RocketFrog, a social gaming product devised by serial American entrepreneur Brett Calapp, is pulling the social punters in to its Facebook site with a series of multiplayer tournaments for poker, blackjack and slots in which players can set-up multi-player competitions with friends and family for prizes.
Using well-executed and amusing cartoon graphics (check out the vimeo and the RocketFrog himself at http://rocket-frog.com/) the tournaments are available daily for fast and fun action, with the winners receiving prizes from a diversity of advertising sponsors that include music, food and movie tickets.
CEO Calapp says Facebook is the ideal medium to carry the action due to the large number of users, making it easy for friends and family to get together online for a competition in which legitimate rewards are offered
Players can compete to win real world prizes through free-to-play poker (Texas Hold’em), blackjack and slot tournaments alongside real-time stand-alone games such as no-limit poker, blackjack, slots, roulette, and deuces and joker, deuces wild and jacks or better video poker.
Two members of the RocketFrog team have impressive experience in the online gambling space – founder and CEO Brett Calapp and chief technical officer Uri Kozai.
A graduate of Arizona State University, and MBA alumni of Pepperdine University, Calapp’s resume includes creating online games and multi-player game networks, search products, interactive media and global technology solutions. He was CEO and CTO of the Ultimate Blackjack Tour, a multi-faceted, gaming-media company that included an international gambling tour, an online game network and a hit television show on CBS.
He was CEO and co-founder of Centaurus Games, and after UIGEA he created a legal, subscription-based, gaming network that focused on providing online poker solutions to established retail brands like the World Poker Tour. He eventually sold his company to WPT owner Party Gaming.
Kozai is a Computer Science and Mathematics graduate from the University of Haifa, Israel. His hi-tech career has embraced aerospace-navigation systems, semiconductor-industry products, material-movement systems, and video- and audio-processing systems, but he is better known in the online gambling industry for his work in developing mutli-player capability and infrastructure for software company Excapsa back in 2005.
As head of technology he was key in developing a company that became – at that time – the third largest online poker operator on the planet, supporting over 5 million players. The current co-CEO of Bwin.Party digital, Jim Ryan, was involved back then. The company was sold and eventually formed the basis of the controversial Absolute and UltimateBet operations…but that is another story.
Kozai also founded the Toronto-based software company RealTime Edge, which specialises in building scalable, robust, multi-player-gaming software that supports millions of players and billions of gaming transactions.