Heading For The Web, Game Shows In His Blood

Quick—name two of the fastest-growing categories of Web sites. Answer: user-generated content and online gaming. Now a gameshow industry veteran, Doug Barry, has wedded the two. Barry, 45, raised $4.7 million in venture capital and launched PopJax.com in mid-March. The site takes videos and questions submitted by viewers and turns them into trivia games in which contestants can win cash prizes from $250 to $1,000.

Barry has game shows in his blood. His late father, Jack Barry, was the original host of TV shows Tic Tac Dough and Twenty-One. In the 1970s, Barry recalls his father trying to make The Joker’s Wild more interactive by inviting callers to spin the wheels by pressing a button on their home phone. Although PopJax enters a crowded field that includes online game sites such as Pogo.com and WildTangent.com, Barry still sees a chance to score. “Nobody has created the Jeopardy! or the Trivial Pursuit of the Web,” he says. –Christopher Palmeri