How many hot startups are VW-based?

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Apr 292008
 

The SIA 25 Live (a snapshot from CNet)

The SAI 25 Live is this new index that is trying to track the hottest startups based on an estimated valuation figure. As you look at the chart, realize these figures are in thousands, so the top of the chart is valued in the billions.

Several of the top 25 are familiar names to readers of this blog and folks who hang around the virtual worlds space:

  • Webkinz
  • Habbo (why it’s not listed as Sulake, I don’t know)
  • Linden Lab
  • Stardoll

Of course, if you are on the Metaverse Roadmap bandwagon, then the stuff like Twitter also fits into the eventual metaverse picture, via the “lifelogging” quadrant. And Meebo, which many think of as just a chat app, has had great success with Meebo Rooms, which is basically am embeddable chat room that you can put on any website — another step towards web-wide synchronous interaction.

The table is intended only to show privately held companies, so many of the big players are absent. And many of these valuations are purely hypothetical — there isn’t necessarily a buyer at that price, and the markets aren’t exactly hot for IPOs right now either. But it does serve to demonstrate the attraction of virtual worlds as a category.

It’s also interesting to me how many of the others are ones I have never heard of. Tudou is a video-sharing site in China. Ozon and Yandex are Russian. There’s a bunch of job-seeking sites, and a bunch of ad networks.

3d in Flash is getting better

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Apr 182008
 

Remember how I said that 3d in Flash was catching up? I got a lot of flak for it in some quarters.

Check out this demo. OK, it’s not 3d, it’s actually parallax. Still. 🙂 It’s apparently from this new platform called Alternativa, which looks quite promising and which does have quite a lot of 3d. Check out this interior or this exterior.

The way things are looking right now, 3d on the web is in a position where there’s multiple solutions coming down the pike, though none are fully baked yet. There’s Flash itself, which is the dominant platform. There’s Shockwave as well. Microsoft sees a strategic imperative and is doing Silverlight. And the open-sourceniks are not going to let something so critical be all proprietary, so there’s the <canvas> tag with OpenGL.

This is basically console wars for the Web. The Alternativas/Away3ds/Papervisions of the world are middleware developers for the Flash “console.” Heck, the latest Away3d demo even somewhat reminds me of the first time I saw Magic Carpet on the PC.

Is it “here” yet? No. But you can see it from here.

Virtual Worlds 2008 Wrap Up

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Apr 092008
 

Virtual Worlds News has a great wrap-up article covering all of the major blog posts and reactions to the show. Sounds basically like lots of dealmaking and announcements, but also some tentativeness from many commentators. Be sure to read the takes from Prokofy, Christian Renaud, Cory O., and others. Some echoes of my “high windows” keynote at the GDC Worlds in Motion Summit.

However, what really struck me walking around the show was how constrained the virtual world dream has become. There are a bunch of projects that look like less populated and less functional versions of Second Life, usually with some marketing material promising a “safer” or more “corporate” environment. A few other companies are promising rapid and cheap creation of advertising worlds, leveraging outsourced production.

Is this really the Metaverse? Is this even the 3D internet?

 -Cory Ondrejka

Is there such as thing as a casual online world?

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Apr 092008
 

I’m not sure there is, at least as we understand it. Not at the moment, anyway.

When we speak of “casual” we mean a cluster of things. Sometimes we mean targeting a different demographic, one not excited by the hardcore fantasy-and-sci-fi fictions we concoct. Sometimes we mean shorter play sessions. Sometimes we mean things like not requiring grouping in the worlds, which makes it easier for a less dedicated player to have fun.

More “casual” experiences often have a connotation of being shallow. One thing that is clear, though, is that it doesn’t matter how casual you make an experience, some people will use it in a hardcore manner.  And that means that it must have hidden depths of some sort. A shallow experience simply doesn’t tend to keep people.

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Trevor Smith predicts the VW future

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Apr 082008
 

Trevor F. Smith is, of course, the prime mover behind Ogoglio and Tomorrow Space, and he has a pair of posts that lay out a bit of a roadmap for the development of a 3d web.

Don’t run away screaming– it’s a lot more plausible than you think! But of course, I have some thoughts on his thoughts, too. 🙂

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