I first wrote about Israeli widget site Gizmoz in December 2006. At the time, the company hadn’t launched its product to create personalized widgets using users’ pictures and voice, but they had a working demo. Today, the product launches for everyone to use. Gizmoz is also announcing a $6.3 million Series A funding round from Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital and distribution partnerships with RockYou and Freewebs.
These are animated, talking, 3D images that can be embedded on any website. When compared to what Sitepal and others are doing on the avatar side of things, or Snapvine in the voice recording space, it really shines (see, however, Sitepal’s comment in our previous post for a different viewpoint).
Creating a Gizmoz takes about a minute and requires a single photo of the subject. Gizmoz renders a 3D image of the photo. Users then customize it by adding hair, body, accessories, clothes, etc., and can also distort the face in a number of ways. When you add your voice, via a microphone or by typing in text that is converted to audio. the avatar adds facial expressions, eye blinks, breathing and lip syncs to the voice. Here’s an example using my photo:
The key uses for the product will be to create a welcome clip like the one above, or to create a welcome “voicemail” service where people visiting your site can leave audio messages (like Snapvine).
Gizmoz is built on the Flash platform; however, like Flektor, which was recently acquired by MySpace, all of the code was developed in-house by CEO Eyal Gever and his team over the last four years. That will make it an even more attractive acquisition target for MySpace and others.
The company has also created a cool personalized demo showcasing the announcement:
A really nice pic of you Mike
Don’t know about you, but i’m not big fan of avatars. Just a thought.
/ heh / Looks like – this is another thing aimed at myspace /
– I mean this isnt going to be used on a alexa (top 500) site any time soon; (without being paid)
(p.s. TC is only 651)
-
rb
thats a good news for me now i am going to try it
cool avatar but a bit passe no?
maybe there’s some universe of kids who’ll just love it, maybe
I can see both advantages and disadvantages to using a virtual avatar – it’s a given that this IS but a glimpse at the future of the internet… until somebody invents a teleporter
I must say though, the quality is getting better each time I see these demos from various companies.
Jon
I wish they’d use a chunk of that 6.3 million to shave a few bytes off of their 100K animated gif logo. I mean come on.
If an animated avatar can raise $6 million in funding then there is hope for our company yet.
Virtual avatars have come a long way in the past couple of years. I too was surprised that they were able to raise so much funding but – good for them!
how can this happen?
That demo movie is freakin hilarious!!
although Borat’s character is a bit creepy, I got a good laugh from his line.
I must say that the quality of the lip-sync surprised me.. way to go.
Amazing talking characters (much more then avatars). this is going to be huge. Wow you can make movies, parodies, tell stories. So much creative ideas I get when seeing their work. Congratulation Gizmoz.
you depress us with your “we need a downturn” article, then you invite us to punch your avatar, now you freak us out with this!
There’s gotta be some law against readership abuse
If you want to see the Gizmoz Answering Machines the artists from the clip posted on their myspace profiles, here are the links:
http://www.myspace.com/50cent
http://www.mysp...ce.com/scottian
http://www.mysp...om/kellyrowland
how do you make it stop?????????
I hope my homeboys WEFAIL gets royalties from these guys!
We Fail
I think this will be more popular than people think. The myspace crowd is eager to differentiate itself from the rest and this will be a way to do that initially. People will also be able to make their own short movies with whomever they want as costars and this will also be appealing to the younger crowd.
I have never liked the idea of sitepal and find the sites that use it annoying, I don’t see why this will be any better. This works for Myspace and possibly bloggers about us pages but I really don’t see much use for it in ecommerce. The other big use will be to send greeting cards with your personalized logo. Very cool product.
you laugh like a girl! lmao
This is fun! Yohooo!
Here is mine: http://www.gizm...eo/516166_first
If I could port it to Wii to replace my horid Mii i’d be stoked………but Freewebs?
weak.
Take a look . . .and see how 50 cent and Scott Ian and Kelly Rowland communicate with their fans
myspace.com/scottian
myspace.com/kellyrowland
myspace.com/50cent
it keeps telling me errors while im trying to upload…
Here is how Ilook like before and after Gizmoz…
http://www.rock...tanceid=1138046
Cool…:-)
hahaha oh my god that avatar looks like its retarded
In my humble opinion, this is one of the UGLIEST things I’ve ever seen in Avatar. And scary.
This thing is really cool and I’m amazed at how easy it was to add. I took a quick pic from my webcam and then uploaded it…and just had to blog about it and add it to my site.
Just FYI… I’m the product manager for Voki (www.voki.com). Sitepal is a product that we have for a completely different market.
We’ll be doing photoconversion, too, but I have to be honest, I don’t think 3D realistic avatars are where its at. Speaking avatars need to make a bet on their communication features… the market isn’t necessarily demanding 3D photorealistic… That’s just what geeks think is cool. Go check out the traffic on Stardolls… I think if you introduced 3D photoconversion there, you’d kill off the site.
It’s like… how many people upload their own pic in AIM as the buddy icon… very few and it’s almost seen as weird when they do… That being said, their implementation of photoconversion is really fantastic and I give them a lot of technical credit, but we all know the best technology isn’t necessarily the most advanced one, its the one that is right for the market.
I understand there’s also a phenomenal opportunity to charge users for additional outfits, accessories, etc. The overall interface is great, but I have to say I was unable to record sound for my avatar!
I’ve tried my webcam, a headset, and it picked up once, but that was it… I’ll try again later.
We’re venturing into the same market. Michael, you saw a rough rough version of my version of this at Yahoo! Hackday. I presented it in a comical way and I’m not sure if you, or others really saw the product lying underneath.
This is very impressive, creating a 3d head from a 2d image is a difficult problem to solve. We chose to go for something simpler. Rather then go for something that is comparable to “movie quality” we moved towards something more south park like at best.
Here is a one I’ve made of Arrington for example:
http://www.mobo...playBlabber/105
Michael, I’m a big fan of yours. If this rubs you the wrong way I apologize and I’ll delete it right away.
Well, I couldn’t record my own voice, which is quite a bummer (I tried both Firefox and IE). But you can see my sexy waitress avatar speak in a male voice (there’s no text-to-speech female option) at SiberianFruit.com. It’s quite an experience.
Matt Frewer should use this to create Max Headroom all over again.
so creepy. check mine out!
http://www.thej...how.com/b/?p=66
Coolio! I made one too:
http://tallfrea...-gizmoz-avatar/
The Gizmoz product is awesome. Congratulations on the funding Eyal!
I look forward to getting my Gizmoz-RockYou avatar!
Nice…
I think the teen audience will LOVE this, and quite a few older folks too. The RockYou partnership should help lubricate the widget distribution on Social Networks – great strategy. What is really fascinating is the way they pulled in the celebrities from the get-go. I looked at the 50-cent page on MySpace and it already has 106 avatar comments. I look forward to making my favorite politicians say something inappropriate.
Cheers,
Yet another startup that doesn’t understand security. They email you your password in the clear, and probably store it in the clear in their database.
Get a clue folks — don’t send or save passwords in clear text.
Todo muy bueno
This is a fun application of truly innovative technology.
WOW! This is amazing! :O
KOOL!!!! totally awesome!:)
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! zuziasoutx
long hair,a bras,thongs,and getting naked
wats up the big boss
good news for me now i am going to try it
Hi There Your ad is outragious….I lOve It (LOL)
HEELLLLlllooo……
Toodles
Oh and Yeh I’m gonna meet you soon…
wanna congrats you in person..