:''The word 'areae' is also the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

plural of '

area Area is the quantity that expresses the extent of a region on the plane or on a curved surface. The area of a plane region or ''plane area'' refers to the area of a shape or planar lamina, while '' surface area'' refers to the area of an ope ...

'.'' Areae is an American computer technology

corporation A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and ...

located in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United State ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, that was established in July 2006 by

Raph Koster Raphael "Raph" Koster (born September 7, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, game designer, and author of ''A Theory of Fun for Game Design''. Koster is widely recognized for his work as the lead designer of ''Ultima Online'' and the creative dir ...

. Areae has been officially changed to Metaplace, Inc. to avoid confusion. Funded by

Charles River Ventures Charles River Ventures (CRV) is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology. The firm was founded in 1970 to commercialize research that came out of MIT. Its name comes from the Charles River. History The firm has ra ...

and Crescendo Ventures, Areae develops the Metaplace

software platform A computing platform or digital platform is an environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), even a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying ...

that democratizes the development of

virtual world A virtual world (also called a virtual space) is a computer-simulated environment which may be populated by many users who can create a personal avatar, and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities ...

History

In January 2010, the company pivoted towards using its virtual worlds platform to build social games on

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

. It released two successful games on Facebook using its platform, Island Life and My Vineyard, after which the company was acquired by

Playdom Playdom was an online social network game developer popular on Facebook, Google+ and Myspace. The company was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area by University of California, Berkeley graduates Ling Xiao and Chris Wang and Swarthmore College g ...

References

External links

Metaplace
(official website) Companies based in San Diego Video game companies established in 2006 Metaplace MUD organizations Video game companies of the United States {{MUD-stub