Conduit Gets $5.5M for Casual MMO-Style Social Networking

Conduit Labs announced that it had received $5.5 million in Series A financing from Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks leading the way. Susan Wu, a partner at Charles River who helped organize the Virtual Goods Summit, previously invested in Areae and Twitter, showing herself as a leader in new social technologies. Conduit is described as a browser-based way of filling the void between MMO-style  casual gaming and Web 2.0 social networking. Wu told VirtualWorldsNews.com that "If you look at how relationships form, and there's a lot of research around this, they strengthen and weaken when there are challenges around them . A game is a method of providing virtualized conflict situations, not combat necessarily, but something shared that you have to figure out together. That's what Conduit is trying to do."

The main goal seems to provide an easy, low-barrier-of-entry way for friends to connect online, play games, and generally engage in shared activities.

"We're trying for entertainment, but right now in the industry there are two sides," said Conduit CEO Nabeel Hyatt. "On one side is the social chat, synchronous experience like Second Life, There, IMVU, etc. There's a lot of value there, like Club Penguin, which is social chat with single-player games. The only interaction you have really is chat, though. At the other end of the spectrum are very strong social games, like those on the Wii, World of Warcraft, etc. Those offer lots of ways to interact and compete. Unfortunately a lot of those haven't made it  easy online into the space of social networking. We're trying to take the accessibility of the Web and build in those principles.

As Hyatt it explains, it's almost the inverse of what companies like GuildCafe are doing with World of Warcraft.  They provide the hardcore gamer with an asynchronous tool to build on his synchronous gaming. It sounds like Conduit will be taking the asynchronous style of communication that Facebook offers, and adding real-time interaction. And just as Facebook built on existing social relationships, Hyatt says Conduit will build on existing forms of social interaction.

"Facebook looked at how people gathering geographically around Harvard and then created social connections online," said Hyatt. "The offline corollary that we keep coming back to is what you do with friends, going out dancing on Saturday or playing hoops or playing board games with your family. These are all very social. The video game is almost 90 percent about individual play. This is about MMO ideas, the Wii, the Guitar Hero."

Indeed, the Conduit team, including Dan Ogles, Michael Sheidow, and Daniel O'Brien, has experience from designing  Asheron's Call, Lord of the Rings Online, and Guitar Hero.

When put together, those games appeal to a broad demographic. And Hyatt jokes that's the same demographic as Conduit, "People who use the Web." Though Wu points out that there's a focus on younger users who already have established behavior patterns leading to online socializing.

Although work will be constantly ongoing with iterative additions, Hyatt says he expects people to be playing on Conduit this year. You can read more about the project on their blog. 

Susan Wu and Prism's Will Kohler will join Conduit's Board of Directors.

Both Susan Wu and Nabeel Hyatt will be speaking at Virtual Worlds Fall Conference in October.