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."

Currently Virtual Italian Parks is working with 5-6 customers, ranging from hospitals to museums to media companies, while also concentrating on further platform development. Today the company is presenting a demo for a traffic safety program based on a mirror of an Italian city. Students tour through the town, are observed for violations, and docked according to their performance or rewarded with virtual goods. The hope is to sway the larger Italian government to adopt similar instructional tools for a larger project, but the company has other irons in the fire as well.

"We're working with big companies trying to come into the consumer market, using our system in the field of film and interactive television, though I can't disclose the client for now," said Cerboni. "We've been working for six months with these guys, and they plan to make a consumer system. We'll install the server farms, and they've contracted with the website so there's interaction between Web 2.0 and the virtual worlds, letting people make movies in the virtual world."

That's the approach VIP is taking for all its work. Cerboni said he's uninterested in running his own virtual world or operating consumer projects, but is instead focused on the B2B play of licensing the system, developing the content, and providing support for partners.  Once adopted, Moondus can be run behind a firewall or over a VPN and integrates with existing Web services and IT infrastructure, so Cerboni hopes to see the platform adopted for enterprise applications as well as consumer purposes.

To make sure Moondus can handle the wide range of use cases, Virtual Italian Parks is working with partners with closer ties to the individual markets.

"I am looking for partners and I am planning to make partnerships in each line of business," said Cerboni.  "I want not to make everything alone. I want to provide the platform and concentrate on getting the platform even better. It's important to have partners that cover different lines of businesses. In Italy, for example, we've partnered with a company that is working extensively with the military. In the movies, we have a partner more in the consumer market with a big network for reaching customers. In the medical field, we've partnered with a hospital in Rome. We are concentrating mainly on the functionality of Moondus and making it better not only generally, but for the needs of each market."

Virtual Italian Parks, bootstrapped by Cerboni up to this point, is also looking for funding and investments, specifically to produce a productized package for corporate communications and enterprise apps. Also on the roadmap are Web interfaces--Moondus currently operates as a Windows and Mac client download--and functionality for the iPhone. Cerboni admits there will always be plenty to do, but for current and prospective clients, Moondus is ready to go.

"I think the platform can serve different kind of markets. We have lots to do in the next year to get the platform better and add functionalities," he said. "But we have all the basics."