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Technology Stocks : Uproar.com -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hart who wrote (4)	3/31/1999 11:09:00 AM
From: david barr	Respond to of 16

Hungarian games empire built on a shoestring The Scotsman, November 1998 AN AGEING building above a cluttered shoe store in Budapest is an unlikely base for one of the world's most popular internet companies. But from just such a location, a group of young programmers and business school graduates has built a company that runs the most popular site of on-line entertainment in the world,according to analysts. E-Pub's site, Uproar.com (at www.uproar.com), is one of the 30 most popular internet addresses of any kind. "We have had dramatic growth in the last year," says Timothy Ewing, E-Pub's 32-year-old European president. "Things just started clicking." E-Pub, founded in February 1995, owns and operates a variety of websites and internet properties where users play games, chat and win cash prizes. Games are free to play and revenue comes from advertising. Uproar registered 3.7 million players in September, according to NetRatings, a provider of on-line marketing intelligence. Such numbers make the firm the most popular entertainment site on the web and put it in the company of the internet powerhouses such as Yahoo! and the book retailer Amazon, says Gerhard Auer, an analyst at ICE Securities in Vienna. "It is basically becoming a tier-one site, with the technology coming out of Budapest," he said, adding that E-Pub is positioned to be one of the first internet companies actually to make money. The games, which start every few minutes 24-hours a day, include Cosmo's Conundrum, a trivia competition hosted by a cyber monkey and a "syndicated" game, which is linked to thousands of other sites, called Bingo Blitz. Such syndicated games, now linked to more than 10,000 other websites, help the company to gain new players and increase revenues through advertising, Ewing said. Nearly all the revenue comes from regular advertisers in the United States and the UK such as Disney, Microsoft, Ameritech, Sony and the New York Times. The company has more than 30 "blue chip" advertisers, who pay per ad impressions and it has sales departments in London and New York. Sorry, no link. When they changed their website they did not update their archives completely. However, they gave me a copy when I emailed and requested it. Dave

To: Hart who wrote (4)	3/31/1999 11:23:00 AM
From: david barr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16

Remainder of article. Found a link: bday.net "Current growth of the audience and the company's ability to consistently sell its ad inventory give grounds for hope that E-Pub will be among the first entertainment providers to reach critical mass and to become profitable," he said in a recent research report. It is easy to get overly excited about Internet companies. More often than not stock prices and growth projections belong more to the virtual than the real world. E-Pub is not immune to the cyber frenzy. Its share price on the Vienna Stock Exchange has shot above 2,000 schillings from just above 800 last November. Losses, meanwhile, grew by more than 165 percent to US$2.22 million in the first three quarters of 1998, while revenues grew more than five times to $1.01 million. But Auer recommends the company as a "strong buy" based on the company's "exponential" growth prospects and his belief that internet investors are starting to look more actively for "undervalued second tier companies in niches which have not yet been absorbed by the general hype for the industry". E-Pub couples two 1990s revolutions - globalism and the Internet - to create products in low-cost Budapest and offer them to audiences and, importantly, Western advertisers. "I'd say programmers are three to four times more expensive in San Francisco," said Ewing. The Budapest location also helps the company avoid the turnover problems in the US where talented programmers often switch jobs three or four times a year, he said. The games, which start every few minutes 24-hours a day, include "Cosmo's Conundrum", a trivia competition hosted by a cyber monkey and a "syndicated" game linked up to thousands of other sites called "Bingo Blitz".