Category: Press

We are extremely proud to announce that we will be participating in GSMA’s Mobile World Congress in Shanghai-China. Asia’s biggest mobile industry event will run from the 28th of June until the 1st of July. We will be among the 1,000 companies who are exhibiting cutting-edge products and technologies that will define the future of the mobile industry.

Thousands of visionary leaders and tech-savvy consumers will gather on this event to experience a connected life. There will be 70,000 attendees, 8,000 companies, and 1,000 exhibitors in seven halls for Shanghai’s largest-ever mobile industry event. We will be presenting our latest games and technologies, like the VR-Pong game that we highly improved since our last exhibition at the NOAH conference. We are looking forward to meet new people and to show our latest games on this immense event. Come by and visit us! Our stand number is N3 4Y 14.

One of the exciting things at the event are the pitches of the start-ups that are participating in the event. These pitches will be held in front of a Jury of some of the biggest entrepreneurs of China. The Jury consists of:

Edith Yeung of 500 Startups, mobile collective fund focusing on investing in mobile apps and consumer internet startups,

Bruno Bensaid of Shanghaivest Ltd. A company which builds and executes cross-border investment, expansion, fundraising and exit strategies for its clients in China and overseas.

Per Dahlberg of SpringPoint, which links best-in-class innovation with Asia’s mobile market place.

Kenneth Palacios of Voyager Innovations Inc. focused on delivering platforms for the emerging digital economy.

Our CEO Evgeni Kouris will be pitching on the event as well! He will impress the jury with the endless possibilities of Gamewheel‘s innovative game ad platform. It’s an honor that we get a change to present our platform on such a massive event, for such a experienced jury.

Participating in this event is one of the many activities that our co-founder Evgeni Kouris will be participating in during his time in China. The purpose of his stay is to get a foot on the ground in China and to explore the complex Chinese business environment. Gamewheel was also accepted into an accelerator program run by Silk Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by the Chinese government. The program offers a two-week tour of the country and helps Evgeni set up meetings with potential investors and partners. Yahoo finance wrote an interesting article about his stay in China at the WeWork center in Shanghai, you can read it here.

We are looking forward to meeting you at the event and to show our awesome games to all of you! Please drop by if your attending, our stand number is N3 4Y 14.

The famous Noah Internet Conference for CEOs, executives and investors is coming to Berlin at 9/10 of June and we are excited to announce that we as Gamewheel, will be exhibiting at the event!

Gamewheel offers the highest mobile engagement through content innovation. Gamewheel’s simple and professional platform changes the way consumers interact with mobile ads. It’s used by global agencies and brands like Burger King, Delivery Hero and Oracle. With just a couple of clicks or taps, brands can integrate engaging mobile games, chatbots or AR/VR content into their social media communications and mobile ads.

The focus of the conference in this year will be networking startups with companies from fields that include finance, energy, health, travel, games and wearables. These industries all have one thing in common. They are all affected by the rapid changes in the digital environment. Marketers constantly have to come up with new ways to interact with their consumers through the internet.

We at Gamewheel are far ahead of those changes. We are reshaping the way consumers interact with brands in order to keep them engaged in a fun and playful way. We would love to connect to companies and share our experiences with them in order to keep the online ad environment engaging and fun. That’s why we decided participate and share our ideas at the Noah Internet Conference.

If you’re planning on attending the conference, then drop by to experience our latest concepts and be part of the innovative platform Gamewheel!

In case you don’t have a ticket but would love to join last-minute to engage with the best and the brightest minds in the sector, register here using invite code N16BER-Gamewheel and receive a 20% discount!

The talk of town this week was re:publica TEN, but what has truly been making news headlines is the annual conference’s first ever Virtual Reality exhibition which highlighted some of Germany’s and Europe’s leading VR/AR labs, companies, agencies and schools and paved the way for the Performersion exhibition (scroll down for more details).  

Headsets, Headsets Everywhere

People flocked to the separate exhibition ground to get their hands-on VR experience. Many were fascinated by the latest VR news coming out of Samsung and Facebook’s and felt the need to experience “what the hype was all about!” They were not disappointed.

Stands ranged from immersive art experiences, to VR cinema, as well as horror survival games, Augmented Reality concepts and mobile apps.

Toywheel’s stand boasted both a server based virtual reality Pong game (which you can still play if you have a VR headset lying around) and our classic Augmented reality App Toy Car RC. The positive and supportive feedback once again confirmed that we are certainly on the right path when it comes to our VR/AR strategy and future predictions.

