For Tech's Elite, Mobile Gaming Is a Big Play Best and Brightest See the Sector as Chance for Fun and Massive Payoff
By JOSEPH WALKER NOVEMBER 15, 2011
Mobile gaming is the new frontier.
After Aadil Mamujee graduated from Harvard Business School in 2010, he could have worked anywhere. Rather than join a hedge fund or consulting firm though, he signed up with a small, San Francisco gaming start-up best known for "Tap Pet Hotel," an iPhone videogame that lets users build hotel rooms for animated puppies and pandas.
It wasn't a passion for videogames that sent Mr. Mamujee, 29 years old, to Pocket Gems Inc. The Cambridge University-trained engineer saw in mobile-phone gaming, an industry whose products reach tens of millions of consumers-a new Wild West where the multimillionaires of tomorrow are still to be crowned.
Mr. Mamujee says Zynga Inc., with its roughly 230 million monthly players and an initial public offering valuation that could reach $20 billion, has "won" the gaming race on Facebook Inc. But no one has conquered mobile, or figured out how to make as much money from it as Zynga has from its social-media games, he says.
It's the challenge of becoming as successful as Zynga that drives Mr. Mamujee, he says, with the possibility of becoming wealthy an afterthought.
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