The press release is here.

At ACS we are convinced that once capital is flowing freely, people, goods and services will follow and eventually we will see incentive and pressure for the emergence of open tools and standards. It is our vision that one day even traveling across virtual worlds and taking your belongings with you should become as easy as a mouseclick.

I don’t share the optimism that moving currency back and forth will drive open standards on this front… but it is kinda breathtaking to see the huge difference in core assumptions about what virtual worlds are for:

We believe that allowing residents in a virtual world, no matter which one they have chosen to live in, to easily diversify their portfolio of virtual investments…

My commentary on MyMiniLife seems to have prompted a few responses on blogs. The question at hand, basically, is whether the virtual world of the future will be an immersive 3d environment which includes web content on surfaces within the world, or whether it will be new capabilities for the Web, displaying worlds within web browsers.

I think it’s safe to say that the former is more the classic view of the Metaverse — more like Snow Crash, more like the vision that folks like Linden Lab are working towards. Indeed, with acquisitions like Windward Mark, we see Linden continuing to emphasize their vision of being an immersive simulation environment. They’re not alone; over at Delzo’s Avatarian, we see this case being made:

Read More “Web in world or world in web?”

Over at TechCrunch there’s an article about MyMiniLife. In a nutshell, it’s a competitor to CyWorld or Habbo, with social network aspects and virtual apartments. The client runs in Flash, so you can embed it inside any site: your MySpace profile, Yahoo!, whatever. The look of it is very Sims-like. You use virtual currency to purchase stuff to decorate your house with. It’s put together by a bunch of students who seem to have gotten together at U Illinois Urbana Champaign, though now one of them is a grad student at UCLA. And they’ve been around since the middle of last year, running along quite quietly.

Read More “MyMiniLife”