As it was our first time at the conference, we weren’t sure what to expect, but our CEO and veteran re:publica TEN attendee ushered us into the conference’s expertly constructed  world of tech, media and politics. With over 850 speakers and 500 hours of programing centering on topics ranging from nudity, fashion, gaming, Virtual Reality, health, education and internet freedom. We were definitely able to find our people among the crowds.  

So Here’s What We Learned:

re:publica TEN is not just about meeting new people and experiencing new things. It’s about hearing different opinions and openingly engaging with hard-hitting political and societal issues. No topic was left untouched, be it the: refugee crisis, hate speech, social media and nudity, the code of conduct for immersive arts and tech in fashion.

VR/AR are here to stay! The public’s response and demand for VR content is a clear indication of the tech tides. VR is a hot commodity that outlives its hype. It is a clear path to new and immersive experiences that will lead the evolution in media consumption and human interaction.

The best part? The plethora of talks and panels are openly available to watch and listen to online via the the conference’s Youtube channel and podcasts. So, it truly is an experience not to be missed.

Performersion

re:publica TEN wrapped up on Wednesday but our fun was not over yet. We stuck around to participate in the first ever exhibition of it’s kind: Performersion, where art and tech meet to collaborate. The two-day event, which was open and free to the public, led to some incredible insights and some amazing new ideas. We found ourselves amongst our peers as well as VR/AR enthusiasts and evangelists and some kids who are really, really, good at handling technology.

All in all, it was a week well spent. Our creativity batteries have definitely been recharged and we can’t wait to dive right back into the studio to cook up some crazy new ideas inspired by both events.

A big THANK YOU, to those of you who stopped by and said “Hi,” It was truly a pleasure to meet so many of you. Let’s stay in touch.

Have you missed us at re:publica TEN? No worries, we plan to present our newest AR/VR games and concepts at the upcoming and amazing Tech Open Air (TOA) conference 13–15 July in Berlin. So hope to see you soon (again)!

We’ve already spent a lot of time blogging about ad game campaigns, including how you can create one and why you should use them as part of your mobile marketing strategy. But ad games aren’t the only thing we care about at Gamewheel. Today, our co-founder and CEO, Evgeni, gives some background on Gamewheel’s vision and where we’re headed in the future.

Over the past few years, our team of serial entrepreneurs has tackled problems in a variety of different sectors. Whether we were building an educational DIY platform for parents or an augmented reality mobile game for kids, there was one common thread – our focus on creating technology that empowers people in the digital world, fostering humanity and creativity.

As time went on, we realized that our ability to empower people was limited by the amount of content we could produce. So instead of continuing to make our own new content, we decided to take our expertise in tech, design and gaming and package it into a tool that allows other people to create content. Our long-term goal is to become the go-to platform for creating adaptive, interactive content. Our vision is to empower anyone to be a content creator in the digital world.

The first version of our product is aimed at the digital marketing industry, where the lack of a good solution for creating highly optimized, interactive content at scale is a real pain point for advertisers. We’re solving this problem with a SaaS tool that makes it fast and simple to create ad game campaigns that are tailored to the needs of individuals brands and marketing goals.

To put it in less technical terms, we want to make advertising better for everyone involved. When advertisers can provide consumers with fun, relevant content, the consumer is more likely to become a customer, the advertiser gets more bang for their buck and the publisher makes more money off their traffic. Or to use a wonkier analogy, what real-time-bidding (RTB) did for ad serving, we’re going to do for ad creative.

But we’re not just focused on marketing. In the future, we’re going to build tools that make it super simple for people in different industries to create and deliver interactive content tailored to their individual goals. We know this is a big vision, but that’s the only way we know how to do things – by going big.

To achieve our vision, we put together an experienced team with a proven ability to execute. We also have a great beta product, a growing user base and a team of investors who believe in our team and vision. We’ll introduce the Gamewheel team in this space soon and continue to share updates on our company as we continue our journey of building a successful tech company based in Berlin.

Evgeni Kouris, Founder & CEO

We’re thrilled to make some exciting announcements today: we’ve raised 1 Million Euro seed round to launch and expand our platform and partnered up with the leading publisher of html5 games – Famobi.

