CBS News visited our booth on Engage! Expo. Here is the news: Club Cooee on CBS News

CNN’s Barry Neild checked out club cooee at the LeWeb conference in Paris. It seems he liked it
Are any of these the Web’s next big thing?

Koinup is a social network, where you can share your virtual life and meet users from other virtual worlds. At Koinup you can publish and share your videos, screenshots and virtual stories from Club Cooee with others. Each member of Koinup can benefits of almost unlimited storage space (for free) and publish tons of photos and videos.

Join the Club Cooee group at Koinup, where you can collect and share your content with others.

Here is a interview, we had with Pierluigi the co-founder and CEO of Koinup.

• 1. Give me a brief description of you and your job at Koinup
  I’m Pierluigi Casolari and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Koinup (the other founder is Edoardo Turelli). We launched Koinup in the middle of 2007, the idea was creating a web 2.0 portal dedicated to virtual worlds and contents created within virtual worlds.
• 2. What exactly is Koinup, and what can users from virtual worlds like Club Cooee do there?
  Koinup is a web 2.0 gateway (or portal) to discover the best of virtual worlds. Virtual Worlds are immersive and engaging, but quite still unknown spaces in the web. The mission of Koinup is to make virtual worlds more known, easier to access and more manageable. Club Cooee members can join Koinup in order to find new friends, share and tell others about their experience in Club Cooee, meet people from Club Cooee and other virtual worlds and take part in the Koinup Contests and Initiatives ( http://www.koinup.com )
• 3. What is the difference to other Social Networks
  We’re aimed at the vertical of virtual worlds. It means that we’re partnering directly with Virtual Worlds companies to launch initiatives, empower virtual world culture, or create new features that integrate virtual worlds with the web. For example almost all virtual worlds are now supporting the Koinup postcards; postcards are a way for members to communicate with people on koinup, by sending pictures, without leaving the client.
• 4. What’s your favorite demographics and how you plan to enter the market
  The average Koinup member is between 20 – 30 years old. We are a quite global community. So we have members from all the countries
• 5. What’s are your plans for the next months. Can you reveal some of the features you’re going to release in the next months.
  We’re partnering with some important virtual worlds to bring our community new ways to interact with Koinup directly when they are “inworld”. Along with that, we’re counting to further improve our photo and video-sharing features and give people a better experience on Koinup
• 6. Give us some tips for the new members. How get the most out from Koinup?
  Start with sharing some pics of your avatar, add friends, create your network and join groups (we have created a group for Club Cooee members: http://www.koinup.com/group/club-cooee ).

Stay tuned with our blog: http://blog.koinup.com to see if there are some contests or other challenges for the community. If you’re on Facebook, you can follow us by becoming fan of the Koinup FB Page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Koinup/59383074662

Club Cooee is Microsoft’s BizSpark ‘Startup of the day’. Microsoft sees tons of startups each day so it is a great honour for us to be chosen as the most promising startup. Follow the link to read the interview and all the details:

Club Cooee is Microsoft BizSpark Startup of the Day

Club Cooee Enters US Open Beta partnering with the Leading International Browsergame Portal Bigpoint.com and is named AlwaysOn OnHollywood100 winner

Kaiserslautern, Germany April, 2009 – Starting today, all doors are open to the free 3D-chatworld messenger Club Cooee (http://www.clubcooee.com) which is now in Open Beta for customers in the US. The ‘OnHollywood 100′ winner and ‘Red Herring 100 Global’ finalist, Cooee GmbH transfers all the possibilities of classical instant messaging into a lively and fascinating 3D online world running right on the user’s desktop. The customizable avatar not only enables users to chat with friends just like in any normal messenger, it also gives you the possibility to make new friends in Club Cooee and express your feelings with a multitude of animations like dancing, cheering or waving.

Club Cooee members have their own rooms that they can decorate according to their personal tastes also running seamless on the desktop. They can embed music, pictures and videos and turn their rooms into an individual multi-media chat environment. They can invite their friends and even make new ones there. Certain furniture objects can be used for direct links to favorite web sites, like the user’s facebook profile, or for a connection to a web radio station that directly broadcasts into the room. Users or partners can also easily integrate their rooms into their websites.

With low system requirements and a small 3 MB client, Club Cooee runs on almost every desktop computer or notebook. The application works with Windows Vista and Windows XP operationg systems. Even if the members are not actively taking part in the Cooee-universe, they are being informed about all activities by short messages and they are always available for their friends.

Club Cooee also announced today that it has been selected to the 2009 OnHollywood 100 List. The OnHollywood 100 Award is given to private, emerging technology companies in the media and entertainment industries. Club Cooee was selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team based on demonstration of growth, market opportunity, quality of innovation and customer traction. The OnHollywood 100 winners were selected from among hundreds of other technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists and industry insiders. The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2009 list.

