Z2Live

David has spent the past twenty-seven years starting and growing technology companies. In a variety of founder, director and senior operational roles, David has been involved in building over 20 start-ups including Mosaix (now Avaya), WorldVoice, Mammoth Micro (now Washington Post) NearMe and Move.com (NASDAQ: MOVE) that have collectively produced 2 IPOs and 7 successful acquisitions.

David is a co-founder of Medio Systems, a mobile search and advertising company, former CEO and Chairman of GoTV Networks, the industry’s largest made-for-mobile television network, former CEO at WUF Networks, which helped pioneer mobile music streaming and was acquired by Yahoo! In 2004 and co-founder of mobile gaming company HandsOn Mobile which he helped grow into one of the industry’s leading providers of mobile games and wireless entertainment companies. HandsOn brought Activision’s Call of Duty, Marvel’s XMen, the NFL and World Poker Tour to over 600 million subscribers across 60+ carrier networks in 23 different countries.

David’s high technology leadership posts also include a Senior Business Development role at Motorola where he helped direct their emerging market strategies including Internet, hand held devices and Interactive TV, a VP Sales role at Mosaix International (through a $40 million Initial Public Offering in 1990) and VP Sales and Marketing at Davox Corporation (NASDAQ: DVX) where he co-led a turnaround resulting in an 18X increase in valuation in 30 months.

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 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.

Z2Live is committed to becoming the most important force in mobile gaming. This includes calling on the entire game industry to translate the collective hours and efforts of our gamers into making a positive change in the world. Making social games can also have a social responsibility.

“Play2Change”

Play2Change means that game play can be harnessed to make real and significant change in the world. At Z2Live, we believe clean drinking water is a basic human need. 80% of disease worldwide can be attributed to dirty water – which not only threatens life but also directly contributes to the global challenges of food supply, environment, energy, poverty and even education. Currently, over 1 billion people – fully 1/6th of the world’s population are without clean water.

Our games can help.

Through your desire to bring positive change and Z2Live’s Trade Nations, we are helping bring clean water to those who desperately need it.

Z2Live supports charity: water

charity: water is a non-profit organization that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. in their first four years, they completed 3,962 water projects which brought clean water to nearly 1.8 million people.

You can help by playing our games and looking for your opportunity to Play2Change.

Madrona 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.