Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
Jussi Laakkonen of social gaming stealth startup Everyplay has a great post tracking investment in the social games and virtual worlds space. The simple message - there is a whole heap of activity, with roughly $2-5m being invested per week, and some large individual deals, including Balderton’s investment of $87m into Big Fish Games.
Check out [...]
I’m reading a Gartner report on virtual worlds which has lots of interesting data (a lot of which is sourced from KZero). Here are some highlights:
300m registered accounts aggregate across all virtual worlds
Suggesting 30m active users (based on rule of thumb 1 active for every ten members) - compared with 16m active MMOG users
Userbase is [...]
At the Virtual Worlds London conference in October there will be a fast pitch event where the hottest startups are showcased. If you are in this space and would value a bit of exposure you should think about applying!
The announcement for the showcase is here, a description of the process here, and you can [...]
Google has long been rumoured to be working on something in the virtual world space - I think for a year or more now people have been telling me that their friends have been sucked into a top-secret project at the GooglePlex.
Yesterday they announced the release of Lively, reported here Techcrunch.
The video below gives you [...]
There has been a lot of chat in the blogosphere recently about Facebook overtaking Myspace, then on the value of international traffic compared with US domestic traffic - both on Techcrunch and GigaOM, and finally asking if the implication of Facebook over-taking Myspace is that network effects for social networks have been overstated (this is [...]
Last week Jeff Nolan wrote a post entitled Incrementalism and “The New New Thing” where he bemoans the lack of true innovation and the state of venture capital generally. He is talking about Silicon Valley, but what he writes applies equally over here in Europe.
He correctly observes that a lot of money is still [...]
According to Techcrunch Balderton just invested in Berlin based Metaversum, operator of virtual world Twinity.
I haven’t written much about virtual worlds recently, but I’m still a big believer. There will be more investments to follow this one.
I wrote about some of the reasons why I’m excited about this space back in October last year.
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 [...]
From Lord Putnam’s keynote address at the Virtual Worlds Forum in Kings Cross, London which is going on over the next couple of days:
“people are saying World of Warcraft is the new golf for technology focused networkers”
I love it. The parallels are legion – the addiction, the time away from the family, the incomprehensibility [...]
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 [...]