The world’s biggest browser game portal, Bigpoint.com (http://www.bigpoint.com), belonging to the top-3 general gaming portals worldwide, is also convinced of the Club Cooee concept and has partnered with Club Cooee to provide its players with access to exclusive features. The new users coming from the Bigpoint online gaming-portal are always kept up-to-date by the user specific news-service integrated in Club Cooee. It provides the user with the latest news on their games and other exclusive or status information. Additionally, Club Cooee will offer its members the Bigpoint-Lobby as well as a shop exclusively created for Bigpoint.com. Apart from t-shirts, posters and logos for popular online-games such as ‘Seafight’ and ‘Darkorbit’ there is a great deal of fan paraphernalia for online game fans to buy. The user-avatars are equipped with an exclusive Bigpoint-outfit right from the very beginning. Bigpoint.com offers its products within Club Cooee’s lobby: In an environment that looks just like their favorite gaming-portal the users can exchange ideas and opinions about their latest gaming successes, chat, listen to music, look at pictures or get to know new people. The open beta hasalready begunin Europe and isnow extended to the US market.

You can find more information, as well as the Club Cooee client itself on the official website http://www.clubcooee.com.

Good news! We are OPEN BETA now!

After some months we stayed in Closed Beta and ironed out bugs, added features and content. We are excited to see the creativity our Closed Beta members unleashed creating rooms we’ve never could dreamt of. We thank all of you out there who did such a great job in supporting us.

Yesterday all Beta testers received there exclusive “I tested Club Cooee” shirts. Remember .. you can’t buy these shirts in any shop. Consider it the 1st rare item of Club Cooee

See you in the club …
Alexander

Interestingly we have a comparably big number of members from Japan in the closed beta of Club Cooee. Today i found a blog entry in the Japanese “Second Times”. Follow this link: Club Cooee in the Second Times.

Just stumbled over this interesting post about Club Cooee in Virtual World News. The comparison with RocketOn and Weblin is interesting and indeed there are similarities at first sight. However … Club Cooee with its true 3D scene based casual virtual world and its unique Instant Messenger approach is dramatically different.

Good news! We have been TechCrunched today!

Jason Kincaid over at TechCrunch checked out Club Cooee yesterday and as it seems he liked it. If you are fast enough you might catch one of those 500 closed beta invites we provided to TechCrunch here: TechCrunch Club Cooee Beta Invites

I have a strong feeling that this might be a nice burn in test for our server clusters …

Cheers,
Alexander

Club Cooee Red Herring Europe 2008 Finalist, AURELIA PRIVATE EQUITY invests in promising newcomer

Kaiserslautern, April 10th, 2008 – Club Cooee has become one of the 200 finalists in this year’s Red Herring 100 Europe 2008 Award. Red Herring editors have discovered well-known companies such as Google, eBay and Skype in their early days and touted them as pioneers.

Red Herring, editor of the worldwide leading innovation magazine for investors and business decision-makers, assigns this award to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) once every year.

To assign this award the editorial staff of Red Herring rigorously evaluates several hundred private technology companies through a careful analysis of financial data and other strict criteria. This year the TOP 100 Red Herring start-ups will be awarded during the Red Herring Event, taking place at the Westin Dragonara Resort at Malta from April 14th-16th.

The two founders and seed investors Alexander Jorias and Ingo Frick:

„For our start-up team the placement among the finalists of the ‚Red Herring 100 Europe 2008’ award means a confirmation of our company’s philosophy. Communication simply is key to any innovation”

, says Alexander Jorias.

And Ingo Frick adds:

„The mere vicinity to great names such as eBay and Google fills us with pride. To be listed among the best 200 start-ups based in Europe, the Middle East and Africa is not only an honour, but also a challenge.”

Today cooee GmbH also announces the participation of the venture capital company AURELIA PRIVATE EQUITY.

Stefan Lemper, partner at AURELIA PRIVATE EQUITY:

„We are absolutely convinced of Club Cooee’s potential. The innovative technical approach as well as the creative power behind this ambitious project open up many different possibilities and business ideas.”

„We are very happy to have found an early stage investor in AURELIA PRIVATE EQUITY. Their management team has immediately recognized Club Cooee’s high technical and conceptional innovation potential”

, says Ingo Frick.

„With Club Cooee as a social gaming application of the latest generation we are entering a worldwide fast growing market. But together with AURELIA PRIVATE EQUITY Club Cooee’s unique selling points will enable us to open up this market”

, states Alexander Jorias.

About cooee GmbH

Cooee GmbH is situated in Kaiserslautern and was founded in October 2007. With Club Cooee the company provides a 3D communication environment whose motto is: “Express yourself!”. The lean 3D-client, available on http://www.clubcooee.com for free, enables the depiction of rooms, places, avatars and accessories on Windows Vista and Windows XP. The official website is connected to the 3D-client and contains loads of live features to create a Club Cooee community.

About AURELIA PRIVATE EQUITY

Aurelia Private Equity invests in innovative technology companies in Germany. They support companies in the fields of IT, life sciences and industry innovations with an excellent management and scaleable products with a clear competitive advantage.
For further information go to: www.aurelia-pe.de

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