When Google launched its O3D browser plug-in for displaying rich 3D graphics last month, I was dubious that the virtual world industry would eagerly embrace it as a platform for future MMOs. Most of the larger casual virtual worlds, like Habbo and Gaia Online, run on Flash; Mozilla and the Khronos Group are already developing their own 3D graphics API for Firefox. There’s also a lot of insider buzz about Unity 3D’s web plug-in, which already has an install base of 10 million, a company representative recently told me, and is the chosen platform for several major MMOs in development. What’s more, the weak launch and hasty execution of Google’s own virtual world, Lively, suggested the company had given up on the space.

After this weekend, however, I think O3D deserves a closer look from MMO makers. Continue »

Second Life creator Linden Lab will announce on Wednesday that SL users have generated 15 billion voice minutes on their internal avatar-to-avatar VoIP service since the product was launched 18 months ago, and are now forecast to do 15 billion total voice minutes in 2009. By contrast, Skype handled 65 billion total voice minutes last year, according to parent company eBay (PDF).

Since Skype users aren’t usually communicating with each other in a virtual world, this might seem like an apples-to-oranges comparison. However, Linden has been emphasizing Second Life’s voice chat feature as a utility for educators and corporations with an SL presence who use it to conduct in-world conferences and other voice-driven applications. And tomorrow, the company will also announce a battery of voice services usable outside SL, including “AvaLine,” which enables mobile phone-to-avatar calling.

Linden VP Joe Miller told me the company believes this puts it in competition with Skype. Judging by SL’s high voice usage rates, it’s certainly a niche competitor. Then again, with Second Life’s roughly 750,000 monthly users compared to Skype’s 42 million-plus daily users, it’ll be a long time if ever that the VoIP giant feels the virtual pressure.

The best way to describe Blerp, now in open beta, is a social network that looks like it’s swallowed the entire web. Once you create an account and log in, the network is represented in a frame around your browser display, so every web site is viewed within it. Blerpers can add comments and widgets (YouTube videos, star ratings, etc.) around the edges of any given site. What this gives you is a web browsing experience that’s socially annotated and shared from the ground up, in a way that seems markedly richer and more pervasive than other social networks and annotation sites. (The Blerp frame even comes with its own web address bar.) Continue »

There’s a new entrant in the rapidly growing market for retail cards and virtual goods for online games today: the Zeevex Virtual Currency Exchange. The coin of the realm is Zeev Tokens, which can be purchased via retail cards sold at thousands of brick-and-mortar stores, redeemed and stored online, where it can be used to buy virtual goods from participating partners’ games. Continue »

Booyah, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup developing a “playful life companion” for the Apple iPhone/iPod touch, just scored $4.5 million in Series A financing from the iFund of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (Om wrote about KPCB’s $100 million app funding initiative last year.) The funding comes a month after Ngmoco, another iPhone game startup, launched with Kleiner Perkins backing, announced a second funding round of $10 million. No word yet on what exactly Booyah’s product will be, but the announcement hints at an MMO linked to real-world activity. (At any rate, they’re currently taking sign-ups for a private beta test.) Its three founders — CEO Keith Lee, CCO Brian Morrisroe, and CTO Sam Christiansen — are all alum of World of Warcraft creator Blizzard Entertainment, so expect a sleek, broadly appealing product designed with maximum stickiness.

When it comes to MMOs, freemium worlds for kids are enormously popular and lucrative; for the most part, however, the major game publishers have done little to pursue this market. That changes this month with the launch of Free Realms, a colorful virtual world from Sony Online Entertainment. Since this new franchise is targeted at kids, including girls, Sony changed its approach from the ground up. The developer of the Everquest series and other MMORPGs aimed at the 18-34 gamer dude demographic threw out long-held assumptions about what made online worlds appealing, and used market research to learn what kids actually wanted. Turns out that instead of dramatic backstories and complex gameplay, kids want free-form fun and tools for telling their own stories.

Has Sony’s kid-friendly effort succeeded? Based on my first-hand look at the beta version of Free Realms, I’d say yes — at least enough to prove that the big game developers can play in the space. However, I’m not convinced that Free Realms can capture attention away from Habbo, Club Penguin, and other scrappy pioneers in this field just yet. Here’s my take. Continue »

They say numbers don’t lie, and in recent months the number of people populating virtual world Second Life has started to rise again. Mark Kingdon, CEO of parent company Linden Lab, has been touting the return to steady user growth; to back up his claims, he shared with us the chart below, which tracks the number of unique repeat logins into Second Life on a month-by-month basis (it doesn’t include new signups during each month.) That number stood at 731,000 as of the end of March, the result of an upward climb that began in August 2008. Continue »