Avatar-creation service Gizmoz has two major announcements today: funding and new compatibility with AIM. Gizmoz has raised an additional $6.5 million in Series B financing, led by DoCoMo Capital, Inc., a subsidiary of one of Japan's larger cell phone service providers, with additional funding from ngi capital inc. (also based in Japan), Benchmark Capital, and Columbia Capital.
The round will go towards the expansion of Gizmoz into the Asian market, starting with Japan. What's also clear here is that Gizmoz is really pushing its service into the mobile market, with this funding from prominent Japanese companies, and global expansion, beginning in the world's most active mobile community.
There are a number of ways in which Gizmoz could be used for mobile applications, whether for game play or video chats, so I'm rather anxious to see how this plays out in the Japanese market, as well as the rest of the mobile markets across the world (eventually).
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For the upgraded integration of Gizmoz into AIM, we may be getting a glimpse of how Gizmoz is hoping to push its service onto supporting mobile applications as well. While you could already use a Gizmoz avatar on your AIM chat, it wasn't all that interactive. With Gizmoz Lifelike, your avatar will show a bit more expression based on certain keywords you type into your conversation.