Owlient's Olivier Issaly

It was a funny time - it was the Web 2.0 bubble. When we explained at the time that we were generating lots of revenue from people who were paying for a product, people were looking at it and asking us how we were doing it. They wanted to know how we were getting young girls to pay by SMS, or would they pay by credit card, and so on.

Still today it's not very common in the web industry, so I think people were quite interested, and surprised that it was possible to buy items for virtual stuff - but they don't really buy it because it's virtual, they buy it for emotion, for what it represents. It gives the buyer some visibility in the community, so it's really the social interaction that you have to understand.

The second thing is that back in 2005, when I told the games industry that we had 90 per cent women, people said "Wow!" There weren't a lot of game products that were targeting that audience - some big players started, such as Ubisoft with some products, but there weren't a lot.

Now it's more common, with Facebook and social games - but five years ago it was really uncommon.

It's got 16 million registered users over the last five years. Today it has 1.6 million monthly active users on the web - they're more sticky than some social networks I think.

I think for us Facebook should be a way to generate more traffic. If we started from scratch today we'd have no choose but to launch with Facebook, which is obviously possible now - but not as easy for monetisation given the cost of customer acquisition... and the rise of Facebook Credits and the famous 30 per cent.

Today we have the chance - we know how to monetise the audience on the web, via our own website and payment gateways, our own database and so on. Our first objective therefore is to generate traffic for the website - if we can generate revenue, even better.

Well, going back to this year we've had a huge focus on internationalisation. We've launched six new international versions for the horse game, with two more yet to launch. Right now we have 11 versions of the game.

Next year we will continue on that path, probably with Asian launches - we'll also be focusing on multiple platforms. The web will still be our main platform, but we want to develop connections with Facebook and mobile.

And then we're also rolling out a new product next year - number four.

Yes, that was where it was all born.