UPDATED Rumor Mill: Zeemote Purchased?
A few weeks ago, it became public that Zeemote closed its doors. Since closing a $6.9 million Series A funding round, the company has been aggressive to close deals with handset makers like Nokia and SonyEricsson. It was also courting Game Publishers like Gameloft and FishLabs. More news was confirmed that the company’s assets would be put up for sale.
The Case Study of Zeemote appears to be the classic problem of entering a large inefficient ecosystem. As I have met a number of the Management Folks at Zeemote, I had no doubt about their experience and talent, and I still, to this day, feel that the JS1 was a good idea. And there was certainly potential to expand into lots of things beyond gaming.
But the squeeze play by everyone in the system was just a great big comedy of errors for Zeemote to get off the ground in a big way. Content guys want to push units and increase their revenue share to keep the lights on and grow the business. The handset OEMs are constantly struggling to squeeze out every gram of value-add with each successive device while exerting their control over the subscriber. Bundling Zeemote seemed logical, but the momentum to get things off the ground was perhaps too much. As a personal aside, one of the companies who I was consulting for at the time, would have been another logical partner to sell more units and provide a compelling use case for mobile entertainment.
Back to the news at hand. Through an unconfirmed source, it appears that Zeemote has found a suitor in Aplix Corporation from Japan. None of the details have been disclosed, but it appears the buyer hails from Japan. Japan has a very active mobile gaming population and for that matter, Asia in general. So this could breathe new life into a product with much potential and distribution that could eventually make it’s way back to the Americas and Europe.
