Mingleverse Announcement
Today, I am very sad to finally announce that Mingleverse Labs Inc. the developer of the very popular Mingleverse web based telecommunications service located at www.Mingleverse.com and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/mingleverseapp will end its service on March 1st, 2012.
I was proud that Mingleverse accomplished so much in its short history. We pioneered what I called Social Tele-presence; a simple way to allow hundreds of thousands people worldwide to talk while sharing pictures, videos, presentations and other rich media in a fun pseudo 2D/3D environment without subscribing to a costly service as well as winning many prestigious awards including one from Stanford University.
I want to thoroughly thank our loyal users for their support over the past years. It has been a true pleasure for all of us at Mingleverse to develop a truly unique communication service that reached so many people and grew so quickly in popularity. Mingleverse, still widely used today has well over 300,000 registered users, many hundreds of thousands of guest users and at our peak 500,000 monthly average users (MAU). I also extend my thanks to Facebook which helped us attract up to 5000 new subscribers a day from over 200 different countries and for about a year was the most popular live communication service on the Facebook platform.
In the past months I have done everything I can personally to keep the service alive but regrettably it is time to let go and to shutter the service. The main reason to close is the company was not able to recover in time after certain circumstances created a disappointing last minute collapse of our signed $5M Venture Capital lead term sheet and short term bridge financing. Subsequently, this left us in a difficult position and due to the lack of time and funding opportunities available (especially for Canada based technology companies); I had to finally make the difficult decision to shut down Mingleverse.
I have no doubt Mingleverse would have been extremely successful given our terrific team and our novel approach. Ultimately this unique telecommunications approach will now become a huge opportunity for someone else with deeper pockets than I. I have done all I can but without a sizable outside investment to continue to innovate and hire talent, we would not be able to compete with USA based companies with multi-million dollar R&D budgets and Venture Capital backed start-ups. Difficult to do technology is an expensive commitment.
Subscribers of our service will have until the end of February to find an alternative service before all accounts will be automatically terminated.
The Mingleverse staff and I want to thank each of you and express our sincerest gratitude for both your patronage and for your thousands of positive comments that we have received over the past two years. On behalf of the entire staff (Aaron, Alina, Lance, Daniel, Jack, Steven, Shannon and Len), I would sincerely like to thank all the subscribers, press, consultants, advisors, service providers to Mingleverse. I especially want to thank my few close friends who were angel investors and who continued to support the company. I also want to acknowledge YVP for their participation in the company. It has been a great pleasure mingling, meeting and working with you over the past years. I also want to wish my entire staff my best wishes in whatever new venture they decide to try. I will miss you all.
I look forward to 2012 where I will make a better commitment to fitness and reduce stress now that I have a little break. For sure I will be starting a new company or possibly working with another start up but one thing is for sure my best work is ahead of me.
My best wishes to all of you.
Ron Stevens
What We Like To Do In Visual Calls
After recent announcements by Google and Facebook, I tried to offer some perspective on video calling. My conclusion was that communications based on mutually live video are limited in their usefulness beyond close friends or family, often awkward and uncomfortable, and sometimes extremely unwelcome.
You are severely limited in the way you communicate. You can see your conversation partner, which may or may not be such a great idea on occasion, but you can’t go much further. In fact it is hard to multitask. I multitask more in social calls then on business calls. I am very polite on video, but others who may have lunch or use the bathroom while talking can be more than a little annoying. With the added sense of seeing (in addition to hearing and speaking) we often desire to combine a video call with a sense of touch or interaction. There is a limited way to do this in the most recent crop of video calling solutions or even in Chatroulette, which has never shed a certain perception that random video chats will involve body parts you really don’t want to see.
We have been doing an enormous amount of research on what it is that makes us stick around in calls that go beyond a simple audio experience, and it seems that adding webcam is interesting, but not the answer to what makes a call fun. Adding features that enable a higher level of interaction is what we believe to be the key to the future of telecommunications.
While I can’t quite talk about what visual experiences we are adding and working on right now, I can talk about the recent user experience we have seen on Mingleverse: The more interactive components to a conversation, the longer the duration and the more satisfied users tend to be when completing what has been dubbed a “visual call” or an “interactive call”.
Below is a chart that provides a few data points from our users which highlights our strong conviction that users enjoy a visual call much more and spend, as a result, more time in it, if they are given tools to make interaction a no-brainer. Voice-only communications last, for example, 2:39 minutes. Still to this day, we communicate using our voice, that’s how we tell a story or a pitch a business proposal, but if we add simultaneous picture sharing into our call, this lifts the time above 6 minutes. Not surprisingly, presentations engage people even more at more than 14 minutes, and watching YouTube videos together increases the average mingle call time to over 17 minutes… a 7x increase over talking alone!
