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.
There are some isolated areas that offer a little bit of the kind of shared experience that I’m talking about. For example MMOs, presence streams (a’la FriendFeed), and some social games skirt around the edges. But they feel a little like social networking did 10 years ago; when there was Six Degrees and IMing - but no one had taken it to the next level yet.
So late last year I started looking for other people who felt the same way I did, meeting with a wide assortment of people, from social networking entrepreneurs to MMO designers, nightclub owners, social scientists and musicians. After hundreds of people I ended up having dinner with Jason Booth around November. There was an immediate connection, and we spent the evening discussing music, Puzzle Pirates, Dice Wars, and the emerging synchronous web.
Jason was hard at work on Rock Band and busy preparing for the birth of his first child, so he introduced me to Michael Sheidow, which led to a meeting with Dan O’Brien and Dan Ogles (who we now call “the Dans”). Pretty soon a small group of us was meeting every weekend at In a Pickle in Waltham trying to turn an idea into a company. At the same time, we were encouraged by support from Prism, a VC firm I had been working with, which gave us a little seed funding to develop things further.
The four of us all had different backgrounds, but we shared a very similar idea about where the online world was going. Dan O’Brien and Mike helped build one of the first 3D MMOs, Asheron’s Call, and personally experienced the value it created for their players. With Guitar Hero, Dan Ogles saw how making a game that you loved to play with your friends ended up translating into a game everyone wanted to play with their friends.
and so it started…
A few months ago, the coffee shops gave way to a little closet of an office. Before long, a broad unifying vision was narrowed into a product that we couldn’t wait to build. We want to deliver a completely new kind of massively multiplayer experience — one that requires minutes, not hours, to access and learn, and one that is as rich and social as real-world activities like shooting hoops or jamming in a band. And we wanted it all in a browser, as accessible as your email.
We spent some long nights figuring out whether what we wanted to build would even be possible, and I’ll never forget the evening we looked at an animation moving around on Dano’s screen and realized this might actually work. We took that prototype out to raise the money necessary to build a product. Thankfully for us that process was mercifully short.
We were fortunate enough to have a few interested parties on Sand Hill Road and back here in Boston, but in the end it was clear that Charles River Ventures was the best partner for us and Prism. Susan Wu from CRV is someone I immediately hit it off with when we met up at the Starbucks on Sharon Park Road, and it’s not surprising why; CRV is at the nexus of a lot of what’s happening on the social web, from Twitter to Areae.
So with our core team in place, Prism and CRV backing us, I’m super-excited to get a shot at building this out. Social online entertainment is going to be freakin’ huge, even the skeptics are beginning to appreciate its potential; Disney’s purchase of Club Penguin is the latest example. Mike says this feels to him like it did back in the early days of Turbine, like being on the ground floor of a whole new industry. Along the way we’ve also started talking with folks who have different takes but come from very much the same place, guys like Raph Koster and Daniel James. This is striking a chord with people at an instinctive level in the same way that social networking did.
Social online entertainment is about personal connections, creativity, and the long, long tail. I can’t wait to see what people do with it. It’s going to take a little bit before the product hits the street, but we’ll be regularly blogging about it along the way, maybe even doing a podcast or two. And we’ll be inviting folks into the system, um, real soon now.
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Conduit Social Gaming World Gets $5.5m Round…
Susan Wu, who was instrumental in arranging the Virtual Goods Summit I moderated a panel at in June, emailed me some embargoed news earlier today, and though I begged and pleaded, she asked me wait until midnight to post it. However, I see that the new…
Conduit Labs Announces Funding to Build Social Online Gaming World…
..the promise of a totally new form of social network product intrigued us. Is this, as one of the investors said in the press release, where the Web is headed? I asked Susan Wu from CRV, who has joined the board of directors at Conduit Labs, why Condu…
Conduit Labs Closes $5.5 Million Series A Funding…
Once online youll get to connect with friends to play games. Flash will make the application more accessible than a lot of the existing 3D virtual worlds, which require long downloads….
