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Kaneva canvasses 3-D social networking
March 7, 2007
Virtual worlds ought to be an obvious extension for social networking sites – what could improve the experience more than sharing your videos and music in your virtual home with friends recreated in 3-D?
Kaneva, an Atlanta-based start-up, is planning to enable just that with a service launching officially in the next few weeks and is as surprised as anyone that it is first to come up with the combination.
Kaneva, which comes from the Latin word for a blank canvas, has been in development since 2004 and is the pet project of Chris Klaus, the former chief executive of internet security company ISS, sold to IBM last year for $1.3bn.
It functions like a dumbed-down version of Second Life and resembles the Sims Online with an injection from MySpace.
Rob Frasca, chief operating officer, showed me a near-final release version. Many people were put off by the degree of difficulty in navigating Second Life and building their characters, he said. Kaneva’s avatars are as simple to construct as a Sims person and they will find it hard to get lost – they are restricted to going home to their apartments or teleporting to friends’, wandering around a mall or playing paintball in a jungle.
All the apartments have wide-screen TVs and large frames to project videos and their favourite photos onto the walls. Right-clicking on an avatar reveals personal profiles and allows people to connect, build communities of interest and direct others back to content on the 2-D web.
“You get the best of both worlds – I’m not going to read a blog in a virtual world,” says Frasca.
Kaneva expects to make money through sponsorships and product placement, by selling in-world items and by licensing its platform to others.
The business model seems sound - Habbo Hotel sold $77m in virtual items last year, while South Korea’s Cyworld is selling nearly $300,000 worth of imaginary goods every day.
