Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
I bought a new video camera on Amazon this weekend, and I also bought an extra battery and a couple of SD cards. So far so normal. The amazing thing to me is that I ended up buying each of these three items from different suppliers on Amazon’s market place, and the last of the [...]
There are two big takeaways for me from the Virtual Worlds Forum conference I have been attending for the last couple of days.
The first is a firming up of a conclusion that I have been coming too for a while - there is huge opportunity at the nexus of virtual worlds, games (probably casual) and [...]
In the 1960s William Condon extensively researched the non-verbal interaction which surrounds speech. Beyond the obvious body language of looking into people’s eyes and hand movements it turns out there is a world of tiny interactions that happen at incredibly high speed. He wrote:
Your body’s locked precisely with your speech. You can’t break [...]
It is getting fashionable to take a dig at Facebook these days. It seems the company is nearing the peak of it’s hype curve and will shortly move into the phase when the popular opinion becomes that the company won’t be that successful after all. Second Life is firmly in that phase at the moment.
This [...]
Techcrunch yesterday reported rumours that Google is building a Second Life competitor.
I have a couple of observations/thoughts about that :
Is it me or are virtual worlds suddenly more fashionable than toga parties in freshers week? To my knowledge just about all the major tech companies have a play in this area now - and [...]
From Techcrunch:
IAC’s Zwinky has been carefully growing their pre-teen social networking service. It started out as an online avatar creation tool. They later created a virtual world where those avatars could socialize. Usage of the service has been growing, under heavy advertising, as well. They currently have over 9.5 million registered users with 4.6 million [...]
I wrote back in July that Second Life is riding the Gartner hype curve, and is now rapidly coming off it’s first peak and down into the trough of disillusionment. This article from Nicola Mattina adds a bit to that idea, explaining how the corporations that went into Second Life got it wrong, and [...]
Club Penguin - cuddly 3D virtual playground for 6 to 14 year olds has just been bought by Disney for $350m plus a further $350m earn out.
According to Techcrunch the company is flying with expected revenues of $65m this year and profits of $35m. Awesome margins.
Club Penguin apparently gives a substantial portion of its profits [...]
LindenLabs have done a great job of building a buzz round SecondLife that has made it seem bigger than it really is and the whole SL hype machine has also had a huge boost from the interest that traditional media has taken in the worlds favourite virtual world. These two things have combined in [...]
Fresh from all the excitement of virtual worlds at IBM’s innovation centre yesterday I’m pleased to tell you about the forthcoming Virtual Worlds Forum Europe. As I’ve said I think this is going to be a hot topic in the years to come which means getting on top of it now is the smart [...]
