About
Z2Live was formed to bring multiplayer gaming to mobile. The company was founded in 2009 by Damon Danieli, a 14-year Microsoft veteran, David Bluhm, a long time veteran of mobile content and entertainment and Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle-based venture capital firm. Z2Live's mission is to enable multiplayer gaming across all mobile devices and all wireless networks.
David Bluhm (President and CEO)
David has spent the past twenty-five years starting and growing technology companies. In a variety of founder, director and senior operational roles, David has help guide companies through 2 IPOs and 7 company acquisitions.
David is also a co-founder of Medio Systems, a mobile search and advertising company that is pioneering better access to information, content and consumer transactions from mobile devices.
Prior to Z2Live, David was CEO of NextMedium, the first online marketplace for product placement advertising.
Prior to NextMedium, David served as CEO and Chairman of GoTV Networks, the largest made-for-mobile television production studio in North America. Prior to GoTV, David was CEO at WUF Networks, a privately held company that allowed mobile users to access and stream rich media to their mobile phones. WUF helped pioneer mobile music and was acquired in 2004 by Yahoo! to power their Yahoo Music service. In 2000, David co-founded and served as President of (M)Forma (now HandsOn Mobile). While there, HandsOn grew into one of the industry’s leading providers of mobile games and wireless entertainment reaching over 600 million subscribers across 60+ carrier networks in 23 different countries.
Prior to co-founding (M)Forma, David was CEO of NearMe where he guided the development and initial licensing of a suite of location technologies used by AT&T Wireless (TXT 411), SprintPCS and U.S. Cellular to deliver Directory Assistance and other localized information to mobile users.
Between 1994 and 1996, David was a Senior Business Development Manager for Motorola where he helped direct their emerging market strategies including Internet, hand held devices and Interactive TV. David’s high technology leadership posts also include VP Sales at Mosaix International (through a $40 million Initial Public Offering in 1990) and VP Sales and Marketing at Davox Corporation (NASADAQ: DVX) where he co-led a turnaround resulting in an 18X increase in valuation in 30 months.
David's other start up accomplishments includes developing the business plan and securing the initial funding for Realtor.com (now Move.com, an Internet real estate listings site, NASDAQ: MOVE) as well as co-founding BondHub.com (an Internet bond trading exchange) and WorldVoice (natural language understanding). David also led the sales and marketing efforts at Mammoth Micro Productions, a multimedia studio and streaming company, until the company was sold to the Washington Post in 1993. David started his career with corporate-focused sales positions at Hewlett-Packard.
David has served as a Director at WorldVoice, TeraCloud, Ansyr Technologies (sold to Global Graphics in 2002), Northwest Venture Group (non-profit), Young Life Ministries and TheGift.com (sold to 1-800-Flowers.com). David received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington in 1983.
Damon Danieli (CTO)
Damon co-founded Z2Live and serves as its Chief Technology Officer. Damon conceived of, designed, built and launched Z2Live's first application, PhotoFeedd.
Prior to founding Z2Live, Damon spent 14 years at Microsoft in a variety of development and innovation
management roles. During his Microsoft career, Damon served as Technical Lead of the Xbox Entertainment Network inside Microsoft Games Studios and as a Lead Program Manager for Xbox Live where he designed many of the marquee features of the Xbox Live service including Voice Chat, Voice Commands, Friends, Invitations, Presence and Notifications. Also as part of the Xbox team, Damon served as program manager for Security, Authentication, Authorization, NAT Traversal, Matchmaking and Networking.
Prior to joining the Xbox team, Damon served as Development Lead for the SideWinder line of Gaming Devices and the ActiMates Line of Characters (including Microsoft's Interactive Barney toy). His last position at Microsoft was a Senior Developer in the Microsoft Startup Business Accelerator division. As such, Damon was part of a small, agile team that combined technology from Microsoft's research division with production techniques from their product groups. Damon was granted over 20 patents while at Microsoft.
Damon's international experiences includes working as a database programmer at Solidarity's Bank Informacji Gospodarczej (Economic Information Bank) where he created a database for internal Polish companies seeking foreign capital and assistance. While stationed in Tokyo, he worked as an International Relations Kenshusei for Aoki Construction, a mid-sized Japanese construction company. Damon started his career at 20 years old when he started his first company, Internal Technologies - a startup that embedded Microsoft Windows on Read Only Memory (ROM) based platforms such as Kiosks. Damon's education accomplishments include earning a Bachelor of Sciences in Electrical Engineering in 1996 and a Masters in Computer Science in 1999, both from the University of Washington.
Lou Fasulo (Senior Vice President)
Prior to Z2Live, Lou lead the Publishing Team at NY based Sonic Boom Games including portfolio planning, sales, business development and marketing for the leading mobile games and UGC applications publisher. Lou’s team inked highly strategic licensing deals in the casual games space with PlayFirst and Big Fish Games, and launched the company's first original IP that achieved Top Seller status and “Best of 2009” on Verizon Wireless’ storefront in 2009.
Previous to Sonic Boom, Lou was the Vice President of Distribution at Vivendi Games Mobile, now Activision, where he lead sales and partner management to achieve the number 6 sales ranking in North America. He secured distribution for the company's mobile products on over 30 channels in the US, Canada, and Latin America. Lou helped launched the award-winning Surviving High SchoolTM game – one of the first original IP’s on mobile that consistently ranked among the top selling titles in North America for two consecutive years.
Prior to Vivendi, Lou held management positions at AT&T Mobility (formerly Cingular Wireless), and oversaw content acquisition and product management of games and applications. Early in his career, Lou was a product manager at Earthlink. He also co-founded GroovePort, a company that launched one of the first digital music subscription services with content from over 70 labels. Lou received his Masters Degree in Engineering from Clarkson University.
Tom Hubina (Vice President of Community)
Tom has been actively evolving the mobile gaming experience for over a decade. Having designed and developed games around major brands for THQ Wireless, HandsOn Mobile, Superscape and Disney Interactive, Tom has consistently worked towards promoting the social experience as a central part of the game mechanic.
Recognizing that, increasingly, players are the content and interaction is the game, Tom founded Amplified Games in 2003 and set out to build games that promoted more connection between players. Later, with the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, he was the first to bring a full social gaming community to mobile. Amplified was the first to introduce global text chat, private chat rooms, game currency, leader boards, badges, awards and achievements to a series of casual card and word games - all part of a single, connected community.
Tom is still working to build the next generation social games community for the most ubiquitous device ever…the mobile phone.
InvestorsMadrona Venture GroupMadrona is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on building leading technology companies. Started in 1995, the firm has established a national reputation of partnering with entrepreneurs, investors and advisers to create value together. The firm invests predominately in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum including software, Internet, wireless and infrastructure. Madrona currently manages over $400 million while delivering top-quartile performance and over 30 positive exits including: Amazon.com, Isilon Systems, classmates.com and iConclude.