The boardroom windows at ON24 look out over San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the city’s largest convention complex. Every year, Moscone is home to giant events like Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Oracle OpenWorld, Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce, and the MacWorld Expo; in fiscal year 2009-2010, more than 919,000 registered event attendees visited the complex.

But as busy as Moscone is, the number of business people who travel to trade shows and conventions is actually dropping. Moscone’s 2009-2010 attendance was down almost 20 percent compared to 2007-2008 levels. The economy is partly to blame, of course—but so is technology. In 2009, Cisco Systems canceled two San Francisco events and said it would hold digital conferences instead, saving $50 million. And in the growing movement to replace big, expensive physical events with cheaper virtual ones—where the booths are made from bits and attendees let their mice and keyboards do the walking—ON24 wants to take the lead.

ON24 CEO Sharat Sharan

After surviving a brush with death back in 2002, ON24 emerged as one of the country’s leading providers of webcasting technology, which allows companies to stage live online presentations and webinars for employees, trainees, or sales prospects. On the strength of that business, which brings in at least $25 million in revenues every year, the 275-employee company became profitable back in 2009, and is still growing at 25 to 30 percent per year, according to CEO Sharat Sharan.

But whereas a webcast might last 45 minutes, a virtual event can go on for a day, a week, a month, or forever—providing many more opportunities for the host to collect leads that might turn into sales down the road. So ON24 is aggressively pushing its newer “Virtual Show” and “Virtual Briefing Center” technologies, which are both built on a newly overhauled back-end called Platform 10.

This month ON24 is gearing up for VUE2011, a virtual show about virtual shows. Slated for November 17, VUE2011 will be emceed by the San Francisco Giants’ shaggy-bearded relief pitcher Brian Wilson and will be set amidst 3D simulations of San Francisco landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chinatown Gate on Grant Street (see the video on page 3 of this story). In Wilson’s honor, the conference’s tagline will be “Fear the beard, not the technology.” (Of course, after the Giants’ lackluster 2011 season, the beard has lost a bit of its fearsomeness.)

“What we do better than anybody else in the world is live virtual events,” says Sharan. Webcasts are still “the foundation” of the business, he says, but ON24 is growing into a “one-stop shop for webcasting, virtual events, virtual briefing centers, demand generation, corporate communications, and training.” If the flying avatars, corporate islands, and virtual stores of Second Life represented a wild, uncontrolled experiment in virtual commerce and communication, ON24 is the company coming along behind with a broom, civilizing and detoxifying the virtual-spaces concept for business users and serious marketers.

But to someone from the dot-com boom years, when ON24 was founded, the current company would be unrecognizable. It started out in 1998 as a distribution hub for … Next Page »

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I spoke with Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup movement, on July 5, 2011, at Peet’s Coffee & Tea in San Francisco’s startup-rich SoMa neighborhood. If you’re pressed for time, a much shorter summary of our conversation is available here. But at least a few readers—the types who attend Ries’s conferences or go to Lean Startup meetups—will be interested in this full, 11,500-word writeup.

Xconomy: How did you first get interested in entrepreneurship?

Eric Ries: The idea of being an entrepreneur wasn’t really something that I grew up with or resonated with. I was excited about technology. I grew up working on computers. From as long as I can remember it’s something I’ve always done. To me, I was excited about building technology. Creating software was the most creative, most satisfying thing I did growing up. I couldn’t believe you could get paid to do it as a career. It was the best news I ever heard in my life. I was, from a very early age on the Internet, playing online games, getting involved in programming as a component, that was my introduction to this—MUDs, multi-user domains, that was heaven to me.

And so I was very precocious in terms of going on the Internet and trying to get jobs. I got my first software writing jobs through Usenet without revealing my age as a teenager. There was a bit of misdirection required in order to get people to pay you to do stuff, but on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. That was very cool. But at that time, entrepreneurship was not a concept I was even aware of. My parents were doctors. This was outside the box. It wasn’t until I got to college and the dot-com bubble just swept through everything that the idea even occurred to me.

X: You were at Yale, right? What years?

ER: I was there from ’96 to 2000. By ’98, things were just crazy, the stuff we were reading at magazines. I did an internship at Microsoft my freshman year summer, and my relatives were asking for stock tips about whether they should buy Microsoft stock. That just was crazy. Why are you asking me, first of all? I have no idea about that. And B, why are my relatives, who have no interest in technology, all of a sudden interested in Microsoft and in tech in a way they never were before? In retrospect, it’s such a clear sign of a bubble, when people who really have no business are excited about something they don’t know.

