Playwize Share Discussion Threads

[jezsan] 23/3/2009 19:47

dope007 -

ah, i see... youre referring to my post that said that a çompany that i shall not name was highly influential in causing the death of Argonaut. i will not confirm nor deny who i wss referring to.

the people concerned were ruthless and despicable.. and preferred that argonaut had to lose for them to win, and couldnt work out a mutually beneficially arrangement to allow argonaut to continue working on its games for them. anyway, glad to say, the ruthless despicable people are gone. and alas, so is argonaut.

-- Jez

[dope007] 20/3/2009 10:16

SCi by any chance Jez?

[jezsan] 20/3/2009 10:06

esteon -

i think we're easily spending £1m a month on marketing. and thats small fry comparde to what eh big boys are spending like partygaming, fulltiltpoker and pokerstars.

when we went out to get capital, we raised £12m in a private round, which saw us through to cashflow positive. but most of it was spent on marketing.

when bits/playwize raised capital, it wasnt able to raise anywhere near that amount on the public markets. thus foo was cash constrained. he had to plan his marketing budgets around the cash he had available. and he thought he had a plan that would work - but it was nowhere near enough, in my opinion. but at the time he didnt know that.

[oneillshaun] 19/3/2009 20:22

estseon - I dont think you should compare PLW to PKR hats of Jez he has a great team in place with a great product and if you look at the ranking he is doing more than ok......

To be honest guys just dont bother wasting your time posting on this thread just not worth it...

[csilondon] 18/2/2009 16:06

just me and you and whoever bought the 18 000 shares at 4.95p about three weeks ago...

[baronstjohn] 17/2/2009 20:15

Its that bad , boy l must be the only one left with any shares Help..........

[csilondon] 17/2/2009 17:11

god this share can be boring at times.... stjohn, i believe it means that people that held this share through barclays stockbrokers have sold out and no barclays nominess hold less then 6%....

[baronstjohn] 17/2/2009 11:57

What does this mean anything
TR-1: NOTIFICATION OF MAJOR INTERESTS IN SHARES
1. Identity of the issuer or the underlying issuer of existing shares to which voting rights are attached:
Playwize Plc
Reason for the notification (please place an X inside the appropriate bracket/s):
An acquisition or disposal of voting rights: ( X )
Full name of person(s) subject to the notification obligation:
Barclays Plc
5. Date of the transaction (and date on which the threshold is crossed or reached if different):
5 February 2009
6. Date on which issuer notified:
6 February 2009
7. Threshold(s) that is/are crossed or reached:
5% to below reportable
A: Voting rights attached to shares
Class/type of shares if possible using the ISIN CODE
Situation previous to the Triggering transaction
Number of shares 98,506
Number of voting Rights 98,506
GB00B3K51464

[britishbear] 11/2/2009 08:31

What does this mean? 3D at Microgaming?

[bonio10000] 05/2/2009 15:48

Playwize and Christopher Eldred

Two prize bellends.

Anyone who sunk 6 figures into this deserved to lose it all.

Add Mick Baxter into that as well.

[britishbear] 03/2/2009 20:59

I am glad you like ALOG and feel you can work with them. I see PKR as the future of poker in terms of player immersion which is excellent for the fun player.

If ALOG have the exclusive PKR Asia rights to market then I am sure this is a plus for anyone considering investing.

They seem a canny bunch.

[baronstjohn] 03/2/2009 14:54

Very good suggestion wonder if Foo and the team have the same thoughts.All we can do is watch and wait for the champagne cork to burst into life when any announcement is received.

[csilondon] 03/2/2009 02:07

i reckon they are going to attempt the casino side of things, since no once else has done that and yet still Foo and his team still have produed the best casino environment software so far for online work. that is something eg that PKR havent got so far. some would say that Foo's secret ace in the hole

[jezsan] 03/2/2009 01:52

hey british bear -

we're working on foreign language versions of pkr for the other markets, including asia and beyond.

alog is a very exciting company and does well in their market with good products and relationships. pkr is a great partner for them.. and vice versa.

glad to hear youre a fan of pkr ;-)

-- Jez

[csilondon] 02/2/2009 15:27

its 0.004p in old money

[britishbear] 02/2/2009 14:57

Jez,

Good post. How is the PKR agreement working out with ALOG? How do you expect them to sell PKR to the Asia market? This mean different languages and different avatars or the same "English only" product.

I am on PKR each and every night - a top product and I suspect I am one of your larger contributers in terms of rake :-)

ALOG is a share that is undervalued imo. Any feel for this from the PKR agreement?

Thanks

[csilondon] 02/2/2009 03:46

need to wait and see, hopefully prospects will be better and shares will carry value.

[csilondon] 02/2/2009 03:43

we shall see if your final paragraph is a valid paragraph and us the shareholders get anything back. especially the ones that invested once onboard with the ladbrokes agreement...

[jezsan] 02/2/2009 01:47

targatarga -

just a reminder to all that you are economical with the truth and what you just said was not only completely untrue, but defamatory as well.

