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A
lot has changed since we profiled
domain investor/developer Bill Karamouzis
in our March 2010 Cover
Story. At the time Bill
had just finished shocking followers
of the domain aftermarket by paying
$350,000 for CookingGames.com.
Many thought he was crazy to pay so
much - and he was - crazy like a
fox.
As
an experienced and very successful developer
of Internet games, Karamouzis knew something
no one else did - that CookingGames.com
could provide the foundation for a very
successful website. That is exactly what
he turned it into as he grew his company,
Hallpass Media, into such a powerhouse
that within a year gaming giant MindJolt
came along and bought
the entire company.
Karamouzis
stayed on as Senior Vice President of
MindJolt (now SGN),
a post that required him and his team to
move from Edmonton to Los Angeles
where Bill reported directly to Chris
DeWolfe, the co-creator of MySpace.
Karamouzis
told us, "We spent the next 18 months
building great games that were playable on
multi platforms. It was an amazing
experience to work with such successful
internet pioneers
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Bill
Karamouzis, Co-Founder
TeachMe/MathGames
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TeachMe/MathGames
Co-Founders Bill Karamouzis and Rhys Jones
in 2013.
Bill and his
wife Ivana have pre-school age
daughters, Ariana and Eleni,
and the girls played a key role in
the birth is Bill's new venture.
"Education was always something I was
very fond of and watching my kids play
was how I stumbled upon the new idea,"
Karamouzis confirmed. "Teachers who
build math and language games are our
best experts in curriculum, but they don’t
fully understand how children play.
Developers who build games don’t
understand how children learn. We
want to change this, to combine
these worlds of learning and play in
a powerful new way, a way that will change
the lives of millions of children
around the world."
Bill
and Ivana Karamouzis with their
daughters, Eleni and Ariana,
celebrating
Ariana's 1st birthday on July 4th,
2012, when they were living in Los
Angeles.
To put the
opportunity into perspective, Karamouzis
noted, "Five months before Steve
Jobs died, Bill Gates visited him
at his home in Palo Alto. The two
architects of our digital age discussed the
early days of the personal computing
revolution, and how it grew to reinvent
the worlds of music, movies, and
communication. They agreed that education,
compared to other fields had not
undergone any significant changes in its
delivery since the earliest days of the
internet."
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"Teachers
want a powerful tool to
complement their expertise, their
passion, their skill. Parents want the
best education possible for
their children. Children want to play
online, to master a skill, to
feel like they’re growing and
learning," Karamouzis said. With
that in mind, Karamouzis and Jones
were discussing how their young
children were using their iPads.
They realized that education was
moving in one direction and
entertainment was moving in
another.
"Educational
games currently on the market make bold
claims about their educational
value, however when you check under
the surface there is very little
statistical data to support many or
any of their claims," Karamouzis
said. "As parents we have very
little insight into how our kids are
learning, what areas they found
challenging, the speed they were
progressing. After further research we
found not a single educational game
to be using the same level of advanced
analytics that were commonly found in
top tier game developer studios like SGN,
Zynga, King.com and others.
Not to mention the total lack of
machine learning to customized
learning paths that allowed the
strongest students to excel while
ensuring struggling students were not
left behind by advancing to new skills
before they had a chance to learn the
current ones."
"Educational
software we found to be nothing
more than a textbook taken |
Watching
his daughters Ariana (above)
and Eleni play prompted Bill
Karamouzis to start thinking outside
the box about improving children's
education. |
| and put
online. There was no thought put
into making the experience more
interesting or compelling,"
Karamouzis continued. "Both
experiences felt outdated and
outrageously expensive with
some sites charging over $100 per
student – in short this entire
industry is really asking and perhaps
deserving wide scale disruption." |
"We
decided we want to bring the two disciplines
of education and gaming together in a
more authentic and artful way. We built and
launched our new company called TeachMe,
a collection of games and apps that
will let anyone with an Internet
connection access games that are both
educational and fun."
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"Our
first product is our Math
Games site. We picked math
because it’s universal,"
Karamouzis said. "Math is also
one of the most important skills a
person needs to learn. From a
gaming perspective it allows for a ton
of opportunities for us as developers.
We have the ability to create
fun competitive environments for child
to compete within their classrooms,
with their friends, even with kids
from other countries. Friendly
competition brings out the best
in people and we even plan to hold
a competitions between iPhone and
Android phone users to find out which
users are better at math in an
upcoming conference where we will
demonstrating our games." |
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"We
feel this approach will reinvent digital
learning because for the first time
games will be utilizing the same types of
analytic driven engagement metrics that have
made other mobile and social games so
addictive and fun," Karamouzis said,
"The same advanced analytics that have
been used to increase the amount of time
kids spend playing games, the numbers of
games they play and how often they return.
