungama Mobile would also take the Dailymotion community to the mobile consumer where video consumption is already high and will grow rapidly once 3G is introduced later in the year.

Some may say this is an enlightened approach to company takeovers. Others may say it is a foolish marketing ploy. The UK’s biggest commercial radio station,  Virgin Radio, is about to be taken over by the Times of India and relaunched by Absolute Radio. In parallel with the takeover they also intend to rebrand the station, not easy even without the hassle of stabilizing a business you just bought.

Just to make it interesting though, the folks at ARI has opened up a blog tracking their progress as their thinking develops and allowing the staff at Virgin and anyone els for that matter to have their say - in public.

Naive or not?

Read it at OneGoldenSquare.com

As the music industry begins to buckle under the weight of digital downloads it is finally dawning on the Empire that the rebellion cannot be halted. No amount of marketing mind tricks are going to stop the decline in music sales.

According to research commissioned by British Music Rights 63% of people illegally download and some 48% of MP3 tracks are not paid for. Worst news still is that only 15% of people are dissuaded from uploading because of the risk of being caught. Clearly the industry is facing a challenge greater than a ’small minority’ of serial uploaders! PricewaterhouseCoopers is predicting a 0.6% compound annual decline in music spending over the next four years ($33.4bn in 2007 to $32.5bn in 2012. Not exactly the end of the planet as we know it but the Music Industry can certainly see it from there.

So what to do? Well for all you Music Fat Cats out there here is my top five survival strategies. [Read more]

Avaloop is seeking first round funding for Papermint, a virtual world game. Papermint is a game which thousands of people all over the world can play at the same time. Choose your game character and start your new life in a vast, colourful world.

Key concepts of Papermint

Papermint’s metagame, “Capture the Social Flag!”, features cooperation instead of dominance, a visualisation of the avatars’ souls, the establishment of powerful family bonds, and the protection of community resources.

• Papermint gives its “gaming residents” a reason to come back: players can establish social networks, become designers and take up a profession, explore, have fun, and live a socially rewarding life.
• Papermint is safe and easy: the game is [Read more]

  

  Tags: Avaloop, Papermint