Berlin start-up Metaversum, the developer and operator of the virtual world Twinity, has won a new investor in the form of Balderton Capital. The exact amount has not been released but it’s understood to be in the ‘multi million Euro’ range. Metaversum is adding to investment from VC Grazia Equity. Balderton, better known in its previous incarnation as Benchmark Capital Europe, is the fund that invested in and exited from Bebo and MySQL, the former to the tune of $140 million.
Twinity, currently in its private beta phase, is positioning itself as a virtual world “linked closely with reality.” You can get an apartment in New York, for example.
Reviewers of Twinity’s beta are thin on the ground but Maria Bäcke, a PhD candidate in Digital Games at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden - said the beta version of Twinity is “a very nice environment” and avatar customization tools “pretty good”, but another felt the world is pretty locked-down and feels like it’s ‘on rails’, which may well be the intention.
will there be a place to distribute art and video content in this new world????????????? i hope so!!
@ jason jenkins,
this is jeremy, vp of community at metaversum/twinity. and to answer your question, yes, there will be places to distribute art and video in twinity.
thanks!
- jeremy
Hi, I’m the second reviewer linked in the article. How nice it is that the VP of community dev is out answering questions on blogs? +1.
In my review the other month, I pitted it against Second Life, perhaps unfairly so. SL has been around awhile and has different design goals. I think it is telling that the young Twinity beta felt more stable than SL, albeit less versatile at this stage. I mean, what version is SL on now? 19?
The common criticism of SL (stability aside) is that the learning curve for newbies is prohibitively high. Twinity, not so much. Still a bit wonky, but plenty of time to iron that out.
Maybe it’s time for another review. <3
Poorly designed logo makes me want to misspell the company name. twiinity?
Don’t dot an “N”.
How many of these postmodern “parallel worlds” can the ailing real-world economy support?
What kind of value creation are these people engaged in besides building yet another high-tech comic book?
Will there be.a subprime crisis in the Twinity world?
Hey, did you know that Klaus Hommels is no longer a partner at Balderton? He got out, the exact reasons unknown, but they let him keep his board seats while paying him some management fee. IMHO this speaks poorly about his interest in the Balderton-backed companies where he sits as board member, as his involvement with them is likely to fall to zero.