almost nothing more about digital chocolate

There's a fresh article about digital chocolate, Trip Hawkins' new mobile gaming venture, on Nokia's communizine The Feature. It doesn't say much that hasn't already been said, and frankly that's not saying much. But the fredshouse oracle sez that some of you are looking for any new bit about this stealthy affair, so there you go.

The company is still operating somewhat in stealth mode, so Hawkins didn't give too much away regarding actual products under development. He did hint at work on creating a collection of digital characters that could be "used in multiple applications," and who would show up in a phone's icon set, in ringtones, in screensavers, as avatars, etc. "It's a good social community application, like NeoPets," he said.

Well, there's an ambitious target to aim for: digital chocolate as the NeoPets of the mobile industry.

Don't laugh:

In less than three years, Neopets has grown from operating on a single server to employing more than two hundred servers. Currently, the site peaks at just under a gigabit of bandwidth (the equivalent of approximately 700 T1's), and the number of registered Neopets accounts has risen to over 65 million by December 2003 (which is approximately 16 million individuals by Company estimates). The website receives more than 60,000 registrations daily.

and

Presently, there are over 100 games targeted at various age groups. Additionally, Neopets offers its members 63 Neopian Shops (created by the Neopets creative staff) from which members can purchase Items for their Neopets. The site also has 10 different worlds that are brimming with fantastic things to do. And, of course, equally important are the pages created by Neopets' members. In total, members have created more than 12 million pages of content, including more than 2 million pet homepages, 1 million guilds (clubs), and nearly 10 million members' shops.

and

The average time spent per person on Neopets is greater than any other site on the Internet, including Yahoo, eBay, MSN and AOL. Total pageviews per user on Neopets leads the entire Internet including all search engines, auctions and niche websites.Only Yahoo, MSN, eBay and Google have more total pageviews than Neopets.

I suspect Trip would be quite happy to equal these stats in his first 4 years of operation.

Posted by Gene at April 12, 2004 02:49 PM | TrackBack