Video Archives

Tao Group, Ltd.

Product Name

intEnt - Interactive Entertainment Software Platform

Market Segment

Enabling technology

Funding

Series A: Motorola/Freescale, Inc., $7.5 million. Series b: Sony, $4 million. Series C: bowman Capital, Sony, NEC, Mitsubishi, Kyocera, Sharp and private investors, $21.7 million. Series D: Freescale, Inc., Cross Atlantic technology Fund II l.P. and private investors, $8.3 million. Series E: Cross Atlantic technology Fund II l.P., Cross Atlantic Co-Investment 2000 Fund l.P., Nauta Capital and private investors, $19.5 million.

Competitors

Competitors include bounce technology and DigImpro in mobile music; Nokia, MuVee and Max in mobile media mixing; and Synergenix Interactive and IdeaWorks in mobile gaming.

Product Description

This suite of tightly integrated content-execution technologies for mobile entertainment includes the miniMIXA™ suite, comprising music-and media-mixing software applications; the GamePlayer, which enables the platform-independent delivery of C, C++ and Java-based games to mobile devices; the JavaPlayer, a high-performance Java Virtual Machine; and the Entertainment Platform SDK.

Market Opportunity

Juniper Research forecasts that global market revenues will rise from $3.6 billion in 2004 to $9.3 billion by 2009 for mobile music services, and from $3 billion in 2006 to $17.5 billion by 2011 for mobile games.

Demo Says

Ironically, as mobile devices become more powerful, it becomes increasingly difficult to write applications that tap that power. Phones, media players and game consoles take a myriad of approaches to hardware design and interface, leaving content providers the tough choice of either porting to specific devices to gain performance, or writing to high-level interfaces to get portability and distribution. Tao Group addresses this with an entertainment platform that enables mobile applications to tap the power of underlying hardware, while retaining portability across a range of devices.