Hyzonia, a next generation online marketing tool, has won the ‘Microsoft technology’ and ‘Best strategic entertainment online portal’ awards at the recently concluded Pan Arab Web Awards 2009.

Hyzonia.com was recognised for its powerful portal which enables advertisers to create and publish campaigns for entertaining and engaging their target audience and helps publishers to increase revenue by creating and publishing customised virtual worlds to their websites.

“Hyzonia is a web platform that changes the concept of advertisement from interrupting to entertaining,” said Maryam Alimardani, managing director, of Rena, a Dubai-based company that has created Hyzonia.

“It is unique for achieving social, cultural, educational and of course marketing and advertising goals,” he added.

“Hyzonia virtual worlds' structure is designed based on a very new effective online marketing technique called "Engagement". It is a meaningful brand experience created by audience's interaction with advertising materials and we are proud that our hard work in this project is now being recognized by our peers.”

Designed as an entertainment-based marketing tool under the ‘Virtual World as a Service’ (VWAAS) model, Hyzonia is a "Cloud" system that is made of many individual applications distributed on the internet and developed on the Microsoft .NET technology.

Through these customisable virtual worlds, advertisers can reach and engage specific target audience based on their interest, location, age and gender, and monitor the results in real-time.

As a triangle of Web 2.0, online advertising and online gaming, Hyzonia is a powerful marketing platform for advertisers, a revenue machine for publishers and a gateway of fun and fame for players.

From the player’s perspective, each Hyzonia virtual world offers light weight games that could be conveniently played from virtually anywhere with an internet connection and requires no special platform, high-end device, download or installation, so players can continue playing from where they left off.

These unique features are contributing to the rapid growth in popularity of Hyzonia among all age groups; an age-wise break up of users shows that 49 per cent come in the 18-49 bracket, 26 per cent are more than 50 and about 25 per cent are under 18 years.

Also, while 56 per cent of users are men and 44 per cent are women, it is interesting to note that women aged 18 or older represent 33 per cent of the population, which is a significantly high portion in this market.

Considering the fast growing global online advertisement and gaming market, Hyzonia technology hits audience that are on the scale of millions but targeted precisely.

Hyzonia is created from scratch over the last two years to be a competency factor with lots of benefits for both regional and international businesses.

It aims to capitalise on the online advertising industry of EMEA which is the second largest market in the world with revenues expected to touch $52 billion by 2010 as the internet is predicted to constitute nearly 10 per cent of global advertising in 2010 compared to less than 3 per cent in 2002. – TradeArabia News Service