Electronic Arts has reportedly formed a new team called EA Blueprint, aimed at assisting small-sized developers with strategic funding and project management. The group will be led by former EA Los Angeles general manager Neil Young and artist and repertoire director Alan Yu.

Sources tell consumer site GameTap that EA Blueprint products will include brand extensions of existing EA games in addition to original IP. The EA Blueprint games will reportedly focus on social networking platforms, such as Facebook, which has an audience of some 62 million users.

According to GameTap, EA Blueprint's first effort is the recently released Facebook extension of 2007 Wii title Smarty Pants (pictured). The Facebook title was made in conjunction with San Francisco development house Context Optional.

An EA spokesperson told GameTap that "most of the stuff we're working on isn't ready to be announced," promising full disclosure at a later date.

[Via GameTap]

Worlds in Motion sister site Games On Deck, which focuses on mobile gaming, has been running a series of interviews with the game developers who have submitted games for consideration in the 2008 Independent Game Festival Mobile, and this time, Games On Deck's Matthew Kumar talks to the staff of Punch Entertainment, the folks behind Ego which aims to build an online world based around individual connectivity. The game lets users create avatars that can be customized over time based on personality-driven types, and the developers believe that this type of mobile game is the future.

With accessibility being a watchword in the virtual worlds space, we look to mobile as a new frontier for connected, social play. Games On Deck interviewed the staff of Punch Entertainment, including founder and CEO Tobin Lent and Creative Director Steve Nix, including plenty of details about their IGF Mobile 2008 Best Game and Innovation in Mobile Game Design finalist Ego, which they call an online mobile virtual world.

An excerpt:

"We believe that heavily viral, community-based games that take advantage of mobile's strengths (mobility and connectivity) will be the most successful. As a result, we wanted to create a community game that was fresh, easy to get into, fun to play, could be shared with other people, and was made just for mobile.

We came up with the idea for Ego by focusing on these elements through several brainstorming sessions. We had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas and came up with a lot of crazy stuff. We eventually landed on Ego, because it could leverage mobility through social connections, and we could have the Egos participate in all kinds of fun games and activities."

Complete interview follows the jump.

Speaking of mobile virtual worlds, NEC Corporation has announced it intends to connect Second Life to the mobile platform. The company says its SCI Platform is able to open virtual worlds communications to real-world phones by placing an "NEC Communicator" in Second Life.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, NEC showed off the technoloy, which it says lets users within Second Life use their avatar to make cell phone calls via the NEC Communicator. Beyond voice, Second Lifers will also be able to send text-based communications like SMS, email and IP messaging to real-world devices.

The company says the technology will provide new Web 2.0 revenue streams for its customers through such "virtual to real world" interfaces that enable connected communication, payment and media distribution. It's part of what the company says is an overall vision for media convergence and evolution.

The company will place its NEC Communicator at its "Tokutoku Pocket Island" in Second Life, which it launched alongside its NEC Island in 2007 for its branding and marketing activities.

Even when you factor in the fact that the userbase of sites like MySpace and Facebook continues to grow, that growth rate is slackening. And what's it worth when they're spending less time?

In our recent interview with Makena's Ben Richardson, he pointed out that one of the big draws of these new formats for advertisers is the fact that the level of user engagement -- translating to time spent viewing ads -- is much higher in virtual worlds and social media than it is with traditional ads. Numerous other folks we've spoken to who are doing work in this space have told us that the era of measuring impact in clicks or "impressions" is over in this arena, and minutes-per-user is the new benchmark.

"What you have with social networks is the most overhyped scenario in online advertising," Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook told Business Week in the article. If users, as the article says, can get bored with profile-swapping and tired of ad proliferation, what might that mean for virtual worlds? Given that the latter is still in its formative stages, generally, and many companies are still experimenting, it's not clear that this resistance has quite reached virtual worlds yet -- but we can look to social networks, perhaps, as a barometer for the issues that can be expected to reach our space shortly thereafter.

[Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up | BusinessWeek]

Self-styled "experiential marketing and advertising" firm Swivel Media, whose work includes virtual worlds branding, has announced that former Apple marketing communications manager for partnerships and promotions Kyle McNeely has been appointed its managing director.

In the new role, McNeely will lead the account service division, heading up agency operation and contributing to business development activities. Says McNeely, "[Swivel's] incorporation of both real and virtual experiences into each of its campaigns makes it a leader in its domain. I am honored to be joining Swivel Media to help guide its imminent growth.”

McNeely managed the Apple Student Group on Facebook in addition to its peer-to-peer marketing program, Apple Campus Rep, among other activities with cross-promotion and virtual worlds like Nike + IPod College Tour in Second Life.

Swivel Media founder Erik Hauser said, “Kyle’s a terrific addition to Swivel Media, as we continue to add talent and grow our leadership position in the area of experiential marketing and overall experience design. His academic advertising and branding background, combined with hands-on experience of ground-breaking technologies and how they relate to a generation of always-connected customers makes him ideal for our team and our current and expanding client base."

Redwood City-based startup Twofish has revealed an in-game economic middleware called Twofish Elements, which integrates with online games to provide them an infrastructure for banking and retail.

The Twofish Elements middleware plugs into an online game's backend to enable game developers and operators to implement, analyze and manage microtransaction driven in-game economies.

Through the tools it provides, developers can view the in-game economy in the same way as if it were a real-world economy, and access analytic tools that let them track in-game market trends and properly price and value in-game items. From the game's backend, they can then adjust the price of in-game items accordingly based on data results like supply and demand trends, for example.

The venture-funded Twofish was founded in 2006 by Yahoo! Games, Shockwave.com and Segasoft Networks vet Lee Crawford, who told Gamasutra that the rise of casual gaming alongside alternative business models has resulted in a broad audience of gamers who demand a free experience.

To back up its claims, Twofish is also working on Edgeracers, the first game to be developed using the Twofish Elements Economic Engine, and an example of its middleware in action. The title, built around "the culture of car customization and casual racing", is currently in testing and is expected to launch in Q1 2008.

But Crawford expects the transition to a microtransactions-supported business model to pose a challenge for some companies. "Game developers are not bankers," he notes.

With that in mind, Crawford says Twofish Elements offers developers the ability to control real-world economic features including inventory logic, account management policies, complex pricing models, flexible transaction types and multiple currencies.

"What people sometimes don't realize is that when you move RMTs into the game environment, even though you're dealing with virtual goods, it creates a real economy. Concerns like economic health, security and privacy become essential to ensuring the quality of experience," Crawford adds.

Currently, Crawford says the company is in discussions with a variety of major publishers and has received a lot of interest. But he also sees real opportunity and "tremendous interest" from independent developers who see the use of an economic engine as a way to compete more effectively.

"We see Twofish Elements being a way to help independent publishers and developers compete on a level footing with the technology that companies such as Nexon have developed through many years of operations in Asia," Crawford added.

"In our view, the world is moving towards the mass-market consumer and, ultimately, the hardcore player going to free-to-play with microtransactions," Crawford said.

Moreover, Crawford feels the retail price point has become insufficient to support an online experience in the long term -- after purchase, a publisher's relationship with the consumer ends.

"The operating infrastructure, after sale, continues to erode the economic value for sale, and so subscriptions ensure revenue to support the experience. If you factor in consumer expectations, the web is forcing that price point to zero. So what's needed is a model that accommodates a zero-dollar price point, but the revenue to operate very complicated infrastructures."

Many free-to-play games rely on ad support; we asked Crawford about ad-supported or blended business models. "Ads were the fantastic first business model for the internet, and it supported a content experience effectively But it's insufficient to support a content experience effectively," he said.

Concluded Crawford, "Virtual items are really the second great business model for the web."

Sister web site GameCareerGuide.com has a new book review of Edward Castronova’s fictional Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality.

Castronova looks into the not-so-distant future to imagine a new, and possibly realistic, world. Here’s an excerpt from the review by Raymond Hutchins:

“Famous for his stint as a video game expert on 60 Minutes and for his groundbreaking book Synthetic Worlds, self-described video game scholar Edward Castronova does what academics are not supposed to do: He writes a piece of easy-to-understand fiction.

His new book, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality, can be called fiction because it’s about the future, 20 to 40 years from now. Castronova describes a collision between virtual worlds and the real world that results in a better world. I’m not sure I totally buy that particular vision, but more on that shortly.

Today, at any one time, tens of millions of people dwell and interact in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life. Within a year or so, that number (worldwide) will regularly be in the hundreds of millions. Within ten years, the number could conceivably be counted in the billions. That translates into a large percentage of the human population choosing to spend a great deal of time every day in virtual worlds, as opposed to the ‘real’ world.

This shift represents a human exodus from the real world to the virtual world, a vast migration. Why are people choosing to do this and what are the implications of such a migration? What will it mean for our families, societies, and economies? What will it mean for our personal relationships and our other relationships, including the one with our government? Government? Yes, this relationship in particular will be affected, as Castronova sees it.”

Read the complete book review on GameCareerGuide.com.

TechCrunch is reporting on San Francisco-based startup RocketOn, who's just raised $5 million in funding from the D.E. Shaw Group (in addition to $.8 million they already raised). They're developing a 2D world, currently in alpha, that's reportedly accessible across any site through an embeddable widget.

It sounds pretty much like a chat tool with avatars that can walk around, although they can enter themed chat areas that look like rooms. It's also got the personality-based functionality slate -- profiles, fame, items -- that seems to have become standard modus operandi for these products, especially when they're angled at kids -- in addition to a profanity blocker, TechCrunch calls it "fuzzy looking".

But TechCrunch also noticed the strangeness in targeting a web-based product like this at kids. The appeal in most kids' online worlds is that they're closed and fully moderated -- kids can't travel from the Webkinz world, for example, into an inappropriate area. But using widgets, of course, essentially means web-as-platform, and that's another can of worms.

The Alpha is closed, so there's no way to check it out for ourselves. But what's interesting is that more and more products seem to be departing the "virtual world" and heading for the web, either leveraging existing web-based social networks or adding game-like functionality or avatar-based interactivity to the regular old browser.

It's an interesting strategy as an experiment with principles of online interaction, but it's perhaps prudent to wonder how much longevity the idea really has. Consumers enjoy interactivity, but they also enjoy simplicity, and I'm sure a good many users wonder, "when can a web page just be a web page?" The internet plays such a huge functional role in our daily lives nowadays that it's hard to imagine that everyone wants to make it a game -- after all, isn't that what games and online worlds are for? Current trends promise, though, that the boundaries that separate digital media by definitions are softening, so it certainly remains to be seen.

[RocketOn Gets $5M For Embeddable Virtual Kids World | TechCrunch]

Audio tool developer Vivox has announced that Metaversum, Simutronics and Stratics have all selected Vivox's voice integration services for their respective technology, and the company has also added enhanced features.

Metaversum has integrated Vivox voice services into its Twinity virtual world, enabling users to speak to one another in 3D spatial audio in groups or on private channels.

Simutronics will now offer the Vivox Precision Studio SDK as an embedded technology option within its HeroEngine MMO development platform. Developers can now employ Vivox's voice solutions in MMO development.

MMO portal Stratics will provide Vivox services to its claimed 500,000 subscribers, including voice, buddy lists, presence indicators and other features.

Vivox product management vice president and co-founder Monty Sharma commented, "The Vivox Network brings unprecedented scale and support to gamers globally. Our focus from day one has been to give game developers new tools to increase immersion and build community. We are pleased to add these companies to the Vivox Network.”

The Sanrio-branded toys have been a cross-cultural mainstay for both East and West for many years now, and now an online world themed around Hello Kitty is entering a closed beta. The Hello Kitty Online world includes London, Paris, Tokyo and Moscow, in addition to the more fantastic Flower Kingdom area.

Details are scant at the moment, but the site currently leaves room for an item mall, and the info points out that community-based activities and in-game commerce will be part of a more traditional MMO experience. The game will integrate with the SanrioTown social networking site -- avatars in the Hello Kitty world will correspond to social networking blogs, video, messaging and email.

It's another example of a brand with a broad following creating a networked online world, and given the broad family of Hello Kitty characters -- Badtz-Maru the penguin, Pochacco the puppy, and My Melody (who knows exactly what kind of animal she is) are all joining in.

The clever PC gaming veterans of Rock Paper Shotgun, who reported on the closed beta, note that Firefox browser tabs cut off the site's header name so that it reads "Welcome To Hell..." but the screenshots look quite cute, actually.

[Thanks, RPS!]

The borough council of Barnsley, England, is using ActiveWorlds' software to use 3D environments for education. The environment includes reading and writing exercises against the backdrop of a story, which asks students to follow clues to determine what has happened to the residents.

Each child participating gets an avatar and they can interact with one another. The students can share the information they learn and then discuss in class, as the overall objective is to strengthen reading, writing and comprehension skills.

According to Computer Weekly, which reported on the school's program, 10 schools in total are currently using ActiveWorlds, and these schools say that it's been a success so far, with the borough council considering deploying the program at additional schools.

