Finally! weblin frees Avatars from Second Life

One unique avatar, stepping from one virtual world to another. This was the idea and weblin made it come true. The new weblin Gate portal allows avatars to roam from the virtual world of Second Life(R) to the Web, which is the biggest virtual world. Isn´t it?
Yesterday, at 8:00 am Boston time we sent out the press release and just few hours later, there was a bunch of people waiting in the weblin house in SL, to be teleported to the web. How cool is that?

If you are a SL user try it.
Fast Facts about weblin Gate (according to "stargate", not watergate of course):
-- The Weblin house in Second Life is located in New Berlin, close to the tower at Alexanderplatz: New Berlin 221, 73, 32 (PG).
-- The Second Life avatar is capable of performing all the actions of a weblin avatar, such as walking left and right, dancing, laughing or waving.
-- The 3D data is then exported as a library of animated GIFs and once the conversion is finished, the user receives a link and is directed to a personalized weblin login landing page, built with a token. With the token, the generated library can be mapped to one's weblin account.
-- Interoperability between virtual worlds is something Linden Lab actively supports. This is a positive and encouraging development for Second Life users to add more dimension to our user experience.

There are already a lot of blog posts covering weblin Gate. One of the posts I liked best for now ist: Common|Sensible.
Have fun!

Back from LeWeb 08

It was a fancy venue, where Loic Le Meur planned LeWeb 08. But cold. So cold. The first day we thought to freeze to death.

weblin had a little booth sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. Thanks for the big spender, we had an exciting time and more than 80 leads to talk to. In the end I could not count anymore how many cameras we saw and interviews we gave. Twice we were asked to do an elevator pitch in less than one minute.
Unfortunately I didn´t saw any speaker or panel on Tuesday. But it was worth it, because we had so many talks with press and agencies, with major companies and interesting Bloggers, with VCs and Trendscouts.

On Tuesday we went to the MySpace party later on, which was a nice place also. A lot of happy people drinking and dancing, some celebrating as if the financial crisis never happened.

On Wednesday, the only speaker I saw, was Morton Lund. I could not believe, what he was saying, that he lost all his money by investing in a free print magazine in Denmark. Morten is a weird guy, but I admire his courage to tell this story, again and again and always adding that he will come back. Falling down is not a shame.

Despite the catering was curtly calculated, and Loic seemed to save the heating for not contributing to the climate change, LeWeb was great event for us.

Business 3.0: weblin in Silicon Valley

Dave Drach blogging about german Start-ups

As some might know, Microsoft runs a Start-up Accelerator Program in several countries. The program is called "unternimm was" in Germany and led by Dr. Carsten Rudolph. weblin is one of the 20 supported companies. Every year there is a campus trip to visit the Microsoft headquarter and interesting people like strategic Microsoft VIPs and journalists. This year weblin got the chance to join the journey with a handful of other start-ups like mediber.de, VIOSO.com, and visumotion.com. Jan Andresen, weblins CEO has met Dave Drach, who is the Director of Microsoft’s U.S. VC and Emerging Business Team. Dave mentioned the visit of the german start-ups in his blog. To read his full article please click the pic.

weblin at the Virtual Worlds conference 2008

The Virtual Worlds conference will be taking place in NY on April 3-4 and it is there that weblin will be making its first public appearance in the USA. Virtual Worlds is a small but important conference and exhibition where the who is who of the US scene meet up. From Linden Labs to Sulake, from Multiverse to Metaverse, from IBM to the Electric Sheep Company - they are all there as exhibitors at the relatively small number of 60 stands. weblin has seized the favourable opportunity, when calculated in dollars, and booked stand number 60 :-). We are really looking forward to our first close contact with the US market.