Last week was a busy week in Los Angeles for the Virtual Worlds Expo 2008 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. According to conference organizers I spoke with, nearly 1300 attendees participated in the event, which included multiple tracks covering consumer, media, children, enterprise, education and a 'future of virtual worlds' track. I was fortunate enough to participate on a panel in this last track, alongside such industry luminaries as John Swords, Ian Hughes, Mark Wallace, and Ben Goetzel.
The overall show was well populated compared to previous shows, if not a bit drowning in the spacious LACC. It was evident that the industry is evolving, both in the international flavor of the participants attending, as well as the distribution of industry vs. customers, and (within industry) the number of consumer virtual world companies vs. the number of technology providers to same. The latter quantity was present in abundance, with every company vying to be the platform-of-choice for developers to create consumer and business worlds upon.
This is the current-indicator-incarnation of a leading-indicator that I wrote about in late 2007, in that VC investment in the virtual worlds market was leaning heavily towards technology and component startups versus retail virtual world plays themselves. It took eight to ten months for these second round investments to bear fruit, and they were in full bloom at the show.
One side note- many vendors I spoke with bemoaned the mix of industry/customers at the show, as there was an overpopulation of industry represented this time around. It may be the first-time-location or a statistical blip in attendee mix. Time will give us more samples to trend from.
Next, I head off to Coventry England to the Serious Virtual Worlds 2008 conference. I had the opportunity to keynote the conference last year just as the integration of virtual worlds and the real world was still a black art. This year should provide much more meat for conversation (or presentation) given the considerable activity that has taken place in the intervening twelve months. I'll be posting the presentation shortly after my keynote, although in my usual fashion, it will be of the 'pretty pictures to accompany the speaker's points' school and not a longhand document with lots of text. When I get back to the states next week I will do a voiceover to accompany the slides and post them to slideshare.
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