Weblo Gets $3.2M in Financing

Weblo, the virtual world that allows you to buy and sell representations of real-world locations and people, announced that it had secured $3.2 million in venture capital funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners. In the deal, Geoff Mott, a managing director at VantagePoint Venture Partners, will join the Weblo board of directors. Right now the virtual properties, or Weblo Assets, are strictly 2D, but we spoke with Kelly Ekins, Senior Director of Marketing, about plans for the future.

It seems like Weblo is more of a Web 2.0 property than a virtual world. You can buy and sell digital assets that are based on a real location(say, New Mexico) or person (say, 50 Cent) that are  2D Web pages. You only purOnce you own the page, you can fill it with pretty much whatever content you want including advertisements. It seems like auctioning off a MySpace page.

But Ekins is used to being asked about that. "We’ve been asked the question before," she said. "It was a conscious decision to stay 2D not 3D so the barrier of entry is lower. You don’t need to be a gamer or have gamer hardware. It definitely is a virtual world. We replicate the real world. Everything that exists outside your window is for sale. When you own any asset, it comes with a community aspect. If you own the city, you’re the mayor of that community. You have the freedom on that site to promote that city and put out news that relates to the city or just about yourself."

The company has plans to grow, though, and add more virtual world aspects. "We’ve definitely discussed it," said Ekins. "We can’t say right now, but in the future we definitely want to add 3D elements. But we want to keep the barrier of entry low. One of the things we’ve discussed is that if you want to keep the auction open to becoming more 3D you have that choice, but you can stay 2D as well."

Joey Seiler
www.VirtualWorldsNews.com
joey (at) showinitiative.com
(512) 535-8650
skype: joey.seiler.vwnews

Comments

[M. Patel]

Hey come on. We are living in next gen. Keeping entry barriers low buy promoting 2D low end stuff is not done. Clients downloads can be smart to recognize the users PC capability. Also clients can be optimized to miximize user experience by some smart programming. Who are we kidding? 2D to lower entry barriers????