‘Ah K Zero, the people that do they graphs’ is how we’re usually greeted when we meet people around the virtual worlds space. Sure, we do graphs and interesting stuff like that, but I thought it would be useful to go into a little detail on some of the projects we’ve been working on lately to demonstrate the breadth of our services.
Business planning / financial modeling
We’re recently completed end-to-end business planning and financial modeling projects for three virtual worlds concepts. All three are still at conceptual stage – two have just received initial funding and other is pending. Our work here included market sizing, user base modeling and full usage profiling. All three projects are US-based.
For another (UK) client we’ve overhauled their business model and radically improved their speed to market.
Strategic partnerships
This appears to be a hot area in the market at present and fits nicely into our portfolio. We sit more or less in the middle of the sector at the moment and are able to link virtual world owners with complementary traffic partners/brands/online user groups to achieve mutual goals – growing emerging VW user bases quickly after launch and enabling new revenue streams for both parties.
Brand placement
Our work with L’Oreal Paris in Second Life and The 7 Point Plan for Marketing in Virtual Worlds has placed us at the forefront of the ‘brands into virtual worlds’ category. We’re currently finalising projects involving five different brands being placed into three different worlds.
New market entry
We’re currently working with two European VW’s developing entry plans into the US marketplace (one kids and one teen world) and also developing a segmenting marketing strategy for a US world seeking to maximise opportunities across Europe.
Investment analysis
A growing area for K Zero is working with VC’s and investors. This typically involves assessing existing and new business models to determine key metrics and business areas needing to be explored in more detail. We’ve looking at 7 different VWs in the last two weeks.
….and there’s a brand new graph coming out in a week days….just to keep everyone happy.