Nasdaq: KZ | |
Founded | May 6, 2002 [1] |
Founder | Nick Yang [2] |
Headquarters | Beijing , China [1] |
Key people | Leilei Wang (CEO) |
Number of employees | 1,000 (2008) [3] |
Website | www.kongzhong.com (Chinese) |
Kongzhong | |||||||
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Simplified Chinese | 空中网 | ||||||
Literal meaning | Air Networks | ||||||
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Kongzhong Corporation is a Chinese company that provides value-added services including video games via the Internet and various mobile networks. These include or included mobile web content, [1] such as mobile message boards,WAP websites,and electronic books; [4] ring tones; [5] ringback tones; [6] mobile games; [1] and Internet games. [4]
While the company was making subscription-based mobile games as early as 2005, [6] its mobile games business expanded with the 2012 acquisition of Noumena [4] AKA Nuomina,developer of a "cross-platform mobile game engine" that allows games to be played on Android,iOS,and with HTML5. [7] Some early mobile games were coded in Java. [7]
The company doesn't confine itself to mobile games exclusively. It has a license to operate World of Tanks ,other Wargaming properties,and Guild Wars 2 in China. [8] It also operates a handful of self-developed titles. [4] The company derives revenue from some of these massively multiplayer online games,such as World of Tanks,through the sale of virtual goods. [4]
A pioneer mobile value-added services provider,the company's first such products were for WAP. Kongzhong has,as of 2007,a partnership with Opera Software that allows a mobile version of the latter company's Opera browser to be downloaded in China. [9] Kongzhong may have patterned its early mobile business model off of Japanese companies [10] that successfully provided WAP-based value-added services to a domestic audience in the 1990s and early 2000s. Between 2005 and 2007 the company was being described as a provider of 2.5G mobile value-added services. [11]
Founded by serial entrepreneur Nick Yang in 2002 with venture capital funding,he may no longer be able to play an active role. [2]
In 2013 the company participated in an effort to locate a Flying Tigers P-40 thought to have crash landed in a Yunnan province lake in 1942. [12]
A securities class-action lawsuit against Kongzhong Corporation was settled for $3.5 million in 2006. [13] The complaint stemmed from a perception that prior to the issuance of an IPO,the company likely provided a misleading prospectus. [13]
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