X: That infected college campuses as well.

ER: Well, we just kept reading these magazines, and the magazine stories were like, two college kids walk into some VC’s office and say “I need $10 million,” and they get it, and a year later they have something worth $100 million. My friends and I were like, why aren’t we doing that?

X: Was the Yale Entrepreneurial Society active back then?

ER: There was no such thing. The very first clubs happened in 2000. It was the last place on earth to catch the bug. It was almost too late for us. I remember the first incubator frenzy from the bubble—I was involved with two or three incubators in New Haven, CT. I was an advisor to a VC firm. All I had at that time was a half-baked startup. But I’m skipping ahead. In 1999 I started a company at Yale that turned out to be a big disaster. It was called Catalyst Recruiting. We had this idea to have college students create online profiles for the purpose of sharing. So it sounds promising, right? Except that our idea was that you would create those profiles and share them with employers, whom we would then charge for access to the best college students. On the face of it, it was not a crazy idea. It was certainly in the vicinity of things that turned out to be really valuable later, but we had no idea what we were doing. The idea of building a company—they don’t cover that in the magazines.

X: In what way did Catalyst Recruiting fail?

ER: Entrepreneurs only fail at one speed, which is full speed into the wall, leaving a startup-shaped cutout. That was us. The proximate cause was when the dot-com bubble collapsed, we couldn’t raise more money. The kind of people who would invest in us obviously didn’t have great investment judgment. A lot of them just were killed when the NASDAQ crashed. They were completely overinvested in risky stuff. They all cut back and moved. All of a sudden … Next Page »

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Internet tycoon Bob Metcalfe, who recently moved from Boston, is giving his first lecture as professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin this afternoon. I don’t know exactly what he plans to say, but what’s particularly interesting is how he’s delivering the talk—to more than just the people in the room, through a virtual collaboration interface from Avaya, the New Jersey-based business communications firm. The technology is being led by an Avaya group with a strong presence in Boston.

Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet local-area networking standard, founder of 3Com, and partner at Polaris Venture Partners, moved to Austin for the faculty job earlier this month. He has been a mainstay of the Boston innovation scene for the past couple of decades. (For his part, he said he’s not leaving, he’s expanding—and he’ll still spend his summers in New England.)

The topic of his lecture will be “Enernet: Internet lessons for solving energy.” Reached by e-mail, Metcalfe says, “I will again urge that we all use the Internet to conserve energy: Transport your bits, not your atoms.”

Case in point: Metcalfe will speak not only in person to the audience in the UT auditorium, but also to remote viewers (who will see his avatar) using Avaya’s new system. The online platform, called web.alive, uses video-game graphics, immersive audio, and personalized avatars to create a 3-D virtual environment for business collaboration among remote participants. Metcalfe calls it “emersive collaboration through the Internet.” (The URL for the lecture has not been given out publicly; I’ll update this story if that changes.)

The point of web.alive is to do better than existing collaborative tools like video conferencing, which don’t let you move around in the remote environment or interact with people individually. So presumably you could ask Metcalfe’s avatar a question in an interactive way, or even greet him “in person” after his lecture (see image of the virtual auditorium below).

And web.alive is different from existing virtual worlds like Second Life, in that you can set up secure and private meeting areas. What’s more, you have an individualized audio mix through your headphones—so you can have a private conversation with someone in the back of the room, say, and not disturb the speaker (though his avatar might yell at you).

It’s still early days, but Avaya is signing up customers in industry and academia who seem eager to try it out. “Every person we’ve shown it to has wanted it,” says Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of corporate development and strategy, who heads up the web.alive effort from Avaya’s Waltham, MA, office. As a start, he says, “We want to link up other universities.”

Ali says when he’s in the office, he conducts about half of his meetings in the web.alive environment. And Avaya uses it in-house for all of its leadership training courses and new-employee programs. “Over the next year, we mostly want to get people to use it,” Ali says. “Then at some point we have to figure out how to make money with it.”

Metcalfe says he will also use the Avaya system to hold “virtual” office hours, which will be open to his UT students as well as remote visitors. The first session will be tomorrow from 2-5 pm Central Time. If you have a Windows-based PC, you can check it out (and say hello to Metcalfe’s avatar) at utexas.avayalive.com.

