Caleb Booker

Headlines about virtual worlds just from the last week. See the archive page for past weeks.

Seems like it’s numbers week this week. Everybody is tossing around figures relating to usage, investment, and whatever else they can think of. I’ve only linked a small number of them as it starts to all feel a bit like marketing hype rather than real information. Just remember what Mark Twain said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, my blip channel, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:

Top Stories

Moggle Raising $10M for Development Platform
Moggle is working on a platform to develop at the convergence of MMOGs, virtual worlds, and social networks. Need more? They’ll be “thee first truly end-to-end browser based online game development and delivery platform”. I still don’t get it… will need to hunt down more info here. Somebody thinks the platform is worth $10M anyhow.

IMVU Picks Up $10M in Series D Led by Best Buy Capital
Whoop, I think that’s it. Looking back over the last couple of months we’ve seen constant VC investment in virtual worlds, and with IMVU getting Series D from Best Buy Capital you can pretty much call this a “virtual worlds gold rush”. “Tough economic times” be damned, investors are seeing something in virtual worlds.

mEgo Raises $2.5M for Avatar Identity
Ok, NOW the “virtual worlds gold rush” is on.

Updated: Game and virtual world fundings top $885 million in 2008
Well, CNet says almost $600M for virtual worlds specifically, but let’s not quibble. As far as MediaPost is concerned, this means they tanked because last year had Disney buying things for almost a billion. Statistics.

Second Life Creators Purchase Startups To Push Virtual Goods Online
Mentioned this earlier in the week but thought it was worth linking this. Fun stats on virtual goods trade.

TTSL announces entry into the Virtual World
The “first Indian telecom operator to enter the popular Second Life community.”

Alcoa Using ExitReality for Collaboration
Tying its 90,000 employees spread out across 34 countries together to review prototypes. Hooray for fast prototyping!

Meetsee Simplifies Collaboration for Small Businesses
I don’t know much about it yet, but it seems to be a very basic meeting space that enables webcams and file trading. No idea how practical it is in the face of things like Qwaq, and jury’s still out on the effectiveness of 2D/2.5D interaction. Perhaps worth a closer look though. Screenshot:

Industry Leaders Predict Growth for Virtual Goods in VWM Industry Forecast
60+ executives and analysts from the virtual worlds industry are surveyed here and they predict growth. Of course, if you survey any professional from any industry they generally predict growth. Still, interesting reading FWIW.

Predicting 2009: Channel consolidation, more virtualization, less Second Life
Always good to hear differing opinions. IT pros have a bit of a history of detesting Second Life, preventing employees from logging in and telling executives there couldn’t possibly be any good reason for them to want to do something that’s so hard on the machines. Again, FWIW.

Enhance Live Events With Virtual Ones
A nicely written once-over from Web Worker Daily on enhancing your events with virtual spaces.

Training and Education

Santa Clara Law School joins Second Life to find new students
Virtual recruiting and education in virtual worlds - a match made in heaven I suppose!

Teaching gets a Second Life
The University of Western Ontario’s Psychology department starts having some fun in Second Life.

EcoBuddies Partners with PrimaryGames for Distribution
Edutainment is a hot market!

Lenovo to Train 15-20% of Sales Staff on Web.alive’s eLounge
This is a very respectable percentage to test the platform with. I’ll be interested in seeing the results.

Acklam Grange launches 3D virtual school
A private school launches a 3D space, but really I’m just into this story because of this pic of how cool these guys look in modern polarized 3D glasses. Here they are mid-rap:

Government and Military

Obama’s Is First Web 2.0 Inauguration
If you owned anything running electricity, chances are you heard all about the details of inauguration day. Bit of a contrast from when Bush had to be rushed to the White House away from an angry mob on the day of his inauguration…

U.S. Army Announces America’s Army 3
I guess it must be proving itself to be an effective recruiting tool.

Marketing

Moderne Interactive to Launch Adobe eLearning Experience in Second Life
Press release. Adobe launches a presence to promote Captivate 4 and the eLearning Suite products. Live events for the first few days, no idea if the plan is for their island to become a ghost town afterward. This is as much an ad for the marketing company, Moderne Interactive, as it is for Adobe.

Weblin Launching Virtual Goods and Layered Banners in February
Weblin, that avatars-on-every-page-you-surf-to app, is working out its monetization model. Webmasters are going to have mixed feelings about this!

Sony Electronics holds a virtual trade show
Notably not held in the Home platform, but rather in the InXpo space. Guys, if you can’t fake confidence in Home then how are the rest of us supposed to? Anyhow, interesting quote here:

Normally, Shapiro said that the company would do a road show across 15 cities, talking to 200 to 400 people at each single-day event. Shapiro guessed that the virtual trade cost less than 50 percent of a real world event, not to mention that most of the virtual trade show material can be reused.

Gaming

TechCrunch: Beta Invites For Ridemakerz Virtual World
Know any kids between 6 and 12 who like cars? This might be a fun little treat for them.

Microsoft Makes Big Cuts At Flight Sim Studio
All is not well in the land of Microsoft.

RedBedlam Boss Says Gold Farming “Inevitable”
FINALLY someone faces up to the inevitable!

Nerds Only

Meta-Mole Launching Searchable Index for Virtual Worlds
“a searchable directory of developer-submitted information on virtual worlds,” along the same lines as MMOGCHART I suppose but with user-submitted content. We’ve seen projects like these come and go over the years, but this one may have a shot. We’ll see!

IBM Demoing Sametime3D for Brainstorming in OpenSim
IBM translates Lotus Sametime into 3-space. Interesting that they’re throwing support behind OpenSim rather than that firewalled Second Life experiment they had run awhile back. Demo video:

Newbs Only

With a click of the mouse, you can have a second life
“Second Life is a website that is built on the same concept as World of Warcraft…” Yeeeeesh!

Sociological Oddities

How do Founding Fathers’ protections apply in a virtual world?
Either this is very clever, or it’s a no-brainer masquerading as a brain teaser.

Posted on January 25th, 2009 under business, governance, new media, news, press, virtual worlds. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.