For those of you who have noticed the name Nabeel Hyatt popping up all over the place in the MMO-to-Web sort of space over the last year, well, now you know what he’s up to — along with some Turbine and Harmonix vets. 🙂 Conduit Labs, of which he is CEO, just announced landing $5.5m in Series A funding to do “social online entertainment”:

We want to deliver a completely new kind of massively multiplayer experience — one that requires minutes, not hours, to access and learn, and one that is as rich and social as real-world activities like shooting hoops or jamming in a band. And we wanted it all in a browser, as accessible as your email.

The Conduit Labs Blog has an informal take on how the company got going, and there’s coverage at 3pointD, at Read/Write Web, and of course at TechCrunch. Edit: Virtual Worlds News landed some interview tidbits.

Edit: two posts popped up with some more meaty detail. There’s Susan Wu’s post about why CRV funded Conduit, which discusses more the general space; and there’s a great interview of Nabeel at WorldsInMotion which digs deeper into what an actual product might look like.

• CNet has an article on THQ using brain sensors to refine gameplay. I saw this sensor at GDC last year… The game industry doesn’t do nearly enough, overall, in terms of scientific assessment of their product. There’s a great playability lab at Microsoft that monitors players as they experience games, but there’s a really long way to go in terms of measuring people’s reactions to the content. Fortunately, there’s folks like Mark Terrano (who has a great diagrammatic method of measuring player engagement over gameplay time), Nicole Lazzaro, and Dan Cook thinking about this. 🙂

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