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It would be easy to dismiss Jerry Paffendorf and his friends as a bunch of art-nerd carpetbaggers from San Francisco who see Detroit as the latest canvas for their airy-fairy ideas about virtual communities and social entrepreneurship.

In fact, that’s how some locals reacted when reports surfaced in The Detroit News last year that Paffendorf had bought an abandoned lot on the city’s east side for $500, renamed it Plymouth, and announced plans to resell it, one square inch at a time, on the Internet. “People brought up stuff like, ‘Who does this hipster f*ggot think he is, moving in from San Francisco with stupid Internet ideas,’ or ‘It’s illegal to represent that you are offering land for sale if it’s not real,’” Paffendorf says. “And there was some skepticism that I would want to stay in the city.”

For the record, Paffendorf isn’t gay. His girlfriend, Mary Lorene Carter, is the community engagement director for Loveland, the company Paffendorf set up to pursue a range of creative projects, including Plymouth and another developing “microhood” called Hello World. And now that Paffendorf has been in Detroit for a year and a half, people have stopped asking him when he’s leaving.

But getting an accurate fix on Loveland is still a bit difficult: the project would be an unusual addition to any city, let alone Detroit. It’s part artists’ collective, part consulting firm, part neogeography experiment, and part non-profit foundation. It started out with the previously mentioned real-estate microtransactions experiment—the group sold 10,000 square inches of Plymouth to a total of 588 “inchvestors,” each of whom can log on to the Loveland website and see where their parcel is located. Lately, though, the company’s efforts have gotten a lot more hands-on. This summer Loveland and a group of community organizers bought a pair of abandoned houses near the old Michigan Central Railroad station in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood and are rehabilitating the property, with the aim of turning it into a public art exhibition space, digital media center, and small-business incubator.

They’re calling it Imagination Station. But don’t be fooled by the name. You don’t have to stay long in Detroit, Paffendorf says, to realize that the city needs more than imaginative ideas—it needs action.

“With the deep troubles this city has, you can’t just do a happy dance,” says Paffendorf. “[Loveland] started out as this really apolitical, creative act; selfish isn’t the word, but there was the joy of being the author of it and having it be really playful and not worrying about where it goes, but just making something cool. But the more we work on things, the more we get approached by people who say, ‘What you guys are doing is so fantastic—have you considered partnering with these guys? Or applying this not to inches on an empty lot but to sustainable farms? Could you break a $10,000 house into 10,000 shares and put a family back inside it and feel social ownership? When those kinds of opportunities come around, you start to feel obliged to work in those directions. Then it becomes less of a cool idea and more something that’s needed.”

Part of Paffendorf’s hunger to make a difference stems from the failure of his previous entrepreneurial venture. The 28-year-old, six-foot-five entrepreneur, who’s been called a “Shaggy lookalike” (unfairly), has always been happiest when sliding back and forth between the real world and various virtual ones. I first met him about four years ago, when I was working on a story about Second Life and he had just left a job as “resident futurist” at virtual-worlds builder Electric Sheep Company. His next gig, with a group of fellow programmers and designers in Brooklyn, was … Next Page »

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Mountain View, CA-based social gaming company Playdom announced yesterday that it has acquired Metaplace, a San Diego-based startup that built social virtual worlds software and introduced two Facebook social games, Island Life and My Vineyard, earlier this year. Metaplace co-founder and CEO John Donham will run Playdom’s new San Diego office, according to the announcement, while co-founder and president Raph Koster and several other staff will move to Playdom’s Mountain View headquarters. As Bruce reported, Metaplace closed its consumer-facing virtual worlds site last December after failing to generate enough business. The terms of this week’s acquisition weren’t disclosed; Metaplace had raised at least $9.4 million from a group of investors that included Charles River Ventures, Crescendo Ventures, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz.

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Hangout Industries, the Boston-based creator of a software platform for teen-oriented social games such as Fashion City, has raised an additional $2 million in venture funding, according to a regulatory filing published yesterday. Hangout CEO Pano Anthos told Mass High Tech that the money came from the company’s existing backers, who include Highland Capital Partners and Polaris Venture Partners, and that an additional $3 million may be on the way, which would bring the startup’s total funding to $15 million.

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This Seattle-based website draws some 6 million visitors a month. It has been seeing annual traffic growth of about 300 percent, and was recently named the #2 fastest-growing website in the U.S., according to comScore.

