Today FUHU, creator of the UrFooz avatar widget, signed a 10-year-contract deal with PC manufacturer The Acer Group. The deal gives FUHU a $6.5 million round of venture capital funding as well as the right to distribute FUHU's avatar products in all Acer computers and smart phones. The Acer Group manufactures the well-known Acer, Gateway, Packard Bell, and eMachines lines of PC computers and laptops.
This is FUHU's second round of funding, following a $1.5 million round last year from eMachines founder John Hui, VIA Technologies, UMC Capital, Industrial Bank of Taiwan, Alorica, and a group of other angel investors. FUHU's main product is the UrFooz embeddable identity card that features a customizable avatar along with other social profile data. The cards are designed to be incorporated into Facebook, MySpace, and other online profiles.
The deal with Acer will let FUHU build UrFooz widgets into The Acer Group's computers, collecting registration data to allow users to create pre-configured UrFooz profiles and accounts as part of setting up their computers. Part of the customization process for UrFooz avatars involves using real money to purchase particular avatar fashions from the UrFooz Mall, so what FUHU has done here is essentially signed a deal to put its item shop into every new PC manufactured by The Acer Group over the next ten years.
UrFooz has 20,000 users now but company CEO Jim Mitchell says he anticipates gaining as many as one to two million per month once the Acer deal kicks in. Even if most users don't opt to use their UrFooz accounts regularly, that's still staggering growth for a new service. FUHU also manufactures a widget called Spinlets that allows users to embed media like movies, MP3s, and photos. The Acer deal will allow pre-loaded Spinlets widgets to come packaged onto new PCs.
The real goal here, though, seems to be making sure UrFooz avatar software ships pre-loaded onto The Acer Group's much-anticipated line of smart phones, which come to the U.S. in 2010. The UrFooz interface is clearly optimized for mobile screens and the appeal of controlling your social profile from a single login is more obvious for a mobile-centric user. The real question is if most mobile users (or PC users) will be willing to pay to have a tricked-out version of an avatar in pre-loaded software, even if some of the UrFooz Mall offerings are premium goods based on hot real-world licenses like the NBA, which was announced this week.
[via TechCrunch]
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