Connecting Worlds

Myrl.com Private Beta goes live today: answers, and invites, are coming… 

(London, UK, March 19, 2008) - Have you ever met aliens? Your time has come. People from multiple worlds scattered across the universe can now gather for the first time ever on the cross-worlds gateway to the Metaverse. Introducing Myrl, a Place for Avatars.

Millions of people are using more than 200 virtual worlds. Gartner Research estimates that 50 to 60 millions of net users will participate in virtual worlds by 2011.

While this is great, there is a problem: virtual worlds are walled-gardens and they don’t get along very well with the web.

This is why Myrl.com (which stands for My Real Life / My Role Life) is being developed: to open virtual worlds to the web and to bring virtual world users together.

To put it simply, Myrl is a collaborative platform for avatars enabling interaction between different virtual worlds and the web.

Myrl founder and CEO, Francesco D’Orazio, says: “We’ve been using virtual worlds for a few years now, but are frustrated by how closed they are. It’s really difficult to find out about interesting and curious stuff and to meet like-minded users. Our vision is to build a Metaverse where an avatar can move freely from one virtual world to the other following his interests and browsing content across multiple worlds rather than being trapped in a box. This is what we call worldshopping. And this is why we created Myrl.com.”

The platform is based on a combination of social networking and social ranking features, with a direct tie into virtual worlds. Myrl.com allows users to share their virtual life by publishing their avatar profile or items like places, events, videos, and news that every user can vote on to make them more visible. It’s basically a facebook/digg-like system for virtual worlds items.

The avatar profile is automatically updated in real-time from the virtual world to the web via a light-weight app called profiler, but information published can be selected by the avatar. So, no effort at all and still a lot of relaxation, fun and interesting discoveries.

Myrl.com opens today for private beta.

Currently the platform supports users from Second Life and There.com. Future plans are to support OpenSim worlds and to create relationships with virtual worlds such as Entropia, Active Worlds, Kaneva, HipiHi and Vast Park amongst the others, targeting a market of more than 30 millions users.

Myrl.com is based in London, UK and has received angel funding.

For more information please contact info [at] myrl.com

Visit Myrl at: http://www.myrl.com

Visit Myrl Blog at: http://www.connectingworlds.net