Frenzoo - free your ztyle

Goodbye Alpha, we hardly knew you!

So, after pulling many long days and late nights (even working through a Category T8 Typhoon!) we have started our closed beta ^_^

For now it's a private affair.  Why?  There are a couple of things we need to fix and some rough edges to smooth out, and then we'll be ready to open it up to everyone... In the meantime, here is a  screencap to give you a feeling - hope you like it..

Big respect to all those ztylists who helped volunteer to translate and test out the site during our alpha:

•   Alice
•   HKBaby
•   Christy
•   Mondaine
•   Mikani
•   Eliut
•   Birgit
•   Esther
•   Yan
•   Moon
•   Dragnmastralex
•   Yuki
•   Kokiyi
•   Kelly
•   Emily
•   Kim
•   Hitomo
•   Yumi
•   Jing
•   Anita
•   Koey
•   Candy
•   Robbert
•   Leo
•   Terry
•   Geoffrey

We have fixed tons of things in past days based on your feedback - Thanks a million, you guys are cool and see you on the beta!

Finally - thanks to the team who pulled it together.  This is just the beginning and we have a lot of work to do over the next few weeks, but it's still nice to take a minute and enjoy this milestone.  We'll all be catching up our overdue sleep over the weekend, and yeah maybe watch a little Olympics  :]

PS - Beta testers, our forums have just been set up at http://www.frenzoo.com/beta/forum.php

Upcoming industry events.. catch us in person!

Hey, we're going to be quite busy spreading the word about Frenzoo later this year :] 

Here is a list of industry events we'll be joining - if you'd like to catch up feel free to drop us a note - we'd love to meet you!

July
28-29/7 - Asia Web Technology Conference - Frenzoo is leading a workshop - TBC

September
3-4/9 - Virtual Worlds Expo, Los Angeles - we're attending and doing demos
18/9 - Startup Lunch 2.0 and networking at Frenzoo office
24/9 - What's Cool at Social Networking - with Asia Digital Marketing Association in HK - we're presenting
29-30/9 - Digital Marketing Asia 2008 - we're the chairperson, and presenting

October
6-8/10 - Virtual Worlds Forum, London - we're attending and doing demos
20-21/10 - Virtual Worlds London - we're attending and doing demos
22 - 24/10 - Unite 2008 Copenhagen - we're attending and doing demos

November
5-6/11 - Consumer Insights Asia - we're the chairperson and presenting
18/11 - Cyberport Venture Capital Forum 2008 - we're presenting
25-26/11 - Ad:Tech Shanghai - we're joining panel discussion - TBC

December
1-2/12 - Innovative Marketing and Branding for Higher Education, Singapore - we're presenting - TBC
4-5/12 - Innovative Marketing and Branding for Higher Education, Hong Kong - we're presenting - TBC

We'll keep this post updated so check back for the most updated schedule!

OMG! We are in Alpha!

It’s time for you to get ready, as we’ve just started our alpha ^^
If you’ve registered your interest to join in the testing, thank you!  We’ll be in touch with some of you in the next couple of days. For now we’re keeping the number of invited ztylists pretty limited, but each week as we add more features and fix more bugs we’ll invite more to join.  And for the rest, don’t worry, we’ll invite you to join us soon as beta is not far away!

Why are we launching this alpha?  We really want your opinions, suggestions and help to iron out the rough edges before we launch.  We want to hear all you think - both what you love and what annoys you, what rocks heroically, what fails epically!  Note - For alpha testers you can leave your comments directly in the alpha webpage comment box (shown as the picture on the left), or message us directly.  We promise we’ll will listen to every single bit of your feedback, so please let us know what you think!

Free your Ztyle!

Ceci – Community Princess

Review of Lively - Google's 3D chat offering

Lively is the new 3D chat world Google launched overnight...

We've played with it for a while this morning and we think it's not only simple and fun, but a great thing for us in the industry.

Although there isn't really much overlap in focus and graphical quality with what we're launching with Frenzoo (Google seems to be aiming at IMVU), it still helps a lot to raise the whole level of awareness and acceptance of web 3D avatars - which makes us pretty excited as we're preparing to launch :]

Our review of it is here at the industry blog VR Fashion..check it out!

Love at first site?!

So today we're pulling back part of the curtain and revealing our new avatar designs :]

Hope you all enjoy the look our talented art team created !

