Sulake, the company behind the popular Habbo Hotel, a virtual world for teenagers with 14,600,000 montly unique visitors, has come out with a new service, Bobba Bar. Bobba Bar is virtual bar where, according to Sulake, you can meet and make friends. And it’s not just any virtual bar, it’s a virtual bar for 18-year-olds and over, so teenagers stay away.

The Finnish social gaming firm Ironstar Helsinki has announced appointing a new CEO Tiina Zilliacus and expanding its platform reach to Facebook. Ironstar Helsinki runs a social gaming world MoiPal, which up until now has been available on the web and as a downloadable mobile application.

Episode: VMC #168 Edmund Edgar - Social Media & Virtual Worlds in Japan

Edgar is an information technology consultant based in Tokyo (Japan) so thought to capture on video some of his thoughts and info about social media & virtual worlds in Japan.

We shot this video in a restaurant, quite noisy, that’s why during our chat I had to keep an eye on the screen to check the equalizer of the track we were recording.

Enjoy it!

Muxlim, the world’s largest online community, and is based in Finland, has launched the world’s first virtual world for muslims, Muxlim Pal. As the name implies, the virtual world wants to be the user’s virtual friend instead of a virtual representation of the user.

According to TechCrunch UK (blog post here) Muxlim, the Finnish born Muslim social network, is launching a virtual world especially Muslims in mind.  This will be much like the other virtual worlds we are familiar with such as The Second Life apart from the Muslim specific features.
TechCrunch UK reports:

3D Technologies R&D, an Estonian Tartu-based startup founded in 2006, is developing an ultralight XML-like standard for better showing interactive 3D and 2D content on the web than is possible with HTML. The cross-platform standard is called 3DMLW – Three Dimensional Markup Language for Web, which is licensed under GPL. The company also provides also an independent plug-in for web browsers to display 3DMLW.

In my opinion this is a terrific example that demonstrate the value of virtual worlds like Second Life.

Let’s try to step out of the fishbowl for a while…