Yes, I’m talking about BuddyTV, the social site for television fans led by prominent entrepreneur and investor Andy Liu. Fans go to BuddyTV.com to get news about their favorite shows, play TV-related games, and gossip with other fans. I stopped by the company’s office in Lower Queen Anne yesterday for a Seattle Lunch 2.0 meeting (thanks to Josh Maher for organizing it). Very nearby are some other notable startups, including Cheezburger Network and BigDoor Media. It’s an intriguing little pocket of Internet entrepreneurship in Seattle.

Neal Freeland, BuddyTV’s head of marketing (and a former Microsoft and Zango veteran), gave an informal update on the company to a packed room of about 80 entrepreneurs and tech-business types. My take is that 2009 hit everybody hard, especially consumer tech and Web 2.0 startups. And although BuddyTV is doing well—its revenues roughly follow its traffic, Freeland says—the company has been looking beyond its bread-and-butter revenue model of Web advertising to figure out how it can make more money.

The entire medium of television is going through big changes. From broadcast to niche, analog to digital, scheduled to anytime, and—crucially—from advertising-supported to “nobody really knows,” Freeland says. Nevertheless, it’s clear that TV still matters a lot. And online, he says, “Ads are good, but not enough.” The key is that nobody has figured out how to make banner ads really work on the Web, in order to create the kind of demand for advertising you see (or at least used to see) in print, radio, and TV.

Freeland didn’t offer any magic bullets. But he says BuddyTV has been looking at other options besides subscriptions, like virtual currencies—including micropayments, decorative benefits (dressing up your avatar online), and virtual gifts (e-cards, for example)—and lead-generation models. One problem with lead generation and “offer” models, which typically ask consumers to take surveys or sign up for subscriptions to other products, is that they sometimes include hidden fees, or have very low retention rates for subscribers. (People will sign up for Netflix in order to keep playing a game online, say, but then they might immediately cancel their subscription.)

But the virtual currency model has picked up steam, Freeland says, with Café World (from social gaming company Zynga) raking in more than $100 million a year, virtual world IMVU making $25 million a year, and Facebook Gifts hauling in some $50 million annually.

“We’re in a revolution which is changing media consumption and marketing,” Freeland says. I took this to mean, consumer Internet companies beware—but get ready to seize new revenue opportunities in 2010 and beyond.

BuddyTV is still running lean with about 20 employees, including six writers who crank out hundreds of articles a week for the site. The company was founded in 2005 and is backed by Madrona Venture Group, Gemstar-TV Guide, and Charles River Ventures.

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Online publishers who want to let their users exchange virtual gifts—think singing Santa e-cards at Christmas or animated hearts for Valentine’s Day—can turn to Viximo, a two-year-old startup in Cambridge, MA, for both the virtual goods themselves and the microtransactions system needed to distribute them. And now Viximo is turning to a new leader to spearhead its expansion.

The company announced today that Dale Strang, an online media and advertising veteran, has taken over as CEO. Strang replaces acting CEO Dayna Grayson, a principal at Viximo backer North Bridge Venture Partners, who had stepped into the CEO role after the departure of Viximo’s first CEO, Rob Frasca, last spring.

A virtual good is any digital object—a video, an icon, a piece of clothing for a game avatar—that helps people express themselves in an online interaction, add bling to their online persona, or increase their enjoyment of a game. U.S. consumers spent $1 billion on such items in 2009, according to Inside Network, a market research company focused on Facebook and social gaming sites. Strang says he sees these purchases as a potential substitute for dying revenue streams (such as subscriptions) in the publishing world.

“In the print world we used to take it for granted that users were willing to pay for certain interactions,” Strang tells Xconomy. “They’d buy a copy of a magazine, for example, or a subscription. That made for a healthy, balanced business model. But the Internet hasn’t had that. I view the virtual goods microtransaction explosion as an answer for that.”

Strang says more and more online publishers are looking at online communities where there is a brisk trade in virtual goods, such as MySpace and Facebook, and deciding that they want to build their own virtual economies. But it’s harder than it looks, he says.

“Some people have implemented an online currency, but they can’t quite get it right. Other people may have problems integrating their currency with a payment system. Others may have huge holes in the content that they provide. The strategy that has evolved for Viximo is to do all the hard parts for our partners, while they do their main job, engaging with the audience.”