Just wondering who are your target users: gamers, SNS users, geeks… or new cool style of users
[…] The Conduit Labs Blog has an informal take on how the company got going, and there’s coverage at 3pointD, at Read/Write Web, and of course at TechCrunch. […]
Casual MMO’s are going to be the next “big thing”. Blogs, podcasting, etc. were big because the built on existing technologies and allowed users to have more control not only over what they consume but what they create. I think this is key to the success of this new casual mmo genre. It’s not just about hanging out in a virtual room chatting about beer, it’s going to be about creating “things” and “spaces” that may not have ever existed before - all built on a combination of gaming concepts and web technologies. I’m really eager to see what you guys have cooking.
I can’t wait to see ur innovative products.
Your mail box is full. Get error “Your JotForm Account Is Over Quota.” when attempt to sign up for info. FYI-Hank
[…] members have a lot in common, although they may literally be in different worlds. This SoNet by Conduit Labs looks to bridge this gap by creating a network to span all members in all virtual […]
Go get ‘em guys. Can’t wait to see what you’re up to.
Way to go, Nabs!
Looking forward to seeing the future.
Excellent idea - but one question I did not see was how / if it might help connect 3D platforms like Second Life, There.com or Kaneva… are they intended to benefit from this interlinking?
Great news! Can’t wait to see what the team is brewing up!
Congrats Nabeel! We beat you buy a week but you got more money
Congratulations guys. It’s good to see truly creative people getting to work on unique stuff. I’m greatly looking forward to what you guys produce
Way to go guys! Grouping people together with like interests and enabling a “relationship” or “conflict” to occur will be fun. Keep us posted. Kudos to CRV and Prism for betting on the team.
this sounds exciting, what users have really been waiting for! can’t wait to check it out..
Congratulations Conduit Labs! Looking forward to see what you guys are going to cook up.
Here’s to social entertainment, cheers!
Oh yea, and please make your product an open platform.
Congratulations to you and the team. Can’t wait to see what you’re up to, ping me when you’re ready to hold court on your myspace page!
Congrats guys!
http://thinglefin.com/2007/08/23/congrats-conduit/
Xivio.com pulled off 3D in flash over a year ago and have been building their site’s feature set ever since. How is this news? 3D in Flash, in Realtime = been done. In a virtual world. Try archiving it if you need proof.
I too offer DING! GRATZ! with a however attached…
The statement “there really isn’t any place to “hang out” with friends, an online world where you can get involved in a whole range of activities, a place where you help create a steady stream of new adventures.” simply isn’t true.
Because what you’ve just described is the very experience that i’ve been having in MMO’s for the last several years - getting together impromptu with friends to hang out together while doing a multitude of casual yet useful fun ‘Stuff’ together, a kind of “directed casual” experience.
And Socializing while still doing worthwhile ‘Stuff’ is also mostly what goes on 24/7 in IronForge in WoW, at least on the servers i’ve played on.
Not being a Virtual Worlds guy, if this type of casual social directed co-op is missing from VR worlds like SL then indeed yours is a worthy endeavor, especially if it comes in the form of web based flash, but us MMO guys have been doing this for most of a decade now (UO went live in 1997 iirc)
Anyway, more games is good games so Go For It and Good Luck.
Rob - I don’t know that we would call ourselves “virtual worlds” guys, we’re just looking to make a set of fun live events you can do with your friends.
And you’re right that MMOs are indeed a good example of this which is why much of the background of the team is in MMO development on top of web guys. I thought we gave good enough credit to MMOs, but perhaps not.
We see typical MMOs like WOW as a great service, but one that is ultimately tied to a very specific production (ie big budget+years of development), distribution (retail+subscription) and play style that is directed at the hard core gamer.
While the enjoyment might be similar, the aim in the audience is quite different, to an audience that really hasn’t experienced the kind of interactions you have had he pleasure of having online.
Go get’em guys!
From your post “one that is as rich and social as real-world activities like shooting hoops or jamming in a band. And we wanted it all in a browser, as accessible as your email.”
But don’t forget the “real-world”. An idea might be to integrate things we do and places we hangout at in the “real-world” with conduit. Try to integrate the social online entertainment with social real-world entertainment. For example, when I’m at restaurant A in the real-world I’ll also be hanging out with people at an online version of restaurant A. Just an idea.
Chappets, can I ask a tiny thing: set your RSS feed to broadcast full posts, and not excerpts?
Much obliged! And good luck with it all, can’t wait to see what you produce.
Alice.