Lots of happenings at the old Web3D Consortium. The new web site designed by the folks at out of the blue design was launched. The new site shows what happens when a professional designer gets into the act, it looks mahvahlous. In addition to the new face lift some major events also took place last week.
The new Board of Directors (BoD) and the new Technical Review Board (TRB) were announced. The results of these elections can be seen at the Consortium web site. There are a fair number of old familiar faces and also a fair bit of new blood, always good for an organization of this type.
The licensing arrangements are also still in the works for the Cosmo software and it's relationship to the Consortium. These should be announce real-soon-now. However a possible sticking point (haven't heard eitherway) is, believe it or not, another shake up in corporate VRML land. Computer Associates International is buying PLATINUM Technologies. Yes that's right for a mere 4.5 billion dollars you too can own the mega-software company that just dumped the Cosmo folks!
Computer Associates (CA) is even bigger then PLATINUM and does however already have some interesting 3D products and some investments in the 3D world. Most notably, for our interest, the formerly known 3Name3D company and Viewpoint (the clip art folks). For our community the point-chick is going to be, whether she likes it or not, Cindy Reed-Ballreich, well know for her Nancy avatar, the MyTicketmaster project and more! At least that aspect bodes well. They also have a really cool networking product that makes extensive use of 3D called Unicenter TNG. You can literally fly around your global enterprise wide network spotting problems and managing net traffic.
To top it all off this was Tony Parisi's last week at PLATINUM...we wish you well! Yanno ya just can't make this stuff up!
One Year Ago in Focus on Web3D PROTOs for Dummies II: Creating Modular Prototypes