Amadeus Consulting, a custom software development company, announced a partnership with Merchant Marketing Services, Inc., to provide development, technology and marketing consulting services for Play2Shop.com, a Vegas-style gaming site that rewards players with shopping credits to top online retailers.
The Play2Shop project leverages Amadeus Consulting's strength in rich Internet application development, ecommerce websites, integrated data storage and online security. Play2Shop was built using Microsoft Silverlight to provide a rich and interactive web experience.
"Using Silverlight on this project makes it incredibly powerful," said Jonathan Fries, vice president of development at Amadeus Consulting. "By definition, the Alpha stage in most projects is normally a fragile, partially working model. But using Silverlight we compiled the first Alpha release and had a stable working application that we felt confident sending to investors, friends and others internally to play and enjoy."
Since Play2Shop is an investor-funded startup, an early working product was helpful to the company to show progress and results to "VIP" invitees as they look for future investment partners.
"Amadeus Consulting has been vital to our early success and has helped us through many of the trials and challenges of building a new business," said John Benton, chief executive officer of Merchant Market Services, Inc., the parent company behind Play2Shop.
Play2Shop.com includes Vegas-style games, and in order to comply with U.S. regulations, there is no wagering involved. Instead, the site offers actual prizes and rewards for all its games, as well as the ability to use winnings on any of the ecommerce affiliates associated with the site. These include retailers like Best Buy, Costco and Amazon.com, as well as hundreds of others.
Users can visit the site and play the games for free, create a free account for additional chances to win prizes, or create a paid subscription for access to exclusive games, promotions and contests.
"There is really nothing like Play2Shop.com out there," said Benton. "It combines our favorite aspects of the web - gaming, socializing and shopping-in a way that makes sense and provides a lot of enjoyment, entertainment and value to players."
The website and games are currently in an invitation-only testing phase. Interested players can sign up to receive a special VIP invitation and early access at www.Play2Shop.com.