How many hot startups are VW-based?

 Posted by (Visited 9422 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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.

MetaverseU time capsules

 Posted by (Visited 7918 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Mar 282008
 

Henrik Bennetsen cornered everyone he could at MetaverseU and asked them a set of questions about the metaverse:

  • What excites you about current metaverse technology?
  • What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
  • What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
  • What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?

Now he’s posted all the videos of all the answers — and there’s some good stuff in there.

Here’s my answers:

Continue reading »

PMOG is going beta…!

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Mar 112008
 

Justin Hall’s nifty web metagame PMOG is going beta, and you can sign up on their site.

In short, you install an extension to Firefox. Then you browse. You can leave stuff on pages (like bombs!), gain Xp and level up by browsing, do quests, etc. Basically, it layers an RPG on top of browsing: you even have character classes.

This is a great example of the inversion in thinking that comes with the Web approach to doing stuff. I remember toying with a similar but different idea back in the SWG days — an MMO that slurped real world web pages into a full 3d world, and that you ran around in “cyberspace” and played an RPG. How obvious it seems now to instead do it outside of a 3d immersive client!

GDC08: Worlds in Motion keynote coverage

 Posted by (Visited 8959 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Feb 182008
 

Virtual Worlds News has a liveblog of “High Windows”, my keynote talk at the Worlds in Motion Summit this morning here at GDC. I was, uh, philosophical. 😉

There is also a Gamasutra article which seems to manage to capture an almost entirely different set of quotes.

I also see a few blog reactions.

As usual, I will try to get the slides posted later today.

Edit: more blog reactions. Brenda Brathwaite. Prokofy, based on the liveblog.

Edit 2: 3d on the Web Cheap. Jeff McNab. e-Clippings. And Massively’s coverage comes the closest, I think, to capturing the tone and narrative of what I said; lots of folks are reading this as being about Darfur, when it in fact is more about expanding our horizons — which is more the virtual horizons, and not just social activism.

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