If you can make it here…

Posted by murat on Friday, July 6, 2007 · 1 Comment 

When I had first arrived in New York from Silicon Valley in 1999, I was very surprised to find a very enthusiastic virtual-worlds interest group, however small it was.

My friend Andrew Gerngross and I started TheNextWeb Inc., wrote a business plan that borrowed heavily from SnowCrash much like the business plans of today, and went around showing our demos to VC’s and investors in New York until the stock market couldn’t take it anymore and crashed in March 2000. For a long while after that, you could hear the crickets chirping when you mentioned Hiro Protagonist.

Over the years, the picture remained the same. California, no, Silicon Valley (no, Palo Alto) was the place to be if you wanted to engage in any metaversal activity.

But these days, New York is easily balancing the west coast in terms of metaverse buzz. Here’s a rundown of who’s who of the New York metaverse circles currently:

UpNext
An interactive yellow-book/3D model of New York City in your browser. Java. Very impressive current google-maps like functionality.

SpaceTime
3D tabbed web browsing.

MetaCrasher
3D connected worlds using Ogoglio.

Electric Sheep Company
Second Life builders.

AreaCode
DodgeBall founders/Google defectors, making large-scale real-world games exported from virtual worlds

Tone23
An excellent intelligent multi-user music application now in Second Life.

MTV’s Virtual Lower East Side
A 3D music community, one of MTV’s several hoorays into virtual worlds. Also check out MTV’s latest “One Avatar, One World” initiative.

Graham Software
3D web browsing.

Cruxy
Power tools for digital content creators, including the Cruxy player for Second Life.

Perceptive Pixel
Not exactly virtual worlds, but very cool multi-touch geo-spatial applications.

And, well, Unype - Multi-user Google Earth.

I would also like to mention DayLife as another very technically strong company, especially their latest “Universe” visualization experiments.
With the excellent monthly tech meetup’s, the community is fusing and gaining more and more momentum each passing day. (please let me know if this list is missing some companies/ murat at holoscape dot com )

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  1. If you can make it here…(part 2) says:
    February 25, 2008 at 5:18 am

    [...] Recently there has been a lot of talk about the New York startup scene (I covered the plethora of new york-based metaverse companies in  this post ) and how we can improve it. [...]