Well done!

I woke up Thursday to find that you guys blew up our little email submission form on the website. Way to hit that submit button, that’ll teach us to use free web tools.

Looks like the coverage from the game press (Gamasutra), web press (Mashable), virtual worlds folks (Virtual World News) and financing press (Red Herring) generated a bit of a stir. Metaversed did a good overview job of the coverage, so I won’t do that.

Instead, in a vain attempt at making this otherwise bland posting offer at least a little value, I’m listing out the top five press mentions in order of who actually generated the most inbound traffic here at conduitlabs.com

1. Techmeme (22%)
2. Techcrunch (9%)
3. Read/Write Web (6%)
4. VentureBeat (5%)
5. Gamasutra/Worlds in Motion (5%)

The ranking is of course a factor not only of the popularity of the site, but also how extensive and featured the coverage was. For instance Mashable was nowhere to be seen, because despite having more traffic than Techcrunch, their coverage was cursory.

Another fun surprise for us was the amount of you that actually subscribed to the blog. It looks like there is even an entrepreneurship class that is going to be tuning in. I guess that means we actually have to work on some interesting things to put up here, eh? Don’t worry, we’re working on it.

I’m very excited to announce the closing of our A round of funding here at Conduit. Having just raised $5.5m from Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks, I figured this was a good time to open up the company blog with the story about how Conduit came together and what we are up to.

what do war reporting, sports, and live action role playing games have in common?

My father was a foreign correspondent, a broadcast journalist who had to go into Cambodia and Vietnam a number of times while I lived in Bangkok as a kid. Those were often dangerous assignments, and, not surprisingly, a special type of bond was formed with the friends that he made during that time. The danger, excitement, and sense of adventure helped to form lifelong friendships.

In 1994, the World Cup came to the US and both my father and I caught the soccer bug. In much of the world, the soccer experience is so tied to a person’s sense of self that it’s easy to see why it bonds people together. That passion helped me and my father get closer than we had ever been, and also led to my second start-up, an Internet sports media company.

And in college I got involved in Live Action Role Playing Games (LARPs), a mixture of improv theatre and gaming. I witnessed and experienced the strong friendships that LARPs helped to form on a personal level, as well as the global community of players that was a harbinger of Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Gaming. The extraordinary growth of that network we built highlighted the power of simulated conflict.

Each of these examples is profoundly about people. Not so much about how they met, but how they formed relationships, how they built communities, how they bonded. And, in their own way, each of these examples illustrates the concept behind Conduit.

anyway, back to the present day…

Today, you don’t have to spend much time online to realize that there really isn’t any place to “hang out” with friends, an online community where you can get involved in a whole range of activities, a place where you help create a steady stream of new adventures. MySpace is about visiting profiles and passing of messages back and forth, a kind of pen pal for the Intertubes. In Virtual Worlds, the ideas of complex interaction with friends seems to stop with chat. Even blogs, which we thought would be a great democratizer, have fragmented into echo chambers, with most people subscribing only to the ones that cater to their pre-determined beliefs.

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