Open Ocean Blog

It’s really a hard job to decide into which companies to invest. We at Open Ocean have talked with around 60 companies the last few months to find those that we think have a great potential and that would benefit from our involvement.

One company that more than well matched our investment criterias was Ironstar, that makes the MoiPal virtual world. With more than 100,000 registered users they are definitely a company to watch out for.

I have always been interested in virtual worlds and see how the communities around them continue to grow. The thing that really stands out to me with MoiPal, is the way it combines the social networking aspects similar to Facebook, with the caring of your online character, like you do with Tamagotchis or in games like Sims.

MoiPal has also open interfaces and engages other developers to expand the MoiPal world in their own, often unexpected, directions. Open interfaces are extremely important for a software to succeed today; For example, it was thanks to its open interfaces that MySQL got connections to all major programming languages and tools! This was something we could never have done by ourselves.

I think it’s important that you learn when you play (as long as it doesn’t take away the enjoyment of the game!). I think it will be easy to add more educational aspects into MoiPal; For example by making it easier to communicate with other “Pals” that has other languages and backgrounds. By building bridges to make the world a ’smaller place’ we make it easier for people to understand and eventually respect each other. I personally like to invest in ideas that have a good social aspect!

On the business side, I found it really funny, when I heard that Lordi performed a virtual concert in MoiPal for thousands of players wearing virtual Lordi masks. I can envision this to be a major channel to launch youth brands in the future. When we reach a million users, I would hope we could launch for instance the H&M Spring collection simultaneously in MoiPal and in the real world. Then youngsters could buy the same trendy outfit, both for themselves and for their Pal.

I know that the audience of this blog is unlikely to be users of MoiPal. I hope you will still find this information about MoiPal interesting; If you have young children it’s likely that you will find them at MoiPal and then it’s good to know that it’s a good and safe place for them to be in!

It’s now more than a week since I left Sun and I have been very busy with old commitments; I had one talk at the Tampere University about “Open source licensing and how this affects quality” and a keynote about “Open Source Licensing” for the “2nd Symposium of the HyperTransport Center of Excellence” in Mannheim, Germany.

My web site, askmonty.org, is coming around nicely but it will take a couple of more weeks to add some missing information to it. After that I will start working on the Maria, MariaDB and MySQL code bases for real.

The most exiting thing that has happened so far, is that my investment company “Open Ocean” have just closed a funding round with “Web of Trust” i.e. WOT. I will take a seat on the company’s Board of Directors.

What I like about WOT is that it solves a practical problem I have often experienced myself when I browse and want to buy things from Web sites: “Can I really trust this web site with my personal information, like my credit card”. In addition WOT solves the problem in an elegant and user friendly way; Easy enough so that anyone can use it.

So what is then WOT? WOT is a popular and free browser add-on that works with Firefox and Explorer. It offers you information whether a web site is known to be involved in Internet scams, identity theft, spyware, spam or if it’s just an unreliable online shop.

WOT provides safety ratings to search results when using Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Digg and other popular sites. The Website rating information is continuously updated by the WOT user community and numerous trusted sources, such as listings of from numerous malware and phishing sites.

I encourage everyone to try out WOT to get a better Internet experience. You should consider registering as a WOT user to be able to rate web sites.

In addition, if you encounter a web site that is un-trustworthy, please rate it trough WOT to tell other Internet users about your experience to save them from the possibly trouble you suffered. Also, if you really like a web site or if you get excellent service from it, please use WOT and tell others about this!

I hope we can all work together and make the Internet a place where you can easily know where it’s safe to browse and shop!

You can find a lot more information about WOT, including downloading it, from http://www.mywot.com. If you are using Firefox, you can install it by using the menu option “tools/add-ons”, click on “get add-ons” and do a search after “WOT”.