Viximo’s clients have 60 million network members in aggregate, with social networking sites BlackPlanet.com and SmartDate.com and sports site FanIQ among the newest users of the Viximo platform. The startup offers customers a soup-to-nuts solution, including a huge catalog of virtual items designed by freelance digital artists; currency systems that let people buy virtual currency with cash or earn rewards through various online activities; payment systems that ensure that the money from currency purchases makes it back to publishers; and analytics software that shows publishers which items are selling best.

Just how “micro” are the microtransactions involved in virtual goods exchanges? That varies. Interscope Records, the label behind rock singer/songwriter phenom Lady Gaga, uses Viximo’s technology to power the Lady Gaga Gift Shop on Facebook. Most items in the store, such as an animated picture of Lady Gaga wearing TV-shaped sunglasses, cost … Next Page »

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San Diego-based Metaplace co-founder Ralph Koster announced on his blog today that the venture-backed company is shutting down Metaplace.com, its user-generated content website, effective Jan. 1. Koster, the former chief creative officer at Sony Online, says the Metaplace website, which offers users an online marketplace and platform for building their own social networking rooms “just hasn’t gotten traction.” Koster says the company itself isn’t going away, but he provides no details. The Metaplace website identifies its investors as Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures, Palo Alto, CA-based Cresendo Ventures, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz.

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When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that … Next Page »

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Natick, MA-based Vivox said today that it’s opening its new “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” service to all Facebook members. The application—which allows Facebook users to set up free voice chat rooms and invite their friends to participate from within Facebook—is one of the first creations of Vivox Labs, a new R&D arm of the company, and had been in closed beta testing for the last few months. Vivox, which we profiled last month, is known mainly as a provider of voice communication services for massive virtual worlds and game worlds such as Second Life and Eve Online.

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If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009′s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

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When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to … Next Page »

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For a long time, Second Life was stuck in the cyber equivalent of the silent-movie era: people communicated by typing, and their words showed up in little thought bubbles above their avatars’ heads. All of that changed drastically around 2007, when Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, hired an obscure outfit called Vivox to equip its 3-D virtual world with a voice communication system. Now any Second Life citizen who has a headset connected to their computer can simply speak, and everyone whose avatar is standing nearby will hear them in living stereo.

For the Gloria Swansons of Second Life, like myself, the changeover from typing to talking was a bit traumatic—and indeed, 20 percent of Second Life citizens still abstain from voice communication. But the other 80 percent gab for a billion minutes every month, which is a rather convincing demonstration that most people inside 3-D computer environments prefer talking to texting.

And now Vivox, a four-year-old startup based in Natick, MA, is about to introduce its technology to three new communities that could vastly increase its user base. The company announced this morning that it has formed a partnership with Redwood City, CA-based Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS), the world’s largest entertainment software company, to add its voice services to several online EA games. First up is Command & Conquer 4, a continuation of EA’s hugely popular real-time strategy game that’s expected to launch early next year.

At the same time, Vivox is announcing the launch of Vivox Labs, an incubator-within-a-startup where the company is trying out different ways of delivering its voice services over the Web. And the first two Vivox Labs experiments are aimed at big targets: Facebook, where the lab’s “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” application will allow members to invite their friends to instant Web voice conferences; and World of Warcraft subscribers, who will be able to use a new Vivox-powered website called Puggable to assemble teams of players for in-world campaigns. Both the Facebook and Puggable applications are in private beta testing and are expected to go public by January.

“We started the company about four years ago with the goal of making voice a seamless, natural part of every online experience,” Vivox co-founder and CEO Rob Seaver told me when I visited the company last week. “Our view at the time was that more and more human interaction would take place online, and the richest form of communication we have is talking to each other. So we thought there would be an opportunity to turn the Web from this silent, barren place into one filled with the warm sounds of human voices.”

That’s exactly what could happen if even more gaming, virtual-world, and social networking communities turn to Vivox’s services. Not bad for a company that started out as a wacky idea from Jeff Pulver, the founder of the company that became Internet phone service provider Vonage.

You’ve probably heard of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP; it’s the technology behind Vonage and Skype, and the one that has turned the telecom industry upside down by transforming phone calls into digital data packets and routing them over the open Internet. Vivox’s system works on similar principles, except that … Next Page »

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Boston-based Hangout Industries, which runs the teen social virtual world Hangout.net, has extended its Series A financing round by $4 million, CEO Pano Anthos confirmed today after documents on the financing surfaced online yesterday. Highland Capital Partners and Polaris Venture Partners put up the funds, which bring the company’s total financing to $10 million, including a $1 million seed round and a $5 million first tranche in the Series A round. Hangout came out of stealth mode last September, and recently hired former Disney exec Mike Goslin and opened a West Coast office as part of an effort to focus the online property on entertainment, social interaction, and virtual goods sales.

