Teleplace

» see teleplace.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Qwaq Forums shipped in 2007, built on the Croquet Project, which was built on Squeak, which was an open source Smalltalk. That chain of ancestry explains most of what the product did. Croquet came out of research by Alan Kay and David A. Smith, and its governing idea was that a shared 3D space should be a replicated simulation rather than a thin client waiting on a server. Everyone in the room ran the same computation and stayed in step with everyone else. Qwaq took that research and sold it as a workplace.

The money showed up on 28 November 2007: seven million dollars from Alloy Ventures and Storm Ventures. The customer list read like proof of permanence. Chevron ran it, so did the United States Department of Agriculture, and so did two branches of the American military. Stanford had rooms in it. Hundreds of enterprise accounts did, and the rooms were not decorative. You could drag a PowerPoint onto a wall and everyone saw the same slide, edit a document that stayed edited, share an application window while your avatar stood next to it.

In 2009 the company renamed itself after its product and became Teleplace. That is usually a sign of confidence. Two years later, in May 2011, it released the whole platform as OpenQwaq under GPL v2, held back only the video subsystem because the codecs were licensed and could not be given away. The open source announcement was written as a strategy. In the same month the company laid off most of its staff and outsourced support, which is what the strategy actually was.

This is enterprise software sold mostly to American federal agencies and oil companies, so it never had a consumer moment to miss. Nobody in Ankara was ever going to trip over Teleplace the way you trip over a chat client. The part that travels is underneath it: Smalltalk survived the nineties as a teaching language and a research artifact, and this was one of the last times anyone tried to sell a serious business product built on top of it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what you actually did in it ~

A Teleplace forum was a room with a floor plan. You had an avatar, other people had avatars, and the walls were live surfaces rather than textures. The pitch to a company in 2008 was that a phone bridge and a screen share are two tools pretending to be one meeting, and this was actually one. It ran as a download rather than in a browser, which in 2008 was normal and by 2012 was a death sentence.

3D ICC, which picked up the pieces, eventually shipped a web viewer as an Internet Explorer browser plugin. That sentence is its own kind of epitaph.

~ the may 2011 move ~

Open sourcing a commercial product is sometimes a gift to a community and sometimes a way of putting the body somewhere it will keep. May 2011 was the second one. The code went out under GPL v2, the staff went out the door, and support was handed to contractors. Developers who took the codebase did real work on it afterward, swapping in open audio and video codecs pulled from VLC so the released version could do what the paid version had done.

By December the vendors were getting liquidation notices and teleplace.com stopped answering. The Internet Archive's last real capture of the homepage is 5 December 2011. Anthony Nemelka, the former chief executive, gave the reason plainly afterward: the board of directors was unable to find a buyer.

~ what survived ~

3D Immersive Collaboration Corp, run by Julie LeMoine, stepped in almost immediately and offered hosting to stranded Teleplace customers at forty percent of what they had been paying. In 2012 it bought the intellectual property outright and renamed the commercial product Virtend. openqwaq.org today redirects to 3dicc.com, so even the open source project's front door now belongs to the company that bought the corpse.

The OpenQwaq codebase itself stopped moving in early 2012, a few months after its sponsor went. Croquet did not die with it. David A. Smith and the same circle of designers are still building shared-simulation software under the Croquet name, which means the research outlived every company that tried to charge for it.

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