Interview: EveryScape Gets $7M in Series B

EveryScape, maker of "The Real World Online," has landed $7 million in a round of Series B financing led by new investor Dace Ventures with participation from existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic and LaunchPad Venture Group.  The company says it plans to use the money to "grow its sales force, accelerate new city launches and fuel new community features." EveryScape plans to launch spaces for at least 4 major U.S. cities in the coming weeks, but we followed up with CEO Jim Schoonmaker to discuss EveryScape's success and other plans.

Mapping VS Mirror Worlds

With companies like Google and Microsoft already working hard at building out mapping technologies mixed with community data, it seems like there's stiff competition already.

"The goals are the same," said Schoonmaker when asked how EveryScape's plans ranked with Google's plans to map the world. "I think how we do it will be very different."

In other words, EveryScape isn't trying to out-Google Google. While Google's Streetview and Earth wowed when they were first released, Schoonmaker doesn't want to look at empty streets. He wants to find places.

"Most people that are doing this are kind of the public streets," he explained. "They're using mostly other people's technologies. From our perspective, we think that from a scale perspective it takes a while to do. From a value perspective, people tend to be much more interested in the inside experience than an outside experience. You can determine if that's a store you actually want to go to as opposed to just finding it for directions."

EveryScape, instead, isn't trying to map every street. In Aspen it looks at ski slopes. In Miami it focuses on beaches.

"We do what's important to the city, not just the streets," said Schoonmaker. 

It's also taking a different tack in the way it approaches the street level view.

"We're actually building a 3D mirror world," Schoonmaker. "It doesn't look quite like that right now because we've simplified it to make it easier to navigate and scalable. When you walk down the street, you're not seeing streaming of you walking down the street of photos. You're walking among 3D models."

Schoonmaker says the company is looking at ways to develop more 3D spaces and already has the technology to do so.  (See the company's showing, under the name Mok3, at DEMO 2003 for an example.)

From a user perspective, other companies like like Metaversum and Amazing Worlds are already working on mirror worlds, creating an immersive environment with avatars and customization. EveryScape right now doesn't have those options, but they're coming.

"We have some things we're working on to integrate, I guess you'd say, more virtual world-type ideas," Schoonmaker said. "You could be navigating the real Scion dealership and then you see a door with a Second Life sign and then you go through and you're there in the Second Life build. There's that sort of crossover."

Does It Matter for Business?

That level of immersion or big Microsoft name might not matter for EveryScape's advertising model. The company creates a space for a city and then signs up businesses for a range of services, from simply identifying their location to, like the Breakers Hotel & Resort in Palm Beach did, creating an interior space with 600 nodes, or places for the user to stop and look around.

So far, when EveryScape has gone into an area, Schoonmaker says it has managed to sign up 10-40% of area businesses for paying participation. They're not all what you'd expect, either.

"I would have said that basically it's going to be travel resorts and then restaurants and high-end retail," explained Schoonmaker.  "Really we've just been shocked, frankly, by the breadth of companies wanting to participate in EveryScape. We've got dentists, bookstores, hair salons, you name it. We've got all different places that I wouldn't have thought were applicable. But when you build a world the way we live it, it's a very emotional response that people have to seeing their business online. Because it is their business; it's not just a website."

The goal is to deliver users to virtual businesses and then to the real business. Schoonmaker says EveryScape has driven look-to-book ratios (the amount of people who investigate a service, tourism destination, etc., and then visit or make a purchase) up  four fold. 

It seems like realism is more important for EveryScape's purposes than Second Life-style immersion.

"One thing we've found is that users are incredibly intolerant of almost real imagery," said Schoonmaker. "If your purpose is to socialize, that's fine, but if your purpose is to look for a restaurant or hotel or ski slope, it has to be real. If it doesn't, people's trust levels go down and they won't use the experience to change their judgments online. That emotional reaction that people have to our content is what makes the likelihood that someone will actually show up at a restaurant after visiting online."

What's up next, then?

"We are very serious about building this real world," concluded Schoonmaker. "We're also very serious about enabling the world to build a world. That's where the excitement comes, where it's not just EveryScape doing this."

Comments

[Krakow]

They won't be able to compete with Google but they might be able to branch into areas that Google isn't looking to do.