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November 01, 2004
Media Watch: Trip's new trip
by Doug Millison for SiliconValleyWatcher.com
Old Silicon Valley entrepreneurs never die, and they don't fade away, either. Trip Hawkins is back with a new game company.
Matthew Yi sketches the Hawkins saga in "Game veteran taking a new trip: Entrepreneur's latest startup offers video entertainment for cell phones" in today's San Francisco Chronicle.
Hawkins new company is called Digital Chocolate. Like his previous ventures, it's a game company, but this time the platform is the digital media-enabled mobile phone.
Hawkins boasts to Yi that he can "easily sell a million copies", at $5 each, to the nearly 200 million mobile phone users in the U.S.
That's the kind of bold talk expected of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Whether Digital Chocolate can avoid joining Hawkins' earlier venture, 3DO, in the Silicon Valley dinosaur graveyard is another story entirely.
After founding Electronic Arts, Hawkins became a player in the early 1990's interactive multimedia swirl with 3DO, an ill-fated effort to compete with Nintendo and Sega in the videogame console business by selling games on CD-ROMs. 3DO bit the bankruptcy bullet in 2003.
Inexplicably, Yi's story fails to mention the deal announced last week between Digital Chocolate and Cingular Wireless. Hawkins new company will supply games for Cingular customers beginning in January 2005 with a basketball simulation called NCAA Hoops 2005.
Also missing from Yi's story, but included in last week's announcement: "Digital Chocolate is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, as well as angel investors, including Bob Pittman, former COO of AOL/Time-Warner and founder of MTV."
Links:
Game veteran taking a new trip: Entrepreneur's latest startup offers video entertainment for cell phones by Matthew Yi, San Francisco Chronicle, 1 November 2004
Digital Chocolate and Cingular Wireless Join Forces to Bring Next Generation of Mobile Entertainment Applications to Consumers, press release distributed by Businesswire
November 1, 2004 08:38 AM
