February 9th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »
Around the industry, we all know that 3D games are expensive to produce, hard to port and so, hard to make real money with. Yet companies like Ideaworks3D and Fishlabs keep fighting to stay in the market. Ideaworks3D seems to be succeeding by attracting their latest investor, ARM.
Ideaworks3D will use the strategic investment to significantly increase its sales and marketing effort for Airplay, its advanced cross-platform solution for development and distribution of native applications.
Commenting on the investment, Ideaworks3D CEO Alex Caccia said: "After successfully launching Airplay in 2008, we welcome the investment from ARM to help bring Airplay to a wider market. Airplay's proven 'compile once' single-binary approach means that a single Airplay native binary will address all ARM(R) technology-based devices – including mobile phones, mobile internet devices, set-top boxes and more – without a performance penalty. Airplay greatly reduces device fragmentation and means that developers can now focus their budgets on the applications themselves rather than on the cost and complexity of deploying their content across multiple independent device platforms. By strengthening our ties with ARM, we will be able to be accelerate the uptake of Airplay in the market; increase the ease of content deployment across consumer electronics; and improve the end-user experience."
Bruce Beckloff, VP Corporate Business Development at ARM, said: "The proliferation of highly-sophisticated mobile devices with multiple operating systems and hardware variants has resulted in a fragmented industry and moving target for content developers. With Airplay, Ideaworks3D has created a solid and credible cross-platform solution for creating and deploying games, applications and multimedia content across ARM technology-based devices. By simplifying the market and increasing the level of content available, Ideaworks3D will enable the increase in uptake of sophisticated digital consumer electronics."
So what will competitor Fishlabs do now? Nvidia will probably not be waiting around very long now…
