BuzzCity gets $10m funding boost
- Added:
- Aug 29, 2008
Wireless community developer BuzzCity has secured $10m growth capital financing by new investor Naspers, a South Africa based integrated multinational media company.
BuzzCity will use the financing to extend market share for its core property, myGamma.com and its network of sites.
The company’s growth strategy will continue to focus on growing the membership base of myGamma, developing more user generated content through member services and applications.
It winvest in applications aimed at maximizing partnership opportunities and growing myGamma’s portfolio of advertising clients.
"We’ve seen phenomenal growth in markets in South Asia and Africa and in the coming year, we expect to see this growth to include markets in Europe and USA" said KF Lai, CEO of BuzzCity. ”The common footprints we have make this a strategic relationship for developing our media properties, particularly in South Africa, India and Thailand. We look forward to working closely with the group to ramp up our growth” added Lai.
"The past year for us has also been marked by partnerships with some of the world's leading WAP publishers and mobile digital agencies. BuzzCity has been on an aggressive development programme and secured overwhelming interest from businesses to be part of our growth plans,” added Lai.
He continues: “Users are clearly loving what BuzzCity is offering; the number of users has grown exponentially, and traffic to myGamma network of partner sites has exceeded 6 billion pageviews in the first 6 months of 2008.”
Juniper Research recently predicted that the number of mobile phone users globally will increase from 577 million to 1.7 billion by 2013, with applications such as social networking and user-generated content being key drivers for this growth.
Ian Chard, Analyst at Juniper Research, said: “The market opportunity for BuzzCity is clear. BuzzCity’s ‘myGamma’ community has made stunning headway in the mobile social networking space, reaching 2.7 million users across 70 countries. As an off-deck application, it has successfully applied the D2C business model in an operator-dominated market, and established a strong advertising base that hit 1.7 billion paid ad impressions in July 2008 alone.”
Chard added: “Furthermore, myGamma serves two distinct audiences: the newly-connected emerging middle class in developing markets, and blue-collar users in developed regions – making it a shining example of how the social web can span demographic, as well as geographic divides.”