INTERVIEW/Dylan Collins, Omac Industries:DYLAN COLLINS describes himself as "a serial starter of companies" - and at just 29 years of age, on his third business, with one multimillion-dollar deal already behind him, that's not an unreasonable description.

His first endeavour was a text messaging company he started while still a student at Trinity College. A modest affair by his current standards, it nonetheless achieved two things: it showed him he had a flair for business and it created his business partnership with fellow student, Seán Blanchfield.

"My academic background was in business rather than technology," he says. "Seán has the background in computers, technology and software development. It means our projects are both technology-driven and business-focused. When people ask about Demonware, I always say: he built it . . . and I sold it."

Demonware was the company that made their name in the global computer games business, made them rich when they sold it last year for a reported $15 million, and set them on their current acquisitions path with their new company, Omac Industries - a publisher of online games rather than strictly a games technology company.

"We're building up a portfolio of games, some through acquisitions and others through our own internal development. The change for us is that now we'll be very much consumer-focused.

"We've found that this is a very fragmented marketplace, with a lot of small and medium-sized players but very few with any real scale. So our aim is to become one of the very biggest players over the next three or four years.

"It's not rocket science. From a business point of view, it's very straightforward. And the opportunities are certainly there, even in the current climate. In fact, sometimes it's best to be out looking for deals when everyone else is hunkered down in bunkers."

Global sales of video games are worth $45 billion a year, while the online games business is worth about $10 billion a year. On the other hand, while the video games market is growing at 7 or 8 per cent a year - the online sector is growing at twice that, roughly 15 per cent.

At the heart of Demonware's success was its games software which provided the technological backbone for games on the internet. In 2006, the year before it was sold, it hosted more than 200 million games sessions. It was used by the biggest games publishers in the world, including Atari, Sega, Unisoft and its owners-to-be, Activision, on some of the best-known games, such as Starship Troopers, Splinter Cell, Smackdown, Call of Duty and Outrun. By then Demonware had offices in Dublin, Vancouver and Los Angeles.

Still, when it was sold it remained a relatively small company, Collins admits. "It had a turnover of about € 2 million and a staff of about 20 - but Activision's rationale in acquiring us was strategic rather than purely financial. We had built up a strong core of expertise and technology which would have been very hard to replicate. They wanted to take that off the market and give themselves the competitive advantage."

As an online games publisher, Omac, by contrast, is concentrating on persistent browser games or "casual MMOs", as they're also known. MMOs are massively multiplayer online games, capable of supporting hundreds or even thousands of players - while casual MMOs are games you can play for a while and then return to casually some time later.

"Our specific focus," explains Collins, "is on those games played through an internet browser. They're designed for people who want to play for 20 or 30 minutes a day - and the next day come back to it and continue the adventure or the quest, picking up where they left off. They don't require as much time as much bigger games, such as World of Warcraft."

Omac has already made a handful of acquisitions, including Texas-based Swirve and more significantly Jolt Online Gaming, one of Europe's leading online games communities. "Jolt will be the centre of our online community strategy. It's well established and well known. After all, it's pretty rare in this business to find an online brand that's a decade old."