Zivity Archive

"Female beauty showcase" site Zivity has apparently pulled the age verification requirement for new members. When I (and others) attemped to signup back in February via a Techcrunch invite link, we were prompted to enter credit card information. Zivity noted that the credit card information was used to verify that a member was over the legal age as Zivity has some nudity on the service.

Yesterday I received another invite (not requested by me) to Zivity and I clicked the link and sure enough the age verification was removed! I was able to signup directly and enter the site by just faking my age. I am not sure exactly when they removed the age verification but upon some searching, I haven’t seen any reports as of yet.

When you signup for a Zivity account, you are provided with one "vote" (invited members receive two votes). Votes are the way that Zivity, the photographers and the models make money. You buy packs of 10 votes for $10 and then distribute the votes to the photographers and models you think have created the best photos. Zivity says the "artists" get 80% of every dollar spent on Zivity – not sure how that percentage is split between the photographer and the model.

From my browsing today, most of the members have used either their free vote(s) or no votes as of yet. The Zivity staff have placed what appears to be hundreds (or more) of votes across the site. It would be interesting to see how many actual paid votes have been placed (outside of Zivity staff and photographers). Here’s a short example of founder Cyan Bannister’s recent vote activity:

Photo sets are viewable only and you aren’t paying for the ability to download full hi-res images like you can on most other "female beauty showcase" sites. I clicked on a random variety of models and I’d guess about 30% of the images on the service show any nudity. Zivity recently raised $7 million in venture capital funding.

Last session of the afternoon is around entertainment at Techcrunch40. Here are my notes:

Flowplay

• It’s a virtual avatar that you can then create a social network after you create an avatar
• Kinda like a prettier second life
• PLay a stupid game where you hold the mouse down – you can win tokens – nothing like holding down the space bar for an hour
• don’t like the prizes – sell them to your friends
• its like avatar meets dance dance revolution
• another pre-recorded demo!

Metaplace

• it’s a virtual world widget
• comparisons to the old aol mid-90s
• you can put an amazon storefront inside your world
• you can use xml, feeds, web services, a layer on top of everything
• the main page for your world gets you all kind of web tools – blogs, wikis, etc.
• virtual worlds have loads of potential they say
• the power of metaplace is that everyone can create their own

Woome

• bridging the offline and online world
• its the first company to develop an online speed dating platform using voice and video
• woo someone or be wooed
• do they do gay and lesbian? yes, they do
• they go thru a demo – basically each one has a minute to woo each other
• $1 to contact the person you woo’ed
• you can create your own sessions around any topic

Zivity

• social network with self-organizing content
• hot photos and interactions with amazing women
• amazon-style recommendations
• vote-based royalties for models and photographers
• they pay out 40%
• what does this product actually do??!?!!
• you can upload files in a zip – woo – 2007 baby!
• a photographer uploads photos – and then the models get some of the money or something – heck if i know

Expert Panel 

Caterina – she likes Woome a lot – she doesn’t think its a good standalone app – better as part of another social networking site
Brad – also liked Woome
Sarah – didn’t like Woome at all
Loic – I really believe in Woome, he can see a nice virtual world on a site like techcrunch – he twittered it
Brad – I feel like the train left the platform with metaplace – with second life
Hammer – He liked Kaltura and thinks video is on the upspring and video catches on in the near future
Sarah – likes Zivity the best
Zivity – we do photo verification and age verification – but each model takes a picture with a new newspaper

Post Concludes