GigaOM

The National Health Service is the UK’s state-funded health-care system, and with 1.3 million staffers, the fifth largest employee in the world. And thanks to a chance meeting at a Texas bar at last week’s SXSW, I discovered they’re about to get avatars for their internal resource network. As such, they’re probably the biggest non-gaming organization to incorporate whimsical alter egos into their enterprise infrastructure.

The enterprise part stems from NHS’s licensing deal with Microsoft, which built their online Resource Centre. The avatars come from WeeWorld, the Benchmark Capital-funded social network featuring customizable avatars that resemble “South Park” characters cleaned up for prime time.

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How serious is Sony about online worlds? For the longest time, execs at their Tokyo HQ kept an arms-length distance from the San Diego-based Sony Online Entertainment, purveyor of Everquest I/II, the recently released Pirates of the Burning Sea, and other PC-centric MMOs and online games. Over the last decade, anytime I’d write about an SOE property, their press flacks made sure I clearly distinguished the company from the Japanese mother ship.

That’s about to change. Starting April 1st, SOE will be managed directly by Kazuo Hirai, Sony president and group CEO. The move is meant to better integrate their online PC properties with their Playstation 3 console — just as the press release is probably meant to tell the market that Sony is finally waking up to the fact that their console is in desperate need of more online games and functionality. In my opinion, it’s about five years too late, mixing two mediocre vintages past their prime.

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Last summer we wondered where the games for the iPhone were. Now we know they’re coming, in a big way.

Apple last week showed off the details of its SDK, with VP Scott Forstall promoting it as “a great platform to develop games on.” Just as crucial, publishing giant Electronic Arts said they’d be porting Will Wright’s greatly anticipated Spore and other franchises to the iPhone.

The editor of leading game industry site Next Generation is duly excited by the iPhone’s potential as a game platform, touting its large install base, online distribution network, and intuitive touch-screen interface. All true, but I wouldn’t crown the iPhone king of the phone game platform quite yet. The Google-backed Android, for example, is open source, and the search giant is sponsoring a $10 million developer challenge for Android applications, including games.

Other third-party developers are considering even more exotic applications of Apple’s SDK: A company called BOXFab is cooking up plans to release “a Virtual Reality display device which uses the iPhone as the viewing plate so that it becomes a wearable virtual headset simply by clipping on a special attachment.” Very interesting, if they can pull it off — and convince consumers to clip a phone to their face.

Image credit: BOXfab.com.

Speaking for the Open Handset Alliance, of which Google is the most prominent benefactor/promoter, Morrill highlighted his talk — “Android: Connecting Your Life to the Web” — at the ETech conference in San Diego this afternoon with an Android emulator running from his laptop.

Using a mock-up app called Google Grapes, Morrill fetched the prices and ratings of several wines from a Google Doc spreadsheet. (Perfect for consulting while you’re at the store, shopping for a good vintage.) More impressively, he typed a new wine listing into the web-based spreadsheet, and almost instantaneously, the entry popped up onto the Android display. So along with being a phone, he explained, this is kind of functionality Android will provide: web-like applications that fit in your hand, optimized to a mobile platform. “We want people to think of the web as someone that’s always them,” he said.

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Om just passed me word that The Sims Carnival, yet another spinoff of the long-running franchise from Electronic Arts, is now selecting users for its closed beta period — to apply, just create an account at the site.

Like “EA Land,” the free, web-based revival of The Sims Online we blogged about last week, this is another property full of Web 2.0 flavor –and from such a mammoth publisher like EA, surprisingly so. The site describes a platform that “Empowers you to create games from scratch,” and one on which where you can “Build a community around your own game creations!”

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Just out in public beta, GameLayer’s Passively Multiplayer Online Game is a fantasy MMO that’s largely played from a web-based toolbar. But instead of exploring dungeons and killing monsters, as you would in an old-school MMO, there’s a genius twist: You gain points and achievements through browsing the web itself.

“PMOG is an asynchronous game that can be played on any web page,” explains Merci Hammon, chief creative officer of GameLayers, a startup backed by backed by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures LP and Internet guru/venture capitalist Joi Ito. “The game invites players to use the data they already generate online to fuel ongoing social play.” With Amazon turning its crowd-sourced advice site into an MMO, and social networks like Facebook already feeling somewhat like role-playing games, PMOG is merely the next logical step — that of turning the entire Internet into a game world. Continue »

Electronic Arts has redubbed it “EA-Land,” but it’s The Sims Online relaunched for a new era: free, web-based, even some user-created content. Originally launched in 2002 as a multi-player spinoff of their astoundingly popular casual-crossover Sims franchise, EA (ERTS) expected the online version to do blockbuster sales, only to find it overshadowed by Second Life and other Web 2.0-era MMOs. Based on the site description, the company’s learned from these competitors, cannily leveraging some of their key features.

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