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Dinner party conversations with Celia Francis don’t go down the usual paths. “When people ask ‘What do you do?” she says, “I have to say ‘I sell animated ferrets.’”

Francis is the Harvard- and MIT-educated CEO of WeeWorld, a transatlantic virtual goods company with its U.S. headquarters in Concord, MA, and its European headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland. The company is most famous for creating WeeMees, cartoonish avatars used by more than 27 million people around the world to personalize their identities for instant messaging tools and digital voice applications such as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Skype. But its real business revolves around WeeWorld, an online virtual world where members, represented by their diminutive WeeMee avatars, can socialize, play casual games, and collect virtual items.

The company makes money by selling advertising space on the WeeWorld website and by selling virtual gear and the corporate sponsorships that go along with it—think Boston Celtics or LA Lakers jerseys for your WeeMee. I couldn’t find an actual animated ferret in the WeeWorld shopping mall, but I’m sure Francis could have one designed for you.

The virtual goods business “seems to be totally unaffected by the economy,” Francis says. In fact, Wal-Mart and Target would kill for WeeWorld’s sales statistics. Revenues from virtual goods have been growing at 15 percent per month throughout the recession, and advertising is “growing nicely” as well, she says. Part of that may be thanks to the relatively low prices of virtual goods: for the teens and twenty-somethings who are WeeWorld’s main users, $5 can buy quite a bit of bling. “It’s not a big spend compared to some other ways you can be entertained,” says Francis.

Venture funders apparently agree that WeeWorld is on to something. The startup has raised $21 million to date, with the most recent round of $15.5 million coming from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital in May 2006. But the company’s success isn’t blinding its 40-some staffers to the fundamental strangeness of their business. “The whole thing is amusing, and the company has had a sense of humor about it from the earliest days,” says Francis, whose own WeeMee wears an emerald-green suitjacket and clutches a light saber. “It’s a cheeky, fun, entertaining brand.”

For consumer brands trying to get their message to young people—who are spending less time watching television and more time online—virtual worlds are one promising platform. Whether it’s through full 3-D worlds like Second Life or Boston-based Hangout.net or “Sims”-style “2.5D” worlds like Habbo and WeeWorld, consumer-dependent organizations like clothing brands, sports teams, and musical groups are thrilled to have young people decorate their avatars and their spaces with branded goods. In fact, the organizers of the annual Virtual Worlds conference held each year in New York renamed their event the “Engage! Expo” to reflect the new emphasis on virtual worlds as marketing platforms.

WeeWorld’s philosophy of engagement is to make time spent in-world feel like play. “The people on WeeWorld are mostly teenagers, and they need a place to express themselves and evolve their identities as people,” Francis says. “This kind of thing didn’t exist when I was a teenager. You can come onto the site and every single day play with a different look or persona or interest. That kind of playfulness is so core to being a teenager—and that’s really what’s driving the virtual goods sales.”

Every day, Francis says, the company gets hundreds of requests from members for new virtual items that they’d like to buy. “Brands are a big part of it, which is why we’ve been really successful with advertisers,” Francis says. “Kids want to identify with certain brands that express who they are.”

And not just any brand: Francis says figuring out which virtual items will sell, and which will make members will turn up their noses, is “a total black art”—but one that the company has begun to master over time. “We’re experimenting with all kinds of different items, whether it’s furniture or accessories for your WeeMee,” she says. “We constantly tweak the … Next Page »

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UC San Diego says it has established a center for next-generation digital media with a gift from IBM (NYSE: IBM)—a high-performance IBM System z mainframe computer. In a statement, UCSD says IBM made the center possible through a shared university research award that includes the z mainframe, valued at about $2.2 million. The center, which will be housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, is dedicated to inventing the next generation of virtual worlds, multiple player online games, and high-fidelity digital cinema. UCSD says the center initially will focus on new production platforms for digital cinema through existing relationships with Hollywood studios.

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Hangout Industries, the Boston-based creator of the Web-based social virtual world Hangout.net, announced today that it has named Mike Goslin, former vice president of virtual world design and development for Disney Online, as its new vice president of product development. Goslin will be in charge of design, development and operations. “Mike is one of the most respected, effective and proven forces in the virtual worlds and games space,” Hangout CEO Pano Anthos said in a statement. “His combined talents as a natural story-teller, visionary and technologist make him the perfect candidate to bring Hangout to the forefront in the evolution of casual online entertainment.”

