xfire

The company had its initial launch by seeding the service with a few thousand of its previously registered Ultimate Arena users.

Furthermore, Xfire did not have the benefit of a third party service like ComScore or Nielsen to validate the usage metrics on its client.

About a year after launching Ultimate Arena, the team re-launched the company as Xfire, with the new IM service as the core product.

However, in Xfire's case I felt it was worth pointing out for a few reasons.

The team did a remarkable job of transforming the company from Ultimate Arena to Xfire in a relatively short time period.

Xfire also leveraged the gaming celebrity status of one of its co-founders (Dennis Fong) for well-targeted promotion spots.

Xfire was able to secure some distribution by being bundled with games, most notably the popular America's Army.

Xfire is in a good position to expand its offerings into becoming a leading social networking and content site for gamers.

The service spread quickly because for any one user to derive value from the service, their friends had to be on the service too.

XFire is another SOAP engine, which allows a choice of data binding frameworks to be used; XFire also claims excellent performance results.

In fact, even today Germany is the second largest user population for Xfire, which can be largely attributed to this initial TV appearance.

Xfire enables gamers to detect what games their friends are currently playing and allows unobtrusive IM communication from inside the game.

Its a more independent databinding tool that laid its foundation as part of XFire project.

They have a growing content site and a P2P digital content delivery system, which helps to address the full range of needs of its user base.

This will enable XFIRE to register MapleStory and other games you may have installed on your computer.

The Xfire sales team did a good job of getting high CPM rates (~$10) for a relatively unknown product.

Xfire's technical team also did a great job in quickly launching and scaling a distributed web service.

Prior to the Xfire service, there were clearly a number of pre-existing IM services (Yahoo, AOL, MSN).

Xfire's IM window was customizable, smaller, and could blend-in with the game being played.

XFire provides a convenient API, use the API to develop service-oriented (SOA) program.

Xfire took great care to reduce the friction points in the user registration process.

He is an entrepreneur himself and co-founded gaming site Xfire, which Viacom bought in 2006, the year after Lawee joined Google.

By doing so, XFire will recognize MapleStory when running.

Wasn't the Xfire service just another IM service?

Xfire had about 4M registered users at the time of acquisition and has since grown to 5. 6M in 6 months.