You said i took control of Argonaut. Thats untrue. I always had control of Argonaut. I was the one who founded the company in 1982, owning 100% of it. Over the years, as other investors invested - including Apax partners - my shareholding diluted down but was always the largest shareholder by a large margin. On the flotation in 2000, my shareholding was diluted slightly below 50% - but when combined with the other executive shareholders, and family holdings, it was always in control.

you also seemed to think that the shareholders got screwed. actually, most sharehodlers in argonaut made money. it was only the ones that were there at the end - which i should stress - was mostly me - that suffered the death. a lot of shares were traded during the dying months of argonaut. heck, even after we put out a press release saying we were in financial difficulty, many of the people on this board were buying shares thinking it was not the true position and that we were somehow making it up. i was getting phonecalls from people telling me that they read how we only had a tiny amount of cash left and were in severe cashflow difficulty - and thats what made them decide to invest - because the shares had dropped the most they had ever dropped. i felt awful for them - investing in a dying company hoping it would be saved for them to make money - and alas - it didnt survive and wasnt saved.

you seem to imply that i deliberately ran argonaut into the ground so i could use the administrators to bid for the choice bits.

what an absurd suggestion, to run my OWN company into the ground - one that i had run successfully for 22 years, just so i could bid for two tiny bits of it (less than 10% of the total). What a complete idiot you are to even think such a thing was deliberate. As it happens, the two bits that i 'saved' of the defunct argonaut were the only bits i could practically save. i wanted to save more, but lacked enough funds to do that. up until the last dying breath of the company, i was going to inject £1m of my own funds into the company (and anyone connected with the company including the board, executives, brokers and lawyers can confirm this) - but was eventually advised against this by the company's accountants - because - with outgoings of £1m a month - that would've only staved disaster by a month, with the same outcome - since the company had fallen off a cliff in terms of its revenue, thus drastic cutbacks were the only chance. Also, the company was shafted on a major project by some ruthless executives working at a publisher that i shall not name. there is small justice and those executives are no longer working at that publisher - having had to resign due to other bad management practices and an investor revolt and had their comeuppance.

and how do you think that the result of jez 1, shareholders 0 worked out!? i only got to '1' by starting another company - in a completely different market with a totally different business model, and utilising exactly 0% of the work that argonaut had done. however, i did the best i could for the ex-staff of argonaut and offered as many as possible a job in my new company - which at the time was called crunchy frog, and now is called PKR and is an extremely successful poker company. almost all of the dev team of pkr are ex-argonaut members. more alumni from e-argonaut continue to join us from the old company every month or two. i am very loyal to the staff of argonaut, who lost their jobs. almost all of them got great jobs at other companies - many of them earning much higher salaries than argonaut could afford to pay them - and as gratitude, when i started a new venture - i hired any of them that were interested - to come with me into the new company - some joined immediately, and some joined later, and many, are flying high at other companies and pseudo-spinoffs.

targartarga - in my opinion there was one huge thing wrong with argonaut. that was, it got too big, too fast, and couldnt shrink fast enough to balance its staff costs against the available work. if argonaut hadnt been a public company, there wouldnt have been so much pressure to grow the revenue so quickly, and argo couldve scaled up and down more smoothly and done a much better balancing act. as it happens, almost none of argonaut's main competitors in the videogame developer business are alive today in the same form. most either went bust before, during or after the same time as argonaut did... and a few were sold at firesale prices and are no longer with us in the present form. about the only uk video game developer of any scale that is still alive today is Blitz Games, and their achievement and success earns my deepest respect.

targatarga - i know without a shadow of a doubt that foo did not intend playwize to fail. i do not think he was instrumental in its failure - and i do not think that he has done anything wrong at all (except that the venture wasnt successful, but i genuinely believed he tried extremely hard). bear in mind that playwize pitched itself against a superior and earlier competitor - PKR - my venture. it was a gamble and it didnt pay off. with hindsight, maybe going into casino wouldve been better with the resources that playwize had rather than poker - but its easy to see what went wrong with hindsight. i also genuinely believe that his strategy - after seeing it fail - of winding down playwize gracefully, and allowing its carcass to be utilised by another company seeking a listing - is the best thing for the shareholders - of which, it should be noted that at 5% (pre dilution) i am still one of the largest !!

[baronstjohn] 01/2/2009 18:54

Playwize Seeks Acquisition
12/30/2008
Playwize Plc has now ceased to trade and is looking for an acquisition as per the investment strategy. At the EGM held on November 18, 2008, the shareholders approved a Resolution to make an acquisition of a company, which trades in either the UK, the rest of Europe, the United States of America or the Middle East, and which, if possible, has a proven record of turnover and profitability, in any field of activity, other than real estate.

[baronstjohn] 31/1/2009 11:17

Will be very interesting to see what happens this week. l would still think a lot of holders of this share still hope that a return on their investment may happen if the news is good.