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Allegedly, surfing the Web is a leisure activity for a growing number of people. I wouldn’t know—my job as a technology blogger obliges me to surf the Web all day at work, so if I have to use the Web from home, it’s usually because I’m taking care of some task like paying bills, uploading photos, or getting driving directions. But for people who do use the Web as a hangout, there are more and more ways to make it a social experience. And one company, Hamburg, Germany-based Weblin, is optimistic enough about the future of its animated chat service—which gives surfers inch-tall avatars that can communicate directly with the avatars of other Weblin members visiting the same Web pages—that it has expanded to the United States, starting with an office outside Boston.

If you belonged to Weblin (I’m guessing the name is a combination of “Web” and “gremlin”) and you had downloaded the company’s Windows-based plugin, your customized avatar or small-w weblin would be standing on the status bar at the bottom of this browser window right now. If another Weblin member happened to be reading this Xconomy article at the same time, their weblin would also appear. You could then chat, joke, or flirt with that person via text balloons that show up above your weblin, the same way avatars communicate in virtual worlds like Second Life.

You can even make your weblin smile, wave, dance, or run. So what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did for horrible B-movies and what Lycos Cinema is doing for online video, Weblin does for the entire Web (although in practice, you’ll only run into other weblins at a small fraction of websites, since there are only about 10,000 to 100,000 Weblin users online at any given time).

“Even with social networking, the Web is not a social place; a typical website doesn’t allow you to chat with other visitors,” says Jan Andresen, Weblin’s co-founder and CEO, who’s based in Hamburg but was traveling on the East Coast when I reached him by phone last week. Yes, Andresen acknowledges, you can leave a text comment at your friend’s blog or their Facebook Super-Wall. But that’s like deciding you’re only going to communicate with your family by leaving sticky notes on the fridge, he says. “Why not interact instantly with other people, make jokes, and see their reactions? It’s so much more normal.”

Well, “normal” if you don’t mind a bunch of cartoon characters sauntering around your Web browser. And the 20- to 35-year-old users who are Weblin’s main target audience probably don’t. (Indeed, the system still bears the stamp of the virtual-classroom application, developed by CTO and co-founder Heiner Wolf, on which it’s based.) But for older or more mission-oriented Web users like me, Andresen agrees, a crowd of weblins might be a distraction. “If you have to book a flight or finish your spreadsheet, you don’t do it in a pub,” he says. “But maybe you’re at home, you’re bored, you have a glass of wine next to you, and you just want to be entertained. We call that moment ‘chilling.’ For that time, Weblin is ideal.”

Andresen and Wolf launched Weblin in 2006 and have raised $1.3 million in funding from a combination of private investors and the High Tech Grunderfonds, a public-private initiative that invests in early-stage technology startups in Germany. The startup’s technology is built atop XMPP, an open-source instant messaging platform formerly known as Jabber. Andresen says that Weblin hit the 1-million-member mark in September, and that about 10,000 people are downloading the Windows plugin every day. (There’s also a purely browser-based version of the system called “Weblin Lite” that works on Mac and Linux computers, but it assigns you a random avatar that does not persist as you travel from Web page to Web page.)

The company hopes to make money in two ways. The first, more predictable revenue stream will come from selling ads, which will pop up in the same transparent layer over the browser window that the weblins themselves inhabit. But while that may sound like another annoying distraction, Andresen says … Next Page »

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Metaplace, the open-access virtual world that allows users to build and share their own animated communities, said today that it has collected $6.7 million in new financing, raising the startup’s funding total to $9.4 million.

The funding hails from four investors: existing backers Charles River Ventures and Crescendo Ventures, as well as new financiers Ben Horowitz and internet guru Marc Andreessen (best known for his role as Mosaic co-author and Netscape founder).

The San Diego-based company was started under the name Areae, Inc., by two Sony veterans who specialized in massively multiplayer games, Raph Koster and John Donham. Now officially known as Metaplace, the company has just begun invitation-only beta testing.

In a press release issued today, Koster says that the company’s aim is to create an open-platform space in which users can create a system of interlocking worlds, combining “the ubiquity and ease of the Web with the immersive and addictive nature of video games.”

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