During the design process, we had a goal to make our characters that were sophisticated and stylish, yet still had an element of cute and fun.  We also wanted them to feel very personal for our ztylists (more on that later).  And of course look great tailored in the latest mix-and-match fashion...

So how did we do?!  Love or hate?  In or out?

Would love to hear your feedback, pls leave your comments here!!

Simon - Chief Frenzoo

A new look...

Recently we at Frenzoo have created our new brand image.  The new logo's style and color is more feminine & fashionable, representing our focus on fashion and style. We add a tagline under the logo to help delivering the message of what we are doing – "free you ztyle" -we hope both girls and guys can express your sense of fashion or style in our platform. Now the logo isn't so serious or too young, cute, so we hope you guys like it and the coming up image!

 

Kogi - Frenzoo Art Lead

Frenzoo at APAC Web Technology Conference

Team Frenzoo was invited to give a talk at the first annual Asia Pacific Web Technology conference being held all this week.

Yesterday, I presented in the Next Generation Web, sandwiched between Yahoo and Microsoft ^_^ The Microsoft presentation by Harris Chan included a lot of very cool examples of Silverlight in action, including in the upcoming NBC site of the Beijing Olympic.  The way the demo app handled live streaming video was impressive, especially picture in picture in picture... (you get the picture) and live commentary and bookmarking.  Once Silverlight penetration picks up it should open up a lot more interesting rich internet apps. Actually we had evaluated Silverlight before for our new web approach, but as with Flash, the lack of hardware accelerated 3D meant it wasn’t suited yet for our high quality avatar graphics  for the moment.  So we took another approach, which is turning out really well.

My talk yesterday was all about the transition of 2D to 3D across the digital entertainment industry, from film and animation (great example is Imagi's work on Astroboy) to console, to of course what’s happening with 3D avatars and big brands like Nike and Ikea getting involved in them.  There was a lot of discussion and some interesting audience questions, such as when we could expect to see the first full-fledged 3D MMOs appearing on the web (my personal prediction – this year)

This Friday a few from the team are giving a in depth workshop at the same event.  The topic is on our lessons learnt in building a new web based 3D service platform. Pretty excited about it, the registrations for our session are full already, and we expect a few of our coming alpha testers to be there.  These workshops are always a great chance to interact with some interesting folks from the industry as well as share a sneak peak into our coming product.

Simon - Chief Frenzoo

Big step forward...

Just last week we hit a BIG milestone in our development of the new web platform.

For the first time we brought up dynamic selection and swapping of our fashion assets, displaying within a 3D scene.  This is the core technology for our new platform, so it was pretty exciting to see it up and running live! 

The 3D rendering looked very smooth when the camera rotated around, even on a near pre-historic test laptop in the office.  We tested it out on MAC / Safari as well as Vista and XP with both Internet Explorer and Firefox. After a bit of debugging the team also got it running fine on the new Firefox 3 RC1 and IE 8 betas (Side note - it's really hard to downgrade from IE8 to IE7!)

Congrats to our engineering team... big milestone met, a big step forward.  On to the next milestone!

Simon - Chief Frenzoo

New Industry Blog - Fashion Tech Trends

Hi there, for those who are interested in interactive fashion and digital lifestyle, take a look at a new Fashion Tech industry blog: vrfashion.blogspot.com

The first post is a detailed review of five of the best Fashion 2.0 websites including Polyvore, StyleHive, MyItThings, ThisNext and StyleMob.  Check it out!

Update - New articles include a look at Virtual Hair, avatar fashion and virtual mirrors...enjoy!

Simon - Chief Frenzoo

Surprise BBQ in our new office

All work and no play = no way..

Last night we held a little surprise BBQ to celebrate the birthday of our fearless dev leader and CTO Kev. 

Engineering team have been so busy on development in past weeks he almost forgot his birthday was coming up... so it really was a surprise.  The GTA-4 inspired "Grand Theft Kevin" poster and T-shirts and photo-montage Starbucks cup went down very well:

PS - these pics are from our new office, we recently moved to a bigger space in Sheung Wan, right in the heart of bustling Hong Kong Island.  The new setup is brilliant... lots of space in an reconverted studio, 19 floors up.  Old building so the rent is cheap.  Balcony with killer view, next to the MTR, comfy sofa, Nintendo WII, lots of 21" monitors for programmers...startup life is good!

Simon - Chief Frenzoo