Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Wanna buy a gaming company?

I've been negligent in following all of the latest corporate moves in Buzztime-land, but they keep on a'happening. The latest one is the appointment of Steve Mitgang to NTN Buzztime's Board of Directors.

Mr. Mitgang has had a significant career in business development, marketing and advertising, managing a wide range of businesses from developing and successfully exiting venture backed firms to executing new business launches for Fortune 500 companies. Most recently, Mr. Mitgang was the president and CEO of Veoh Networks, an Internet Television company. Prior to his tenure at Veoh Networks, Mr. Mitgang worked at Yahoo! where he was the senior executive credited with creating the vision and managing the production of Project Panama, Yahoo!‘s new monetization platform. Mr. Mitgang joined Yahoo! after its acquisition of Overture Services, where he was the head of the Performance Marketing group. Prior to joining Overture, Mr. Mitgang was president and CEO of Keylime Software, a web analytics company that was acquired by Overture Services during Mr. Mitgang’s leadership. Mr. Mitgang has 26 years of experience in leading and managing a variety of consumer marketing and technology companies, driving them to sustainable profitability or successful exits.

Anyone notice anything significant about that experience list? I saw it in there at least twice.

Mr. Mitgang has had a significant career in business development, marketing and advertising, managing a wide range of businesses from developing and successfully exiting venture backed firms to executing new business launches for Fortune 500 companies.

and

Mr. Mitgang has 26 years of experience in leading and managing a variety of consumer marketing and technology companies, driving them to sustainable profitability or successful exits.

Hmm...lots of mentions of exits. And normally NTN Buzztime doesn't talk about exits - they want to keep patrons in the bar, playing games and buying beers, not headed toward the exit.

Perhaps this means that someone has concluded that profitability may be too much of a challenge in this economy, and that the best strategy might be to sell NTN Buzztime to someone else.

So, who wants to buy NTN Buzztime?