Irvine’s Quicksilver Software Inc., a developer of video games for consumers and custom software for training and educational purposes, was given an award from the Army for a program it created.
Quicksilver Software got the “training, modeling and simulation” award for developing a PC-based game that helps train logistics planners in the Army.
“We sit down with the guys who train soldiers to do jobs in real combat situations,” said Quicksilver Software’s President William Fisher.
The software teaches Army logistics workers how to minimize risk and safely move and store huge quantities of “toilet paper, tank parts and artillery shells,” among other necessities such as food and water in a combat situation.
“It trains people how to think about logistics,” Fisher said. “It’s a job that’s as boring as anything but it’s absolutely critical to the Army. These people have to figure out how to move huge shipping containers around Iraq every single day to keep our soldiers and contractors supplied.”
Another military software program the company made is geared to hone the decision-making skills of company commanders in combat.
“Our games are not teaching people how to shoot. They are teaching them how to stay alive,” Fisher said. “It allows you to parse apart how they reacted in a combat simulation and analyze the results.”
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Scene from Quicksilver Software’s Army training program: company given award from military |
Quicksilver Software’s been flying under the radar here for some time. The closely held company, which has 25 workers, has been in Orange County since 1984.
Its business model consists of three sources of revenue: video games and custom software for teachers and the military.
All of its software involves “game-related techniques,” Fisher said.
“The core of our company is video games and computer games,” he said. “Out of that branched several sidelines, such as educational and military software.”
Quicksilver Software does its own game development and also gets hired to do back-end work for others on a project basis.
Fisher said the company is profitable and sees yearly sales “under $10 million.”
One of its recent educational programs, a typing tutoring game, gets distributed by other companies that sell directly to schools. Quicksilver Software gets royalties for each copy sold.
The company has done a few well-known computer games, including “Star Trek: Starfleet Command” “Castles” and “Conquest of the New World.”
Its “Star Trek” title sold more than 300,000 copies and spawned four sequels.
About a dozen years ago Quicksilver worked with Irvine’s Interplay Entertainment Corp., a video game developer founded in 1983 that collapsed after the tech bubble burst and was bought in 2001 by France’s Titus Interactive, which eventually filed for bankruptcy.
Unlike Interplay, Quicksilver has been able to stick around by staying small.
“The (video) game business is very risky and very volatile,” Fisher said. “We’ve found that we really aren’t well-suited to do large market-leading PC titles anymore,they’re too expensive. We are extremely effective working on projects with small teams.”
$1M on Demand
Irvine software startup Analytix on Demand recently landed $1 million in its second round of venture funding.
The investor who led the round was Irvine’s Private Equity Management Group, which has some $4 billion in assets.
Analytix has 25 workers here and has raised about $3 million to date.
The company makes software that analyzes data for small and midsize businesses with $50 million to $1 billion in sales, according to Chief Executive and founder Vik Torpunuri.
Its software helps digest the data and organizes it to help managers make better decisions.
Analytix targets companies in telecommunications, media and marketing, retail, healthcare and manufacturing, among other industries.
The privately held startup doesn’t disclose sales.
Online Spending Up
No doubt consumers are tightening their purse strings this year. Still, it seems there are plenty of deal-hunters around.
Aliso Viejo’s Buy.com Inc., an online retailer that is formatted like rival Amazon.com, said the post-Thanksgiving weekend marked “the biggest sales days in company history.”
The day after the Thanksgiving holiday, called Black Friday, is a bellwether used by retailers to determine how their sales might shape up for the holiday shopping season.
The Monday after, called Cyber Monday for its numerous online shopping deals, has become another marker of consumer spending.
Revenue and customer orders increased by more than 40% both on Black Friday and on Cyber Monday compared to the same days a year earlier. Privately held Buy.com doesn’t disclose sales figures.
Buy.com said it lured savvy shoppers with “aggressive deals and unique promotions” that were attractive to “price-conscious consumers.”
The company said is has more than 12 million people who’ve registered accounts with the site.
Buy.com started out selling consumer electronics and related items. It now sells books, music, toys, shoes and even jewelry.
