Virtual Worlds Management, a company that provides research on the growth of online virtual worlds, said $594 million was invested in 63 virtual worlds during 2008. Gaia Online and PlayFish were two of the most prominent recipients of venture funding during the year. That said, investments in virtual worlds declined as the year wore on. In the first quarter of 2008, virtual worlds received $184 million in funding. By the fourth quarter of that year, investments dropped to $101 million. Virtual Worlds Management expects a further decline in funding in virtual worlds during 2009.
Fuzz.com, a social-networking site for musicians and music lovers, announced Wednesday that it's being forced to shut down, effective February 13. According to a blog post the company's founder placed on its site, Fuzz will close because of "increasing operating costs and flat revenue." On February 13, none of the site's accounts or content will be accessible.
Community presentation provider SlideShare has announced that its users can now embed YouTube videos into their Flash-based presentations. According to the company, its old policy of forcing users to include links to outside videos simply wasn't working, so allowing them to embed YouTube videos seemed appropriate. Although its software now works with YouTube, no other video services are supported.
Online video applications, platforms, advertising networks, and related services incurred $494.7 million in revenue in 2008, said AccuStream Media Research. That amount is nearly 87 percent greater than 2007 revenue figures. Even better for the online video market, the research firm believes video revenue will increase by 41 percent in 2009 and 38 percent in 2010. The amounts were based on reported revenue figures from video overlay applications, advertising platforms, CMS platforms, and other video-related services.
HomeAway, an online vacation rental marketplace, announced that it redesigned its hallmark site, VacationRentals.com, Wednesday. According to the company, the revamped page features enhanced property details and an interactive photo flip book to get a better view of prospective locations. To celebrate the launch, the site is offering a "Family Fun Giveaway" for vacationers who wish to book a trip to Florida. Through February 26, travelers will be automatically entered to win 80 prizes from the site, which range from $75 gas cards to a family four-pack of passes to Disney World and Kennedy Space Center.
Rafe and I enjoyed playing around with Muxtape yesterday (review), but were turned off by the uploader and potential limited life span of the service due to its lenient position on copyrights. If you're looking for a slightly more flashy experience, and one that works without having to upload 50MB of music from your hard drive, check out Mixwit. It lets you create gorgeous-looking Web mix tapes to share with others and pulls in media from various streaming services such as Seeqpod and SkreemR.
Maybe its greatest asset is that the players look like real compact cassette tapes, with moving spools to match how far you are through the mix and each song. You can tweak the look and feel of the tape, the font, and the playlist with a wonderfully simple Flex editor. If you feel like going back to make changes, you can also go in and add, reorder, or get rid of songs that don't make the cut.
The one bummer is that linking to playlists is not as simple as an affair as it is on Muxtape, which gives you your own personal URL. The upside is that you can create multiple mixes using a central account.
Mixwit tapes can be embedded in all the major social networks, along with any regular blog, which I've done below.
See also: Create viral mixtapes with Fuzz
Fuzz, a new online music service launched today, tries to recapture some of the teenage excitement of making a mixtape and update it for the online era.
Unfortunately, like some other new online music services, Fuzz suffers from an unclear mission. In this case, it's trying to serve two audiences at once: music fans and musicians.
From a fan's perspective, the biggest draw seems to be an easy way to share music with your friends. After signing up and signing in, you start by clicking the "Deckorator" on the right side of the home page. This launches a Flash application that lets you upload any MP3 from your computer and organize these uploads into a playlist. The playlists are posted in a public forum, but the real draw is the Mixtape Creator, which essentially packages your playlist as a virtual mixtape, complete with canned cover art (you can also create your own). The tape then appears on your profile page, and you can also embed it on any personal Web page or send e-mail to guide your friends to that mixtape.
As an artist, you can create a profile page with 1GB of storage on which you can advertise gigs, invite fans to sign up for your e-mail list, and upload your music to give away or sell. (Fuzz keeps $0.30 cents per transaction, and lets you set your price, although $0.99 per song is the default.) It's sort of like MySpace with digital distribution.
The trouble is, the two goals aren't in perfect alignment. In its effort to attract artists, Fuzz devotes quite a lot of real estate to its artists and their wares. But there aren't a lot of artists signed up yet, which makes it look like a fairly limited online music store. This buries the real draw for users: the ability to create and share custom playlists, including music that users have already bought. If I were in charge of Fuzz's business strategy, I'd start by weighing the site more heavily to users, try and draw a large userbase to create and exchange virtual mixtapes, and then use this large userbase to draw more artists in.
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