Vivaty Archive

Earlier this morning we reported on Vivaty going live with their public beta of a social virtual world creation tool. Not even 24 hours later, Google is out with their own social virtual world creator, Lively. Adam Ostrow has an indepth review of the Lively application. Here’s the basics — you create an avatar and a virtual room. Sounds like Second Life right? Well it’s similar but different – you don’t fly around to endless worlds of stupidity – instead you get a "Lively Room" and an avatar.

Ostrow says this Lively concept came from the 20% of time that Googlers are able to work on their own creations. You will soon be able to import friends from other social networks and chat platforms. You can add all sorts of Google products into your Lively Room including YouTube videos and a search panel. You can take your avatar on the road and place him or her into any Lively Room across the Web.

This is the perfect product for the pre-teen. Get them hooked into Google’s products now so as they grow and enter the business market, they select Google for their product needs. I assume just like Vivaty’s product, we will see sponsored items inside of the Lively Rooms soon. It’s a potential income diversification play; something Wall Street has been demanding for quite a while.

This is really identical to what Vivaty launched today – quite scary almost. Vivaty will need to keep innovating to stay ahead of Google’s Lively, especially because Google’s pockets run very deep. The business sponsored concept is key for Vivaty.

Update: Google Maps Mania is already working on a Google Maps mashup to show you where the Lively Rooms are!

Vivaty is announcing this morning that they are exiting the private beta stage and moving into a wide open public beta of their Vivaty Scenes product. Eric Eldon has an indepth review of the Vivaty product when they launched the private beta back in April. He also notes that the company has raised $9.4 million in venture capital funding.

It’s basically like Second Life meets social networking. The CEO says it’s targeted towards the 15-35 audience. I am in that audience and probably will never create one of these scenes, not even on a dare. But I could see how the kids will eat this up. Will it be as addictive as the Spore Creature game that’s hot right now? 

The application can be installed within Facebook or AIM currently and the company says more social networking platforms are coming soon.

Vivaty sent over the following bullet points on what can be accomplished using a Vivaty Scene:

• Choose a scene to share with AIM and Facebook friends
• Personalize it with hundreds of objects and make it uniquely yours
• Share your photos from the web, Flickr, and Facebook on your walls
• Invite friends to watch your favorite YouTube videos on virtual TVs
• Chat or leave notes for friends 
• Have a virtual party!

It looks like at least part of their business model will be around sponsored scenes. We received a few of these sponsored scenes but were asked not to post them yet. For their younger demo, the sponsored scenes could do very well.

Update: Robert Scoble interviewed the Vivaty CEO:

Here’s an example Vivaty Scene inside of Facebook: