VentureBeat

Pretty soon, we’ll all be hosting our own virtual worlds. VentureBeat has a new virtual scene today (you need a Windows computer to access it on the web), courtesy of Vivaty, which is launching its own widget to embed 3-D virtual scenes on any web page.

The Vivaty folks created our virtual scene in about half an hour. We can take the code for the scene and embed it on our page. It’s a cute way to invite readers to chat, join in a 3-D community, and stay engaged with our site longer. You can create your own character and talk with a virtual Matt Marshall or watch our video of the launch of the T-Mobile G1.

At least that’s the idea behind “Vivaty Everywhere.” By using Vivity’s tools to splice together a virtual scene, you can create a 3-D experience and embed it on any blog, site, brand or online destination. It’s a cut and paste process, making it easy to create virtual environments, said Keith McCurdy, chief executive.

One company that’s taking Vivaty up on this is Universal Music Group, debuting today with the “Queen Listening Lounge”. The 3-D scene lets users create avatars, or virtual characters, and converse with each other about Queen’s latest album. The album, “The Cosmos Rocks,” launches today. In the lounge, fans can watch Queen videos, listen to music, dance, chat and share trivia. As many as 15 characters can join a room at once. When one room fills up, Vivaty creates another to accommodate more users.

Universal will release the scene on a variety of social networks. Andie D’Avino, a spokeswoman for Universal Music Group, said the group will use the virtual scene for Queen to engage directly with fans as they listen to the new album. She said the group hasn’t yet used Second Life to do something similar. She said that Vivaty’s browser-based approach works well because downloads required by other virtual worlds represent a barrier to consumers who just want to check something out briefly.

Fans can even take the scene and embed it on their own fan sites. You can also put the scenes — which are entirely browser-based and thus require no download — on Facebook or AOL’s Instant Messenger chat platform. You can customize your world to embed anything with a URL, including text, photos, live videos and other digital content. Queen has an estimated 450,000 fans on Facebook.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Vivaty is launching a partner program today to let partners create branded scenes using Vivaty’s open platform.

Vivaty has received $9.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures. It was founded in 2007 and has 25 employees. The company started its virtual scene service on Facebook and AIM in May. McCurdy said it’s easy to create the rooms using standard 3-D animation tools.

Vivaty has competition from Lively by Google, a new virtual scene application launched this summer. Lively can also be embedded on any web page. Lively had a big spike in traffic in June, but it leveled off by August, according to Compete.com. But traffic at Lively is still much higher than it is at Vivaty’s beta site.

IMVU, which has a 3-D chat and virtual room business, also competes with Vivaty. McCurdy says Vivaty will focus on selling virtual goods over time.

During the summer, Vivaty did pilot programs with Target and Coke. The company has a bunch of templates for scenes now, including a half-dozen apartments, a beach scene and others.

Here’s a link to the VentureBeat virtual space (update: we disabled it while we’re fixing the code):

Report: YouTube still trying to figure out how to make money — Lots of people have been wondering if the online video site has somehow figured out how to make big money from its huge amounts of web traffic. The answer, according to a Wall Street Journal article (sub required) is, as we’ve been hearing: Nothing mind-blowing is happening yet. Two sources say YouTube will make around $200 million this year, which is short of Google’s hopes. Watch the video to learn more about future monetization plans. However, the article includes some other interesting information about monetization plans. Like the fact that the company is looking to introduce user-hated pre-roll and post-roll ads that run before and after videos.

Mass. governor signs onto ambitious clean energy bill — Among other things, homeowners and business will be able to rent solar panels from utility companies to avoid paying high purchase costs, as well as sell excess energy from the panels and wind turbines.

Vivaty’s virtual world launches in public beta — The company lets social network and instant mssage users go into three dimensional virtual rooms and chat, and do things like choose the room’s decor — decor that can include their photos and other info from social networks. Google also launched a for-now-less-complete 3D chat service today, called Lively, that aims to do much of the same. Maybe, as Allen Stern at Centernetworks says, Vivaty can out-innovate Google on the 3D IM chat room market.

Ocean fertilizer startup Planktos is back, “with science” — The company wanted to fertilize every ocean with iron to produce phytoplankton blooms and thereby reduce carbon emissions. We’ve previously mentioned its re-opening; Earth2Tech has more details but wasn’t impressed with many aspects of the company’s return, including its new name, Planktos Science.

mio knight rider gps from knight rider online on Vimeo.
The Knight Rider GPS system, by Mio, now has the voice of the robot car, KITT, inside — At some point when Knight Rider was a popular television show, somebody must have predicted that one day everyone would have a car that could give them directions, just like KITT. The show’s still-active fan site, Knight Rider Online, was suitably given the KITT-voice scoop. See video for more.

Rosetta Stone sues smaller competitor for infringing on its search results– The smaller competitor, Rocket Dog Languages, allegedly bought Google search ads that negatively described the company. The Wall Street Journal has more (sub required).

Make’n Movies launches movie script idea review site — Submit up 300-500 words, post it on the site’s database, and see what other people think.

Xiaonei, the Facebook clone of China, launches its own developer platform — Built from scratch, not using the OpenSocial platform standard nor Facebook’s licensable platform, the Xiaonei “Open Platform” will compete against the planned platform of rival Chinese network 51.com. Silicon Valley venture firm DCM is creating a fund to support third-party developers on the platform, similar to the fund created by Accel, the Founders Fund and Facebook itself for Facebook’s platform.

MyYahoo launches developer platform — Everyone likes to launch developer platforms these days, including Yahoo, which now has one for its start page web service, MyYahoo. ReadWriteWeb has a good review of it, here.

Aircell, aviation broadband technology company, closes third phase of $265 million financing — The company promises to offer mobile internet and phone access on planes, as you can tell from this picture on its web site.

Shareholders approve $18.9 billion Activision-Vivendi Games merger — The combined entity is now the world’s largest gaming company. Gamespot has more.

MIT researchers announce nanoscale lithographic technology, to create more advanced chips — The results promise improvements in a wide ranges of chips from those used in computer memory systems, to integrated circuits, to solar cells and other devices. The report is here.