Ex-marketing director for Nintendo Europe Jim Merrick has found a new home as CEO of Mobliss, a Seattle based mobile phone company.

Merrick left Nintendo earlier this year after twelve years working for the company, during which time he worked as the head of software, hardware and brand marketing across Europe, as well as technical director for Nintendo in the US, developing new technologies and leading a support team dedicated to helping licensees develop games for Nintendo systems. After several months off the radar, we can confirm Merrick is now working at Mobliss in Canada.

Merrick will oversee all of Mobliss' operations, which include game licensing and development, mobile messaging and Mobliss' proprietary SMS voting platform. "Mobile phones are a part of everyday life for millions of consumers. That number just keeps growing," noted Merrick. "Mobliss is a pioneer and already has proven people want to do more than just use phones to chat. They love to play video games and they love to communicate instantly in many different and edgy ways. Growing this is my sole focus."

He'll probably be most well remembered for famously promising the Wii would launch worldwide "within 14 weeks", though his comeback to the comments of Epic's Mark Reign (that Nintendo fans shouldn't kid themselves - they'll be seeing "crappy, cheap, I-wish-I-hadn't-bought-it gimmick games based around that controller,") also brought a smile to many a fanboy's face:

"Mark has a very narrow section of the business. Epic builds middleware, they're very technically savvy guys, but he doesn't have a Revolution controller, he doesn't have a dev kit, he's talking about something he knows nothing about. So if he'd like to get a dev kit and really dig into it, then I'd be interested to hear what he has to say."

So it appears Merrick has left the world of Nintendo completely, which is a real shame. We interviewed him back when we were Cube-Europe, you can still read the full thing here.

Best of luck to Jim in his new job, from all the staff at Revo-Europe!