Meez, a start-up that expanded last year from an avatar creation service into a full-out virtual world for teens, is touting some good news: it's been profitable since April and "every month is better than the last month," CEO John Cahill told CNET News.
Right now, Meez has about 13 million registered users, 3 million unique hits per month, and only 20 full-time employees plus about 10 contractors.
Where's the money coming from? Premium subscriptions, ads on the free version of the site, and virtual goods bought and sold with its internal "Coinz" currency--which includes a mobile virtual-gift deal with Verizon.
The company is making this announcement in conjunction with the debut of its MySpace application, which should be live on the News Corp.-owned social network shortly. It's Meez's first integration with a big social network.
"The MySpace app is designed to allow people from MySpace to use the Meez virtual world, and people using the virtual world on Meez.com will be able to integrate with the MySpace users," Cahill explained.
So why is the company's first social-network platform product built on MySpace, which has had well-documented drops in traffic? The demographic and culture are a better fit, Cahill said, pointing to MySpace's younger-skewing user base as well as a culture that encourages meeting new people online.
"We are working on a Facebook app as well, but every time we surveyed our audience, our audience was very much more MySpace-based than Facebook," Cahill said. "It's about discovery. It's about finding new friends. On Facebook, your friends actually tend to be your (real-life) friends."
Getting onto social platforms will mean that Meez is starting to compete for attention (and that other buzzword, "engagement") with social gaming behemoths like Zynga and Playfish. Brushing elbows with the companies that already have come to dominate entertainment on social networks is par for the course, Cahill insisted.
"We're all competing for Internet time," he said.
The total number of online Chinese citizens has grown to approximately 298 million, reports the BBC. According to the report, which cites data from the China Internet Network Information Center, there has been a significant increase in the number of people who use mobile phones accessing the Web, which led to a 41.9 percent increase in China's Internet population year over year. Although there are almost as many people on the Web in China as there are U.S. residents, the country has a long way to go to match Web penetration rates measured in other countries: Web penetration in China is just 22.6 percent.
The 111th U.S. Congress welcomed YouTube viewers to its page on the popular video site earlier this week. In the short, two-minute video, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other prominent politicians informed viewers that individual representatives will start posting videos on YouTube, as well as other important information of use to citizens. The YouTube channel also includes a Google Maps integration, which allows visitors to search for a specific representative and find their individual videos.
Virtual world, Meez, announced Wednesday that it has merged with Pulse Entertainment, a company that specializes in mobile messaging and entertainment. Although Pulse will cease to exist, Meez plans to integrate the company's messaging platform into its virtual world and continue servicing existing Pulse customers.
The City of Chicago has selected Translations.com, a provider of enterprise language and translation services, as the sole provider of global communication and localization software for the city's tourism Web site, ExploreChicago.org. Trying desperately to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, Chicago decided a multilingual communication platform would be a key success factor in its appeal. The site's multilingual Web content will be deployed in the coming weeks.
Wrapping up the group presentations at Under the Radar's Entertainment & Media conference is the virtual worlds group. Only two of these companies (Doppleganger and Kaneva) offer what most would consider "virtual worlds" or a replacement for real life interaction with others. The other two consist of user avatars, and a video gaming platform.
The service currently has 150,000 users, and CEO Tim Stevens says it's growing by 10% weekly.
The site makes its money off partnerships and micropayments, where users use their virtual currently on clothing items. One of their competitors Gizmoz recently launched a face mapping tool that will take a digital photo and stick it on a 3-D avatar.
Tonight Gizmoz is launching an upgrade to its service that brings photo face-mapping technology to user avatars. Originally the service allowed users to add voice clips to various pre-existing characters, including celebrities, inanimate objects, and house pets. With this new technology, users can upload a photo of themselves and the service will automatically map their face to a moving, talking character.
Once user faces have been mapped, the service takes on a look and feel a little similar to that of Meez [review] with a build-it-yourself creation tool. Users can adorn their avatar in all sorts of clothing and hairstyle combinations. They can also record 20-second voice clips that will sync up with facial movements and gestures. The result is something that's both visually interesting and a tad creepy (in a Lawnmower Man kind of way).
Gizmoz claims that the entire process takes "under two minutes." Founder and CEO Eyal Gever explained to me that this face-mapping technology was what he originally intended when the service was in its infancy in 2003. It just took a few years to become viable and easy to use.
With the new face-mapping functionality, Gizmoz is also launching two new ways to share user-created talking heads. Previously users could only embed their creation as video clips. Gizmoz is now offering "stickers" and what the service calls an "answering machine." Stickers allow users to record a custom message, almost like a digital Post-it note. This service is aimed mostly for social network comment boards like MySpace.
The new answering machine feature is the more interesting of the two. Users can create and embed their own message (just like Stickers), and visitors can record and respond with their own Gizmoz video responses right inside the player. The new tool reminds me a little bit of Jaxtr's VoiceBlast widget, although a little less businesslike.
Gizmoz is launching these new services in conjunction with a distribution deal with RockYou and Freewebs. Users of both services will now be able to integrate Gizmoz. In my first experience with the site in February, I called it a "gag service." With this update, I think Gizmoz has become a very serious competitor to other social networking add-ons--especially Meez.
I've embedded the answering machine widget to the left. Feel free to add your own responses, and enjoy the head banging.
Photobucket members will discover a new option when logging in this morning. The company has partnered with Meez, the 3-D avatar service to give Photobucket members a place to store and host their 3-D avatars. We don't normally cover personal avatar services, but when they partner with sites with over 40 million users, it's worth noting. Meez has approximately a million users (which in and of itself is no small feat), and the service has apparently seen quite a bit of growth in the last few months.
This is our Webware/Photobucket Meez character.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Users can pick from a ton of options to make their own virtual avatar, and spit it out to their Photobucket account. Meez gives each user seven variations of their Meez avatar, including two sizes of animated GIFs (one of which we've embedded to the left).
If you're wondering how Meez stays afloat offering this service, they have partnerships with a number of musicians and clothing companies to offer virtual promotional items, something that's been done in Second Life and the upcoming PlaystationHome. Users can dress their virtual selves in free clothing, but some of the promotional items fetch a small price in virtual currency called 'coinz.' Before scoffing too much, keep in mind the online micropayment market has created its own economy between World of Warcraft and the XBOX Live Marketplace in the last few years, and profits are going nowhere but up.
Previous coverage of Meez can be found here.
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