Finding people to play computer games with you online can be harder than most people think, said Stuart MacFarlane, chief executive of Los Angeles-based GaimTheory Inc.
“You buy a first-person shooter game and find there are 2,000 servers to choose from. You randomly pick one and chances are, some expert will shoot you in the head and kill you,” he said. “It’s difficult for gamers to find a platform where you’re all playing on an equal footing.”
GaimTheory addresses this conundrum with a software program that recognizes the gamers’ skill levels and places them on the right difficulty level. The software is for PC games such as “Unreal Tournament,” “Quake,” and “Counter-strike” or what’s called first-person shooter games that are played from the perspective of someone holding a weapon.
Last week, GaimTheory received a fresh injection of funds from Momentum Venture Management and appointed the venture fund’s partner MacFarlane as the company’s chief executive.
MacFarlane said the company plans to roll out its software for other genres like sports and racing games.
LRN Acquires U.K. Firm
LRN, which provides online business ethics and compliance training, increased its employee base by 65 percent with its acquisition of Fuel, an e-learning company based in the United Kingdom.
The company would not disclose the terms of the transaction.
“It’s just one step in our quest to dominate the market,” said Paul Cole, LRN’s managing director. “We expect to grow aggressively in the upcoming years.”
The Los Angeles-based company, an application software provider for 250 companies, including the Walt Disney Co., 3M Worldwide and Procter and Gamble, was founded in 1993 and received its first round of venture funding of $30 million in 2000.
Fuel creates scenario-based e-learning education programs about regulatory corporate compliance, corporate responsibility and ethics. The company, founded in 1994, focuses on financial services and government, sectors that are new to LRN.
LRN is 220-employees strong and through Fuel gains 100 employees in India and 45 in Europe.
Youbet Gets New CFO
James Burk has been appointed the new chief financial officer of Youbet.com Inc.
Burk, who has two decades of entertainment industry experience, was previously the chief financial officer of Palace Entertainment and United Cinemas International and held executive positions at MCA Inc./Universal Studios.
He replaced Gary Sproule, who resumed his role as chief operating officer. Sproule has been with Youbet.com since 2002 as chief financial officer before serving as the company’s chief operating officer from 2004 to 2005. Prior to joining Youbet.com, Sproule was chief financial officer for Disney Interactive.
Marketing Muscle
Pay-per-click advertising on Google and Yahoo is a lot more labor intensive than just bidding on key words.
To make sure that every dollar is doing its work, the marketer has to keep track of the sales conversion rates of the key words while keeping the bids under a minimum cost per acquisition.
“The worst thing about the job of search engine marketing is trying to make sense of all the data,” said Erick Herring, vice president of engineering and operations at Adapt Technology.
The Pasadena-based company recently rolled out what’s called SEM-in-a-box, an online application that does all the thinking for the marketer. Its software recommends bid changes based on conversion rates piggy-backed on data from Google and Yahoo. It can automatically generate key word expansion, report how much you’re spending, and analyze ad campaigns on both Google and Yahoo. The company charges $499 a month for its services.
“We like to think of ourselves as the marketer’s friend,” Herring said. “We don’t profit from how much they spend. We just give them the data, save them time and money and leave the rest to the marketer.”
Adapt Technology is backed by Mohr Davidow Ventures and Emergence Capital Partners.
Staff reporter Booyeon Lee can be reached at
[email protected]
or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.
