Separately, when I look at Gaia and Habbo, and I admire a lot of what they have done, the first thing that stands out is that we're 3D. They're 2D or 2.5D. Our emphasis on the beauty, the subtle moves of the avatar, just head shifts when they're standing still, all enhances the experience of projecting yourself into your avatar. You can cause your avatar to move and shake hands with other avatars. Those are things the others haven't focused on. Also we have an older demographic.

VWN: It's interesting to hear you talk about the avatars. They may be expressive and beautiful, but they seem more cartoony than realistic to me. Is that a challenge with the older demographic?

CR: I think you'll find a range of avatars and what people are choosing inside of IMVU Credits. Some people choose kind of an anime look, exactly as you're saying, and historically our product has more of that look overall. We're actually in the process of choosing some of our graphic design and interface to look more consistent. A huge part of self-expression, which is another differentiator in 3D, is your ability to express yourself through your head and eyes and clothing, where people come in as fans of anime, punk, goth, emo, or Latino culture.

I think the observation that graphically we have looked more anime with a rounded face, you're absolutely right. Right now, we're tending to shift some of our graphic approach to convey a broader range of what people are actually choosing in terms of their own avatar. It isn't just the round face approach, there's a range of things.

VWN: Speaking of your homepage and interface. I'm looking at it right now. It's always been interesting to me in the AdWords you put out that IMVU Credits isn't called a virtual world and on the homepage it's branded as "3D chat." Why go that direction instead of calling it a "virtual world"?

CR: What we've been doing, and we'll continue to evolve with the language as we experiment on how to describe what this is, is we tend not to use the language of virtual worlds overtly because we try to get at the benefit of what we're doing.

When people hear "virtual world" they tend to conjure up images of something more focused on the world. As we're focused on the avatar, that's what we try to focus on. And the focus on the IM and messaging is something that's been with us for a long time. That's in our community, so "3D chat" is just another way of trying to get at that communication with the special avatars.