Last month, MocoSpace—an HTML5 mobile gaming platform—announced a fund of $1 million to help accelerate the development of HTML5 games for smartphones. The fund would then become a jumpstart for a select few developers who wanted to make their way into mobile gaming space. Developers were invited to submit existing games as well as game proposals.

Well, the day has come to reveal the first recipients of the fund. According an article in BizReport the companies about to receive this first round of funding for developing games will be: New Game Town, Joyplay and Kooky Panda.

"Kooky Panda firmly believes in mobile browser-based gaming and we’ve put all our chips on HTML5, so we were pumped to get some funding from MocoSpace to help turbo-charge Kooky Panda’s growth in that direction," said Cherry Wu, CEO and Co-Founder of Kooky Panda. "Our first game is a compelling fantasy game called "The Lost World" and we have a half-dozen other HTML5 games in the pipeline."

Mobile gaming is on the rise and MocoSpace doesn’t want to miss the boat. Noting Zynga’s recent valuation increase to somewhere between $7m and $10m last investment cycle and HTML5 is on the rise with Motorola’s investment in Moblyng. MocoSpace can likely see the writing on the wall when it comes to mobile gaming and they want to get in on the upcoming surge of applications. In fact, recently HTML5 got a shot in the arm from Adobe when they came out with a Flash to HTML5 converter and an add-on pack for Illustrator CS5.

Perhaps some will recall the MySpace potential acquisition of MocoSpace hype (which didn’t happen.) The possibility did, however, make a lot of sense when it comes to mobile gaming. iOS devices like iPhone and iPad will not run Flash games so HTML5 is the way to go to break into that market.

MocoSpace did manage to pin down 350,000 active users during the first month after the debut of their game Stage Hero. All this as gamer demographics are expanding, according to reports from IGN and Ipsos; the reports demonstrate a trend that encompasses all ages, even if the largest demographic is still those in their teens and early 20s.

That known, the mobile gaming platform boasts over 16 million registered users who play almost 1 million hours of games a day. That’s a lot of fresh eyeballs staring at smartphone screens for advertisers to tap into.