Virtual Worlds News

Who's New to Virtual Worlds - October 31, 2008, Wrap Up

The CzechTourism travel agency has opened an office in Second Life. More info.

Diabetes UK has launched its Silent Assassin campaign in Second Life. More info.

University of Florida researchers have launched a Chinese cultural training program in Second Life. More info.

Stardoll has partnered with Pink Ribbon, Inc., to promote Breast Cancer Awareness Month. More info.

Universal Music Group, promoting the new Queen+Paul Rogers album, "The Cosmos Rocks," and  BarelyPolitical have partnered to launch Vivaty's new embeddable scenes. More info.

Be Broadband has partnered with Near to promote the mirror world's upcoming beta and add a branded mini-game. More info.

Muxlim.com, a social network focused on the Muslim community, is prepping to launch its own Muslim-oriented virtual world. More info.

Outspark Launching Pre-Paid Cards at Best Buy Next Week

Outspark announced yesterday that it would be launching its prepaid cards in Best Buy stores across America next week through a partnership with GMG Entertainment.  The $25 cards can be redeemed for SparkCash, which in turn is used for virtual goods across Outspark games, in addition to exlusive items, like costumes, for the various games and casual MMOs.

"As the holiday season approaches, we're excited be working with a top retailer like Best Buy," said Outspark CEO and founder Susan Choe. "SparkCash Cards make a perfect gift for family and friends."

Mycosm's 5-Year Plan: Building a Community One Step at a Time

Technically, Mycosm is looking at a 3-5 year plan to slowly grow the user base for its own-your-own virtual world system. The product, built on a platform that's been in development for years, ties an IM client to a graphically rich 3D world engine and a marketplace where 3D artists can import their existing content. Mycosm's hope is that the world will first offer an attractive option for those artists, whose content will in turn be attractive to gamers and then mainstream audiences looking for the more social atmosphere.

"It'll be quite a long transition probably," Producer Ben Hamey told me at Virtual Worlds London last week. "We expect it to take some time to build the audience of artists and populate our marketplace with quality content. From there we'll move to the gamers who regularly interact with 3D content, and then from there we'll bring in the social networkers—or people who look at the 3D environment with less purpose beyond just talking and hanging out. It's a long process, but part of that is making sure everything is really threaded into the way the Internet works now. The backend is completely developed in Web services so you can connect to applications really easily if you want to make a world that shows your Flickr photos or YouTube videos or things like that. We see our job as providing the really accessible tools to let people engage with others. "

Second Life Users Protest Fee Increase; Linden Argues for Efficiency

This Monday, Linden Lab announced a change in the way it will be pricing some of its Second Life servers. This past March, the company began offering improved "Openspace" sims, virtual land meant to be lightly used for open spaces running a shared CPU with other Openspace sims. Linden observed Openspaces being used twice as heavily as expected, causing "a less than great experience with performance fluctuations" and "additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing." As a result, on January 1 monthly costs will rise from $75 to $125 and upfront fees from $250 to $375.  A fair portion of users are unhappy, and there has been some speculation that the change could negatively affect Linden's revenue, though Linden, and others, disagree.

"Linden Lab has been profitable for some time, and we remain so. The price increase for Openspaces is not related to any change in revenue or profitability, but rather was motivated by a change in the use of this type of land," countered Linden CEO Mark Kingdon.

University of Florida Puts $1.25M Grant into Diplomacy Training for Second Life

University of Florida engineers have launched a project in Second Life to foreign service and other government workers for diplomatic missions to China. Second China is funded by a $1.25 million federal grant and offers generic Chinese city for visitors to explore and proceed through various activities. One, for example, simulates a visit to an office building for a conference event where the user must choose appropriate clothes and a gift, proceed through official greetings, and learn about seating patterns and rules. Another building features a tea house with history lessons for the user about politics and culture.

Oddly, though, the receptionist and other points of interaction aren't controlled by users. The researchers promote the use of bots as allowing, along with a Web-based tutorial, 24/7 access and a repeatable, measurable experience. I can understand those benefits, but it does seem to sidestep the bigger benefit of virtual worlds like Second Life for education--actual interaction. The team has spent the last year in development and will spend the next year evaluating Second China's effectiveness.

