Interview with Sven Halling, CEO of It’s Alive

It”s Alive provides great games, either as ASP solution or installed at operator’s site. It’s Alive also provides community managament, working actively with the user base to stimulate usage and drive traffic. This includes updating game content, staging events and competitions, analyzing statistics, etc.

Depends on operator policies, can be game license and/or revenue share. Advertizing and sponsoring has not yet been pursued.

Speaking at a number of trade conferences, exhibiting at major trade shows (usually together with our partners such as Ericsson, Signalsoft, Mobilaris, etc). Successful PR activities, stimulating press coverage.

Currently 6.000 users and growing rapidly. Between 10-25% of this user base is active every week.

The fact that GSM is a standard helps very much in the scalability of the business case, but the lack of standard APIs for interconnectong to the networks is a problem that slows down the speed to market.

No real effect.

This is a main concern that we have taken great care to address in a number of ways: (1). Players are always anonymous in the games, identity or phone number is never revealed only the alias of the player. (2). Players can always puase the game with a simple command and can then not be located. (3). Secure sign up with one time password sent out on SMS prevents anybody to sign up somebody else’s phone. (4). Secure hosting and VPN connections prevents unauthorized access to the system and its database.

Active users send around 20-30 SMS per week, which should be around one game every second day as an average.

Our game platform called “Matrix” would be a killer to run location based advertizing or location based content such as “Find my nearest McDonalds”, but we are only focussing on entertainment and gaming.