The council's ICT consultant, Paul Reese, told Computer Weekly, "We thought we could use it to raise boys' attainment, because we thought the computer environment would appeal to them. But the whole class has been more engaged and motivated and the teachers say the quality of their work has been better."

[Schools using virtual world to teach reading and writing skills | Computer Weekly]

Startup developer-publisher Sparkplay Media has announced that it has secured $4.25 million in financing from Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks.

The company says it will use the funds to expand development of its first MMO, Earth Eternal, as well as other browser-based 3D multiplayer games.

Sparkplay was founded by former Iron Realms (Achaea) principals Matt Mihaly, Chris Kohnert and David Kaye, and the management team also includes veteran development consultant Martin Best as VP of production. The company indicates that its vision encompasses both MMOs and virtual worlds.

Said Mihaly, "We’ve been self-financing, and thus bootstrapping, for two years now and are incredibly excited about the chance to expand and accelerate our plans. We’re developing a different kind of game: one that combines compelling traditional MMO gameplay with new experiences that can be shared with friends on social networks and beyond."

Disney.com is reporting record web traffic for January 2008, crediting "strong performance in virtual worlds" for the boost. In particular, the company says the recently-launched Pirates of the Caribbean Online was a "major factor."

The company adds that comparisons to prior periods look rosier thanks to the inclusion of Club Penguin to Disney's stat counts, noting that co-promotions have helped boost performance and cross-visitation across both sites.

Disney also says that all of its community-based online activities are doing well, and that 40 million avatars have been created across its network. Its XD community site has seen 1.3 million personal channels created, and Disney Fairies users have created more than 4.5 million custom fairies, the company says.

Walt Disney Internet Group EVP and head of Disney Online Paul Yanover commented, "We couldn’t be more thrilled with this new Disney.com traffic record. Over the past year our team has worked hard to innovate and push the boundaries of visitor engagement with Disney’s franchises. Key to our approach is a focus on virtual worlds and community-driven programs. As an example, we’re particularly excited with the response we’re seeing to Pirates Online.”

Market research Strategy Analytics has launched new research into various factors required to capitalize on virtual world trends, looking into consumer behavior, benefits to business and other issues.

The firm says "virtualphiles" and evolving gamers have historically been the main interest group for the market, but believes that the marketplace is now mainstreaming toward commercialization. The firm plans to analyze corporations attempting to attract and engage users and address their needs, in order to determine best practices and critical benchmarks.

While virtual worlds, such as Second Life have attracted millions of early adopters, virtualphiles and evolving gamers for several years, only recently has the marketplace appeared to have turned the corner toward serious commercialization. Through programs of qualitative and quantitative research, Strategy Analytics is examining the challenges facing corporate attempts to attract and motivate consumers, develop internal applications and address the needs of potential business-to-business customers in virtual worlds.

Strategy Analytics president Harvey Cohen commented, "Virtual worlds represent an evolutionary step in the convergence of digital content, the internet, and consumer behavior through digital devices. Strategy Analytics is exploring the factors necessary to succeed in this environment. Companies like IBM, Cisco, Dell, Vodafone, GE, and Intel are pioneers in this commercialization. Strategy Analytics analysts are focusing on the metrics for success and the drivers for consumer adoption."

IBM is set to launch a free multiplayer online game, titled PowerUp, which challenges teens to save a fictional planet from ecological disaster. As part of the company's broader educational initiative, the MMO will launch February 16th, 2008.

The game features three missions for solar, water and wind power that must be solved, either by players alone or in groups, before various environmental crises destroy the planet. IBM says it developed the online world to support educators in engaging children on environmental issues, leveraging kids' interest in virtual worlds and games. Interaction between players is restricted to phrase-based avatar chat, IBM says, to ensure safety.

IBM says it took 16 months to develop the online game, with advice from nearly 200 teens in the Connecticut Innovation Academy. IBM's TryScience team from the New York Hall of Science worked with The Tech Museum in San Jose, California and the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the activities and game content.

The game will be accompanied by classroom lesson plans associated with the topics presented in the online experience, and will also include an interactive module to educate kids on 3D technologies used in virtual world building.

IBM international foundation president Stanley S. Litow said, "Innovation is the key to competitiveness in today's globally integrated economy, but just when we need it to skyrocket, interest in math and science has been declining in the United States. American competitiveness demands more interest in math and science by students. Virtual worlds and 3D are an unexplored resource in education. We asked our best researchers to incorporate the use of this technology into traditional educational curriculum."