Stardoll Partners with Pink Ribbon for Breast Cancer Awareness

Earlier this week, Stardoll announced that it had partnered with Pink Ribbon, Inc., in its first philanthropic effort to promote breast cancer awareness. As a part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the two opened a new line of pink-themed virtual outfits available for purchase with Stardollars, which are converted from real currencies. 100% of the proceeds will go to charities surrounding breast cancer.

“We are thrilled to partner Pink Ribbon Inc. in our first foray into philanthropy,” said Stardoll CEO Mattias Miksche. “Great strides have been made in the fight against breast cancer in recent years largely because prevention and early detection are all about getting the word out effectively.  We’re excited and proud to be able to help educate our audience of nearly 22 million young women.”

SeaPals Heads Worldwide with Spanish Translation; Chinese and French on the Way

SeaPals, the oceanic virtual world from Russ Berrie that launched this summer, is now available to Spanish speakers with a new version of the site. In addition to an overall localization and translation, Russ has added features for users of different languages to interact through safe chat phrases that are auto-translated between languages. The company plans to add support for Chinese and French within the coming weeks. With more toy tie-ins on the way for the new country, the aim is to build an audience and attract more retail support at the same time.

"Russ has worldwide presence for most of our products," explained Director of Web Development Brian Rubash. "We currently have retail presence for SeaPals in Canada, USA, and Europe.  We have built a system that allows us to translate our site and chat into any language we choose to go with in just a week or so.  We want to move into the Asian markets, including Chinese, in the next couple weeks.  We have a really great CMS and translation tool developed by Egencie, Inc.,  that allows us a great deal of flexibility in both translation and expansion.   We have found that having a site translated in the language for the area or country we want to sell into, is easier for us to get placement in that country if we already have the site  translated. Countries and retailers are much quicker to embrace the site and product once they have seen it in action in the language of their country."

Stardoll Partners with Maktoob to Enter Arab Market

Stardoll announced today a partnership with online Arab community Maktoob to help break the avatar fashion site into the Middle Eastern market. The two have launched an Arabic-language version of Stardoll at Maktoob,  targeting users in lgeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and United Arab Emirates.

“Maktoob is proud to partner with Stardoll to bring this one-of-a-kind fashion community for girls in Arabic,” Ahmed Nassef, Vice-President and General Manager of Maktoob, said in a statement. “Teen and Tween girls already make up a huge segment of our audience, currently mostly focused around our casual gaming channels. By partnering with an international leader like Stardoll, we are bringing a whole new level of fun and interactivity to this online-savvy audience.”

Virtual Italian Parks' Moondus Joins the White Label Race

At Virtual Worlds London last week, Virtual Italian Parks unveiled its new platform for developing white label virtual worlds applications, Moondus. In development since March 2007, Moondus came as a reaction to Virtual Italian Park's work in Second Life--and the desire of its customers to have something both more flexible and controlled.

"We developed for one year and a half on Second Life, and we had big costumers like Accenture, Armani, Nokia, and so on," explained VIP CEO Bruno Cerboni. "But during the peak of Second Life customers looking for advertising and cross-media events, we talked with some customers, like banks and serious companies, and they told us that they would not use a system run by other people for security reasons. A bank cannot give a database of clients to an external provider, for example. Other people had asked us for better graphical quality. So during that peak we started to write the code of Moondus."

Vivaty Launches Embeddable Scenes with Universal Music and BarelyPolitical

Vivaty announced today that it had rolled out a new way for users and brands to interact with its browser-based 3D environments. The virtual scenes, previously available on select sites, can now be embedded on any Web page. Bloggers, brands, or sites can add an iFrame tag and the scene is quickly embedded. Starting off Vivaty Everywhere are a scene from Universal Music Group, promoting the new Queen+Paul Rogers album, "The Cosmos Rocks," with a listening and video-watching party, and one from BarelyPolitical, where users can watch and share The Obama Girl videos.