Posts Tagged ‘Paul Rodgers’

Vivaty to bring Virtual Worlds to your browser sans client

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Picture this…a world where dashing off to your favorite virtual world is no more than a few clicks away, all the while having several other tabs open.  Tabs you say?  Isn’t that browser based?  What about that pesky IT department restriction of not being an admin, and not having sufficient rights to install said client?  If San Francisco based Vivaty has it’s way, clients are a thing of the past.  And to be honest, after the last 1.5 GB WoW patch update, I say….good riddance.

Former EA VP, CEO and co-founder of Vivaty Keith McCurdy and co. have been working on such a solution for over a year now.  They’ve steadily been gaining tracking since their summer ’08 release of Vivaty Scenes application.  Scenes is a personal profile page where the user can control who has access to this area, the objects within the area, flickr photos, youtube videos, etc.  OK, nothing new you say?  Agreed, it’s not a new concept…but since Wednesday, the application, titled Vivaty Everywhere, is available in a rich 3D environment right in your favorite browser, thereby making it a ‘take it with you where ever you go’ virtual world.  The feature allows users to embed a scene on any website and/or blog.

“Our vision is to make virtual experiences as accessible, engaging and easy to use as a Web page,” said Keith McCurdy, Vivaty CEO and co-founder. “Vivaty Everywhere gives brands, fan sites and bloggers a rich, engaging way to inject their sites with social experiences that reflect their media and style choices.”

In a recent Forbes.com interview, McCurdy states:

The idea is to create a solution for brands that want to advertise in the virtual world.

“The old model was to take a branded experience and bring it into an application virtual world [like Second Life],” he says. “Now, [we] can bring it to the customers on social networks or a branded site.”

It tackles the problem of “Second Life’s” “big empty” world by finding and engaging folks where they happen to be.

If Vivaty’s main goal is to attract brands to further Virtual advertising and engagement spaces, they’ve been given a big thumbs up with their recent deal with Universal Music Group.  Vivaty has landed a deal to create a Queen and Paul Rodgers themed scene to promote the new The Cosmos Rocks album.  The goal is to attract Queen and Paul Rodgers fans to these virtual spaces, scattered across the web, to listen to the new tracks, watch videos, and discuss the band.  They’ve also recently inked a deal and developed a scene for Barely Political, a leading political satire firm.

“We are pleased to invite Queen and Paul Rodgers fans to a 24/7 listening party in this visually rich, social experience around a highly anticipated album,” said Andie D’Avino, director of online marketing at Universal Music Group. “Making Queen’s Vivaty scene embeddable means it’s extremely accessible to fans, no matter where they are online.”

If some of this in-browser gaming sounds familiar, idSoftware’s recent placement of Quake Live, a free-to-play, browser based first person shooter, might ring some bells.  Unity and Flash are currently working on web publishing tools, Triton World Network is working on it’s own cloud computing gaming platform, and one of our favorite, Acclaim games has been working on server technology and server side game development tools for over a year now. Vivaty is perfectly positioned, and leading the charge of ‘lose that junk in your trunk’ via browser based technology.

“The big trend is that the world of monolithic downloadable application worlds is going to go by the wayside in favor of browser-based worlds,” Reuben Steiger, chief executive of virtual worlds marketing firm Millions of US.

“Worlds plugging in to the browser are becoming the de facto interaction for real-time communication on the Web.”

Vivaty currently has browser based 3D Virtual Worlds apps developed for both facebook and AIM users.  While attracting brands to advertise in these browser based virtual worlds appears to be the main monetization module, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Vivaty investigating further monetization via a microtransaction model within these virtual worlds.

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