Serious Games Category Archives

February 17, 2008

Metaverse Roadmap and MetaverseU

From February 15th through February 17th, people from industry and academia gathered at Stanford University to participate in two events.

The first was a continuation of the excellent Metaverse Roadmap work that had started two years ago, which is an attempt to capture and forecast the coming changes in the user interaction model with the Internet. If you haven't read the original MVR, you can find it here.

The second event was (or rather 'is', as it is still underway) the MetaverseU, which is a combination of presentations and open discussion covering various facets of the virtual worlds, augmented reality, and lifelogging, with a particular focus on the human factors and societal impact of an idealized Metaverse.

The event is being streamed live (and freely) into Second Life here, and Henrik Bennetsen has taken a further step of creating a time capsule of where we are in this technology cycle by interviewing all of the participants and attendees with four questions regarding the best and worst things of current technology, and the opportunities and unforseen downsides of the future adoption of same. His interviews will be published on YouTube under the group 'MetaverseU', as well as tags on Flickr and elsewhere tagged 'MetaverseU'

Henrik has also blogged about what he is doing on the MetaverseU blog here. It think this is a good example of forward thinking in being able to tag content distributed around the Internet as a distributed transcript and record of the event. Consider it 'Distributed Lifelogging'. Now, if we could incorporate Twitter and Second Life chat transcripts.....in one portal.........

Posted by Christian Renaud at 09:18 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 31, 2008

MetaverseU

For those already in the Northern California area, or who are able to attend via Second Life, the great folks at Stanford University will be holding 'MetaverseU' on the 16th and 17th of February at Stanford in Palo Alto. Henrik Bennetsen at Stanford has assembled a diverse field of people from around academia and industry with the goal to catalyze some critical thinking around the current state of networked virtual environments and where they could, can, and will go.

Be sure to check out the agenda page of speakers to see some of the topics and visionaries that he has put together for the event, and please try to attend if you are in the area for any of the other many virtual world-ish events taking place that week in San Francisco.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:17 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

November 08, 2007

You are [Here]

If you want to know where a given space is on the path to being mainstream, there are few measures better than looking at the distribution of venture capital flowing into that space over the prior twelve months. In the case of the Virtual World market, the last twelve months have had somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 deals totaling $1.26B, ranging from investments in world developers, 'producers', and the supporting ecosystem of in-world economy and advertising companies. Including the Disney/Club Penguin and Intel/Havok deals, which skew the numbers heavily and account for 2/3 of all activity, you get a distribution roughly like this:

What does this tell us?

Out of $451M of non-acquisition money flowing into startups, the majority of it is round two. This generally means that there were many many startups with ideas for 'metaverse' platforms that were bootstrapped with the help of friends, family and angel investors (or deep corporate pockets, but we'll touch on that in a separate blogpost). Out of the 'many many', some suffered what we call 'execution failure', which is to say that they were unable to make their vision a reality, even in prototype form to demonstrate to venture capitalists for more funding. This left a subset of startups that had/have prototypes in-hand and were out looking to take their invention mainstream with the help of a capital infusion from the venture community. They had received their smaller A/first/Seed/Angel round(s) already, and were looking to expand.

Also interesting is the number of companies that have effectively retreaded their business models away from fully recreational or training simulations and are attempting to steer into consumer virtual world businesses. A number of startups have gone through their first two or three rounds of funding, at which point they were shipping product, only to take on one or two more rounds of funding and go back into product development mode to re-ship a retreaded product for a larger more consumer-focused mainstream user base.

One final thing to note are the investments in surrounding and secondary technologies, such as platforms (Intel/Havok), producers (CBS/Electric Sheep and Omnicom/Millions of Us), economies (Bessemer/Sparter) and advertising companies for virtual worlds (Microsoft/Massive, Intel/IGA, Time Warner/Double Fusion). This usually follows consolidation and more mainstream adoption of the primary technology (in this case, virtual worlds), but is showing up early this time around.

Effectively, if you see the majority of venture deals leaning towards rounds two and three, that means that you are on the verge of seeing a number of new products and platforms announced. Considerable potential energy. This should be a fun time to watch the industry and see the second generation of virtual world platforms emerge that integrate the key learnings and address the shortcomings of first generation worlds, and the consolidation of the market around key areas such as training, business collaboration, and social networking.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:58 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

September 27, 2007

Virtual Worlds 2007 Conference- San Jose

For those of you who will be on the left coast, we strongly encourage you to attend the Virtual Worlds 2007 Conference and Expo on October 10-11 at the San Jose convention center. We have the honor of presenting alongside some very smart people in industry like Jeff @ Amazon, Cory at Multiverse, Ron @ Proton Media, Edward Castronova, Ian Hughes @ IBM, Christian and Reuben from Millions of Us, Tony O'Driscoll, Jerry Paffendorf, Paul and Matthew @ Intel and the unstoppable Ren Reynolds. The last VW Conference in New York in March was an excellent event that was standing-room-only.

We'll be kicking off the second day of the conference with a keynote presentation on getting serious with virtual worlds as a collaboration technology for businesses. We also will be hosting the attendee lounge, so please stop by and say hello, lounge, and enjoy the free drinks!

Posted by Christian Renaud at 11:31 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

September 14, 2007

Announcing the Cisco Industry Solutions Partner Network

For those of you who did not see the announcement, Cisco has announced a new tool for our channel partners and application service providers to interact, the Industry Solutions Partner Network (ISPN). This is a 3D immersive environment for our channel partners to discover the wide array of solutions available from our ASP partners.

To quickly dispel any confusion, this is not a user-created-content, avatar-customized, free-roaming experience as experienced on the Cisco Virtual Campus in Second Life, but a 24/7 3D tradeshow with easy navigation targeted specifically at our Channel partners. As you know (if you are reading this blog), there are a number of different species of virtual worlds, ranging from pre-scripted web-based flash worlds, walled and open 'free-roaming' worlds, and hybrids. Each species has it's own best uses, as there is no 'one-sized-fits-all' solution.

We'll be releasing more details in the near future, however here is a sample screenshot of the environment because a picture is worth a thousand blog-words. ;-)