We have a theory that if this same approach
was taken to educational games and apps we
could exponentially increase the time
spent “playing” AKA learning. The
more practice, the more play, the more
questions answered and the more skills
mastered. With Math Games our educational
games will be on the same playing
field as the online games currently
competing for your students/children's
attention and time."
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Bill
Karamouzis speaking to domain
investor/developers at the 2011
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference
at Fort Lauderdale Beach, Florida. |
While you
don't have to tell DN Journal's
audience of domain name investors
how valuable the right domain can be,
Karamouzis broke it down for the
layman, noting "MathGames.com is
a generic domain, it’s an EMD
(exact match domain), meaning
it is made up of the same words we’d
use to describe our product. There is
been a lot of debate on the value of
EMD, the changes to their SEO
benefits and so on. I remain a
believer in EMD domains. I knew
for this venture I wanted an EMD that
had a ton of type in traffic,
was easy to spell and easy
to remember. MathGames.com had all
of these attributes (including about 100,000
type-in visitors a month) but it
wasn’t cheap - a $725,000
transaction handled safely using Escrow.com"
"This
is not the most I’ve paid for a
domain but it comes close,"
Karamouzis added. "MathGames.com
is a name I have tried to buy since
2008 without any luck as the owner was
more than content parking it, making hundreds
of dollars per day in net revenue.
For this venture I knew I wanted to
spend as much time on product
development as possible and leave
the marketing to the domain. This
allows an otherwise small team to cast
a somewhat larger footprint. During
certain times of the year over
3,000 |
| unique
people a day would visit the site
though natural type in navigation. We
expect over 75,000-100,000 new
students to pass through out site
in the first month alone and
then every month after it. That’s a powerful
competitive advantage." |
"So
after years, and I mean literally years,
of emailing the former owner, he emailed me out
of the blue asking if I was still
interested. I was, and we were able to close
a deal fairly quickly making this one of the
most expensive domains sold in 2013,"
Karamouzis said.
With
the domain in hand, the hard work began.
"The last six months have been spent
creating a platform so all games and apps
are driven by standardized questions based
on the Common
Core State Standards Initiative,
Karamouzis explained. "This approach allows us to pair our content with
the educational goals of teachers and
parents around the world. Localizing the
standards to regional requirements you can
play our games or apps and by playing our
games you are actually answering the
exact same questions you would be with a
pencil on a sheet of paper. The
medium of engagement has changed and
our beta testing has shown kids that have
answered 15-20 questions in a
textbook like format online, are answering 200-300
questions when games are used as the
delivery method instead!"
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Karamouzis
added, "TeachMe’s
games and apps bring new meaning to
the phrase “customized learning”.
We teach students to master a skill
instead of simply answering a
question. And the games change based
on who’s playing: their mastery of
that skill, their experience. As the
learner gets better, the game — the
curriculum — changes to match the
optimal level of difficulty.
Players pay attention longer and they
learn more. Their time online is
never wasted."
While
Bill's previous ventures were
motivated by a combination of a fun,
creative spirit and commercial savvy
his new lifetime legacy project
combines traits with his desire to remove
privilege from digital education.
It would change lives by giving
help to anyone who wants and needs
it, whether they be from Bangkok,
New York City or any point in
between. |
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Karamouzis
pointed out, "The only competent
educational games on the market
sequester their goodies behind pay
walls, excluding those unable
to pay the toll. TeachMe gives
away all of its content for free.
The goal is not to reach a thousand
students by hiring a sales team. The
goal is to reach 10 million by building
amazing products. We just launched
MathGames.com and it will remain in beta
mode until September and at that
time we will open up our full suite
of games to students just in time
for back to school."
"The
next six months will be
important for us as a company as we
track and test student progress. We
will need to prove our approach
to learning achieves its goal
which is to advance student learning
at a pace we have not seen before.
After a six month period we will
publish the results, and if we are
successful we will open up our
platform to 3rd party publishers and
developers that want to power their
games and apps with the TeachMe
platform. Thus giving educators and
game developers access to the over 800+
ways we have developed to test the
Common Core standards and over 250,000
unique questions we have developed
thus far."
"We’re
trying to help teachers, parents, and
students marry learning and the
best parts of gaming. The first
thing children learn is how to play.
With MathGames, they play to learn,"
Karamouzis concluded.
You
can follow the progress of Bill's
ambitious new adventure as it unfolds
at MathGames.com
and also connect with him at Google+
and on Twitter where his handle
is @karamouzis. You can also
learn more about Bill and his career
in a new
article about him that was
just published at AlbertaVenture.com
- a piece in which Bill continued to
educate the mainstream business world
on just how valuable the right domain
can be. |
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