The Mall Plus website is scheduled to relaunch with a "soft opening" next month, following an extensive 10-month redevelopment effort, developer Mike Hodges, of Dunedin, confirmed yesterday.
The new website would replace an earlier version which disappeared from the internet last year, months after being developed by Dunedin start-up company The Street, with funds from the Dunedin City Council.
The council, through its company Dunedin City Holdings Ltd, bought 1.2 million shares in The Street for $700,000 in 2006. The money helped pay for several projects being developed by The Street, including the website.
The Mall Plus was briefly online last year, but disappeared, soon after to be replaced with a "reopening soon" sign on its homepage.
The sign now reads "reopening March 09", and Mr Hodges has high hopes, once the virtual doors are thrown open.
The initial rollout of the new Mall Plus website would provide a remodelled three-dimensional online environment for users to browse through virtual stores, buying a mixture of real and virtual products, he said.
However, stage two would include more recent social networking concepts, such as allowing users to create and control their own avatars - three-dimensional models of themselves - to use while navigating the mall and interacting with other users, he said.
It was hoped those features could be rolled out within months, although the timing could slip, Mr Hodges said.
The mall was being developed in Dunedin but would be international in scope, potentially attracting users from around the world, he said.
It was hoped franchise agreements with developers in other countries could eventually result in other online malls being developed, which would be linked.
This would allow users to wander from one mall to the next, he said.
The project aimed to bring repeat Trade Me users into the Mall Plus space, with users paying "inconsequential" amounts of real-life money to buy and open small virtual stores to sell their real-life products, he said.
It was expected transactions within the mall would be a "half and half" split between real and virtual products, he said.
When stage two features were included, users could spend their real money to buy virtual features to update their stores, virtual homes with furniture, or gym equipment to upgrade their avatars (characters), he said.
It was hoped the transactions would eventually add to "very serious" revenue, with an audience eventually growing into the millions as other malls were linked to the first project, he said.
Mr Hodges bought the Mall Plus from The Street after its collapse, but a revenue-sharing agreement meant The Street would get royalties until an agreed cap was reached, allowing them to cover costs originally invested in the website's development last year, Mr Hodges said.
