His Online Business Is Built on Places to Be
Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson, the man behind the curtain at Oz Interactive Inc., is taking online chat rooms to a new level, one where visitors can choose their own digital personas and even shake their booties on the Internet.
Don’t worry if your metallic pants are at the dry cleaners. Club-goers at this joint dress online. Log on, select an avatar--or digital persona--and then come to the party as a shirtless punk with a green Mohawk, a space girl in bell bottoms or a devil in a red jumper.
“People not only want to watch music videos, they want to be able to step into them,” says Gudjonsson.
Growing up just shy of the Arctic Circle, this 25-year-old from Iceland knows what it’s like to live far away from where it’s happening. As chief executive and co-founder of Oz, Gudjonsson creates spaces on the Web where a hipster in Waukegan, Ill., a teen from Teaneck, N.J., or a party-goer from Reykjavik can meet online, chat, hear music--and do the macarena.
And it doesn’t matter if you know how to dance. If you can click a mouse, you can shuffle like Travolta--as long as your computer runs Windows 95 and has a Pentium processor, Internet connection and a modem.
But Gudjonsson is more than a software developer and host of a hip virtual party.
He sees himself as a cyber property developer, creating virtual venues for film, sports and record companies where fans can interact and meet vocalists, film stars and athletes.
At least, that’s the plan at Atlantic Records, which has hired Oz to create a virtual-reality version of its DigitalArena Web site.
“Atlantic’s goal is to create a more dynamic and creative environment beyond the traditional Web site,” says Nikke Slight, Atlantic’s director of multimedia. “[This] will facilitate interaction at a whole new level.”
Gudjonsson hopes the technology will soon be fine-tuned enough for visitors to his sites to feel as if they really are shooting hoops with Michael Jordan or jamming onstage with Hootie & the Blowfish. For now, the avatars at https://www.oz.com still look cartoonish. Nonetheless, Oz’s software allows visitors to select an avatar and choose its clothing, size and mode of locomotion. Says Gudjonsson, “You can be whoever you want to be.”
He has achieved the same feat in real life. While his boyhood pals were off ice-fishing and playing hockey, Gudjonsson began writing software programs--and patenting them. At 12, he created a program to automatically shut off lights over billiard tables, a technology he marketed to European pool-table suppliers. At 14, he started playing keyboards and performing his own songs at Reykjavik clubs.
At 19, he and Skuli Mogenson, a buddy from the Iceland music scene, founded Oz, a firm that now has 70 employees, 50 of them hired in the last year. The San Francisco-based company is privately held, but spokesman Andrew de Vries says Gudjonsson has raised more than $8 million from private investors.
Not bad for a high school dropout from Reykjavik.
Parents may also take a shine to Oz’s virtual worlds. The next time Johnny asks to attend a rave, pierce his nose or dye his hair, Mom can say yes, but only if he attends online via his avatar.
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Gali Kronenberg can be reached at gali.kronenberg@latimes.com
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Profile
* Name: Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson
* Company: Oz Interactive Inc.
* Title: CEO and co-founder
* Home: San Francisco and Reykjavik, Iceland
