Phantom Infrastructure, Bridge Loan Deals Announced

Author: by Andrew Wilson, Simon Carless

In the latest in a relatively steady stream of information on the system, Infinium Labs and Sun Microsystems jointly announced plans to create the infrastructure for the subscription-based 'console' Phantom Game Service. Building on Infinium Labs' prior deal covering Phantom support of Java 2 Standard Edition Runtime Environment and Sun's game APIs for support of Java-based titles, today's agreement will see Sun Microsystems providing managed hosting services, back-end infrastructure, and architecture design for the service. Sun are keen to diversify into the gaming middleware and provisioning market, and are obviously seeing the Phantom as a high-profile opportunity to do so. Kevin Bachus, the president of Infinium Labs, commented: "Sun's expertise in delivering content from back-end systems to the user will now become one of our biggest assets. We can focus on offering consumers choice, convenience and ease of use with our PC and Java-based game service." In recent months, the Phantom has seen controversy over possible funding problems, as well as multiple announcements regarding prospective developers and publishers for the PC-like set-top box system, which plans to offer simple, seamless game downloads for those with a broadband Internet system. The Phantom Game Service is scheduled to launch during 2005, with pricing models that includes the Phantom hardware for free if the users signs for a two-year subscription at $29.95 USD per month. In related Infinium funding news, an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Infinium Labs recently entered into a Bridge Loan Agreement with Hazinu Ltd. Under the terms of the agreement, Hazinu has agreed to lend a principal amount of $300,000 USD to Infinium for a 10% promissory note, and 500,000 shares of common stock in the company. This news came alongside another Bridge Loan Agreement Infinium which entered into with JM Investors, LLC, Fenmore Holdings, LLC, Viscount Investments Ltd. and Congregation Mishkan Sholom, apparently a synagogue-related religious organization. Similar to the other deal, the Bridge Loan Agreement will see another loan of $300,000 to Infinium for a 10% promissory note, and 500,000 shares of its common stock. Although these loans will doubtless help keep Infinium tracking toward a release date, it's still somewhat unclear as to whether much larger-scale funding to manufacture and distribute massive amounts of the Phantom set-top boxes has yet been procured.