ITGumbo: spicing IT up

News
Oberon Media is on a role right now. First it made news last week for buying two European companies, and then yesterday, it was announced that it will provide a new gaming channel on social network, MySpace. The company is such a hot topic right now, that in the past week alone, it has received coverage in over 12,000 blog entries.

Background
Oberon Media was founded in 2003 by Tomer Ben-Kiki, Tal Kerret, and Ofer Leidner and has its main headquarters in New York, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv. According to Matimop, Oberon Media has developed the leading global distribution network for casual games, hosting casual gaming sites for companies such as, MSN, Blue Mountain and AOL ICQ. The company is backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers.

What it does
Through R&D and acquisitions, Oberon Media has become the source for creating integrated casual gaming solutions that support its clients brands and users. According to a Globes article, "Oberon Media develops, publishes and distributes games across online, mobile and interactive TV platforms." Additionally, its current games Microsoft, Yahoo and Comcast have reached over 33 million users. A sample game center can be viewed here.

Competitors
Big Fish
RealArcade
Pogo.com
MiniClip

Market and Future
Oberon's deal with MySpace will have ripple affects in almost every medium. Oberon's casual gaming channel is part of MySpace's recent efforts to compete with Facebook. Meanwhile, already the leader in causal gaming, Oberon will now reach 100 million MySpace users to further its share of the gaming market. Additionally, this deal is big news for the marketing world, just as Facebook and Google begin to go head-to-head on which advertising-platform is better. Of course, advertisers will be following how the addition of a gaming channel on MySpace will affect the site's use as well as to see if this channel has potential for different companies desperately trying to reach the MySpace and Facebook demographic market to advertise on.

Should Oberon's gaming channel prove to be helpful in saving MySpace, it will not only reach millions of users, but is certain to be carefully scrutinized by other companies and websites for potential future deals. A benefit of the partnership for game developers is that the platform for the gaming channel will be open and MySpace and Oberon Media are currently receiving submissions for games for the channel.

Regarding Oberon's spending spree on different companies over the past year, perhaps its recent acquisitions of Kenjitsu and Friends Games helped seal the MySpace deal. According to an interview in Gamezebo last week after the acquisitions announcement, company Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder, Ofer Leidner, mentioned that there is a clear trend of successful casual games being developed in Eastern European countries and Russia. How this will effect the Oberon's Israeli R&D center, if at all, will be interesting to watch over the next few months.

Additional Resources
Gamezebo interview with Oberon's co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Ofer Leidner
Casual Gaming Stats
Few job cuts in I-Play deal
Overview of casual gaming competition
Casual Games Association