ROCKETON Draws $5M for Parallel Virtual World

ROCKETON, currently in closed alpha, announced today that it has drawn $5 million in funding in Series B financing from the D. E. Shaw Group, for a total of close to $5.8 million in financing. The company says it is working on a Web-based virtual world that transcends the single site approach and creates a parallel, avatar-based experience on almost every website available. The team has been working on the project since May 2007. "What caught our attention about ROCKETON is the potential for a new, real-time social interaction between people online," says Michael Banks, a senior vice president of D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P. "We asked ourselves, what if you took the next logical step beyond Facebook or Second Life? How would that look? The result is a new way of experiencing the Web."