Contact sales@gamewheel.com if you’re interested in covering the story or have any further questions about Gamewheel. Here is the full version of the press release:

Gamewheel announces a 1 Million Euro seed round to launch and expand its new online platform for creating native interactive advertising – Pick, Brand, Share! ℠

Berlin, 23 November 2015 – Gamewheel, a Berlin-based Seedcamp portfolio company, has launched its new cloud-based platform which is the simplest way for brands, agencies and publishers to add games and other interactive content to their mobile marketing campaigns. In order to launch and expand the platform into different markets, the company raised a 1 Million Euro seed round led by Crown Ocean Capital and partnered up with the leading publisher of html5 games – Famobi.

After joining Seedcamp in the beginning of the year, the founders of Gamewheel, who previously founded the augmented reality game studio Toywheel, officially launched a new cloud-based tool for creating interactive marketing content. As a first step, the company is offering customizable advertising mini-games and a digital advent calendar to help brands engage with their customers on mobile this holiday season.

Users can select from a library of ready-to-go content templates, add their own branding and integrate the customized content into their marketing campaign to the mobile or social media channel of their choice. Afterwards, they can easily review and analyse their campaign’s performance, all without doing any coding. The games and other interactive content are mobile ready and use browser-based technology that allows them to run on any platform.

Gamewheel has a typical SaaS business model, currently with two plans. The free plan is great for early stage startups and SMEs who need a simple way to make individual marketing campaigns more interactive. With a free account the user receives 1.000 launches for free and can buy additional packages on demand starting with 9.90€ for 1.000 campaign launches. The enterprise plan is more appropriate for agencies and brands that need to create interactive marketing content on a regular basis. Gamewheel also offers custom art production and game design services to complement the self-service online tool.

According to Evgeni Kouris, the Co-Founder and CEO of Gamewheel, “When advertisers can provide consumers with fun, interactive and highly targeted content, everybody wins – consumers have a better ad experience, the advertiser gets higher marketing effectiveness and publishers make more money off their traffic. However, the existing solutions for creating interactive marketing content are not suited for the age of RTB – they’re expensive, require long production cycles and struggle to support dynamic content optimization. Gamewheel addresses this problem in an efficient and affordable way – what real-time-bidding (RTB) did for ad serving, we’re going to do for creative ad creation.”

He proceeds – “We’re also not just focused on marketing – in the long-term, our goal is to build an adaptive content platform, like digital LEGOs™ for interactive content – that empowers creators to leverage the technology in the most effective way and deliver interactive content tailored to brands’ individual goals without a need to code or take care of technology.”

The initial response to Gamewheel has been very positive. Customers like Oracle, Urban Sports and Stagelink Club who ran Facebook mobile campaigns using games created with the tool saw a large increase in ad engagement, leading to a decrease in customer acquisition costs of up to 30%.

The company’s approach has also received strong support from both advertisers and game industry insiders. Today’s partnership announcement with Famobi is highlighted by the founder Ilker Aydin: “Gamewheel is simple, modern and innovative. I love it!”. Famobi and Gamewheel partnered up to bring the simplicity of online ad games creation to a vast network including Famobi’s customers such as SpielAffe.de, Disney and Deutsche Bahn.

To accelerate the Gamewheel’s growth, Gamewheel added two veterans from the SaaS, AdTech and mobile industries to its team. A. Pierre Yurow, who has an extensive track record in the AdTech and mobile industries (co-founded Spectrum Mobile, worked at Omnicom and Cellfire) is heading Gamewheel’s business development and sales. Ian Hannigan, who previously co-founded fluidui.com (SaaS innovator in the mobile app prototyping space), is heading Product and UX Design. Through a partnership with Telekom, Gamewheel has a new sales presence in Berlin Mitte at the Telekom 4010 Shop in Mitte. Stop by if you’d like to learn more about Gamewheel.

About Gamewheel
Gamewheel is the simplest way for brands, agencies and publishers to quickly add games and other interactive content to mobile marketing campaigns. Gamewheel was founded in 2014 by Evgeni Kouris (CEO) and Christian Bittler (CTO), who previously built the augmented reality games studio Toywheel. The founding team has an extensive track record in game development and launching innovative media & tech ventures. Gamewheel is financed by various leading investors, including Seedcamp and Crown Ocean Capital, and has raised seven-digit seed capital to date. The company also has several advisors from the vast Seedcamp network. Gamewheel – Pick, Brand, Share! ℠