Facebook+Skype Video Calling: The Impact
Both Facebook and Google are exploring the opportunity of video calling in their social communities. Facebook+Skype as well as Google Hangouts will have tremendous impact on the video calling industry and reshape the way we communicate at least with some of our friends. It is a scary scenario for those who have been offering products in this space as competing directly with Facebook and Google is a tough battle to win. However, there is good news as well, as more consumers will now get in touch with the innovation that is happening in the visual communication market.
Given its user base of 750 million subscribers, Facebook+Skype will provide an introduction to video calling to many people - people who simply did not know that free video calling has been available or people who simply did not feel knowledgeable enough setting up a video camera and audio system on their computer. The implication is that Facebook+Skype is not only entering a market, but is opening the video calling market on a much larger scale.
The challenge now (almost directly issued from Zuckerberg when he said Facebook will now look for companies/entrepreneurs that are innovating on their platform to promote) is to find a way to provide purpose and meaning to a video call beyond seeing your sweetheart on the other side of the world. With a soon to be exponential increase in the number of video calling users, there are plenty of opportunities for third-party providers to add value and differentiate themselves by providing unique utility to a video call and turn it into a “visual call”.
Facebook, Skype or Mingleverse
Interesting that we actually are in this conversation but it’s just in the context of a browser product we are experimenting with for validation and only on a desktop. While this article is true that we are becoming popular on desktop PC’s and Mac’s, that platform is not our only goal. While one to one or many to many video calling is intriguing to others it was never that intriguing to us! What everyone will see soon from Mingleverse is a completely new mobile product service that will help iOS and Android products deliver a truly advanced communications service that really take advantage of the power of tablets and smart phones but is far less burdensome on the network than video calling.
Our Visual Telecom Service VS. their Video Telecom Service:
I promise to help make Visual Telephone calls much more useful, engaging and fun over traditional telephony or video calls while being completely carrier friendly. Our “Visual Telecom” for mobile coming soon is unlike Video Telecom from Skype, FaceBook and Google for PCs and desktops;we think there is a much better visual experience and business to be had by all. Stay Tuned!
Mingleverse Has More Than 250,000 Registered Users!
Mingleverse has seen exceptional growth in 2011, adding more than 200,000 registered users since March of this year. About 2500 people are now signing up for Mingleverse every day. We are also seeing our users spending much more time in mingles, on average about 5:30 minutes, up from just over 3 minutes at the beginning of this year. The total time spent in MingleRooms this year has been an impressive 1.8 million minutes.
The Facebook Factor
Although Mingleverse itself is a separate platform and communication service, a major catalyst for our growth is our focused integration in Facebook as an app, which has proven to be tremendously popular. We found that people enjoy engaging in visual communication while spending time on Facebook and invite their friends to a spontaneous mingle. 96% of our users have taken advantage of the Mingleverse Facebook app. The most popular visual feature in a mingle call is to share YouTube videos: More than 200,000 YouTube videos have been watched this year already, and accumulated almost 30,000 hours of YouTube time inside Mingleverse.
Other Interesting Facts
- Mingleverse hosted more than 20,000 mingles in H1 2011
- More than 248,000 invites were sent in H1 2011
- More than 200 countries are now Mingling with North/South American & Asian countries being the most popular
- More than 200,000 non registered guests have used Mingleverse
More to come!
The first half of 2011 has been amazing for Mingleverse and we are excited to see Mingleverse being adopted around the world - our users are located in 213 different countries. We will continue to add new features and platforms in the second half of the year and introduce a range of new features. Stay tuned!
If you haven’t done so yet, check out the Mingleverse Facebook app.
Follow @mingleverse on Twitter and like us on Facebook!
You can also follow me on Twitter at @ronstevens22.
Understanding the Changes
I have been asked many times as a Canadian/American citizen to comment on the changing climate of politics, sports, religion and technology etc., where I am both an enthusiast and investor (technology of course). My goal here will be to add some clarity and knowledgeable commentary on technology, events and trends that I follow that will hopefully help others. For the record, I live in SF and Vancouver and pay taxes equally in both countries as well as starting, restarting and investing in companies in both countries. I was born in Canada but spent most of my life in USA and abroad (Europe and Asia) in the technology business which has worked out pretty well overall, but the rapidly changing landscape of social media technologies, politics, investing and entrepreneurship in both countries provides me with a bit of insight to hopefully help others with comments and explanations on the rapidly changing process that I have experienced 1st hand.
