Here is some interesting reading about VFK and its makers:
"August 25, 2008
Virtual Family Kingdom Developer Launches as dimension5 Labs
dimension5 Labs announced its launch at the end of last week as a new virtual worlds developer with its own platform. D5's work is best known in Virtual Family Kingdom, which launched in beta mode earlier this year as a homemade replacement for Disney's closing Virtual Magic Kingdom. dimension5 says that it closed off the beta at 100,000 users, but plans to go public in the coming weeks as proof of "not only [having] the technical skill to produce a solid virtual world, but the marketing acumen to make it a public success." While Virtual Family Kingdom may show off the company's technical prowess, the timing of the beta and the public reaction to Virtual Magic Kingdom's shutdown certainly helped with the marketing.
dimension5 plans to offer advertising in its existing worlds (only VFK is announced) as well as custom Web-based environments on its proprietary platform.
The D5 platform is casting a wide net. It's coded in ActionScript3 and is XMPP-compliant, which dimension5 touts as an advantage for companies looking to add a browser-based, 3D virtual world to current communications efforts, but the system also comes with a backend aimed at COPPA-compliant moderation for kids under 13.
D5 has a larger background in Web design and direct mail advertising software as well, so it'll be interesting to see what direction its new platform takes the company in.
"We wanted to make sure that we could safely approach any company looking to build a virtual environment and tell them on no uncertain terms that we could build what they needed," VP of Marketing Justin Handley said in a statement. "The only way we could see to do that was to create one of our own that demonstrated a rich feature set, highly detailed graphic design, and scalable stability into the hundreds of thousands.""
found at:
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/08/virtual-family.html#moreAlso:
http://d5labs.com/http://d5labs.com/virtual-worlds/I admit it, I don't know what a lot of this stuff means
but there must be a smart one among us...
~Dream