November 6, 2006; 04:40 AM
Virtua announced the latest update to its online
community designed for media, gaming and creative businesses. New
features include a dedicated articles and reviews section, an easy to
use gallery, drag and drop file storage, customisable calendar and over
thirty ways to subscribe to iVirtua, including del.icio.us, Windows
Mobile and RSS2PDF.
iVirtua was founded in March of 2006; primarily by Sam England (16) at
the time, and William Tildesley (17); based in the UK, with high
aspirations.
New Features
iVirtua has made vast
improvements to its community focusing on what customer really wanted.
The community team spent a lot of time discussing what could be
improved and what customers wanted to see in iVirtua. Community Manager
Jakob Rauschenbach said, “A lot of our customers not only wanted to
come to iVirtua to read and discus the latest business news but also a
place to relax and have fun; this is why we’ve introduced our Games
Arcade as well as the ability to play online games such as Battlefield
and Counter Strike on our own dedicated server with customers from the
community. Customers also wanted a place were they could read articles
and reviews and this is another feature iVirtua has announced. We hope
all these features new and updated will keep our customers coming back
as well as introducing new customers.”
These new features
include an articles and reviews section, over thirty ways to subscribe
to iVirtua, instant syndication from large sites including gamespot and
Microsoft giving the customer all the information they want in one
place, file storage, gallery, loyalty points (giving customers access
to more features!), Live Chat, A games arcade (over 200+ games), the
ability to play computer games online, better online security, bugs
fixed, inclusion of AJAX features and Search Engine Optimization (for
better search engine rankings).
The community is now run from
its own dedicated server from the London Meridian Gate Redbus
Interhouse located in the Docklands area of London, this dedicated
server allows our customers to access the community from around the
world without any problems.
iVirtua is a powered by integrated
collection of web applications and scripts that are developed in-house
which together create the iVirtua WOS. They hope this creates an easy
to use, rich and immersive community experience. More information about
the iVirtua WOS (Web Operating System) can be found at:
http://www.ivirtuaforums.com/wos.php
Looking Ahead
Jay
Taylor (iVirtua Public and Customer Relations) said, “The new features
which iVirtua offers will allow us to increase our overall percentage
of customers as well as allowing customers to aggregate, share and read
the latest articles, reviews and discussions without having to turn on
their computer. We hope that this will encourage customers to use
iVirtua as their main source of information concerning media, gaming
and creative business news.”
This update will allow iVirtua to
stay ahead of competition in what is becoming a competitive market to
provide customers with the content they want. Features such as the in
built Plusmo aggregator will allow users to quickly access content from
their mobile phone which is all part of iVirtua’s plan to make the
community accessible not just from a computer. Sam England (Development
and Community) said, “With the advent on mobile browsing iVirtua needs
to set itself apart as a contender, we also have plans to make the
community accessible on both the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3, which
will both have opera browsers built in.”
iVirtua employs some
of the finest writers from inside the gaming, media and creative
industry world this means that their members get exclusive articles and
reviews as well as world exclusive news relating to the creative
business sector. This is another reason why their customers use them
over other communities.
iVirtua will soon be releasing a
Podcast on the topics covered by the iVirtua Community, and also they
are going to release a learning environment with HTML, Computing and
Media courses all costing 99p.