New York's fashion district, once home to the city's sweat shops, is now attracting Internet start-ups. At 589 Eighth Avenue, one such company is Virtual Communities Inc which operates five online communities and has a special interest in Ireland.
Virtual Communities was established in August 1996 by Mr Avi Moskowitz, a Brooklyn-born man who moved to Israel with his wife and children. His aim was to develop, acquire and operate Webbased communities targeted to ethnic and affinity groups in the United States. He started by developing Virtual Jerusalem which offers a variety of Jewish and Israel-related content to six million Jewish Americans. Some of its features include an Internet zoom camera called the Kotel Kam which transmits live pictures from the Western Wall - Judaism's holiest site - and a Send A Prayer service which allows users to type in messages to be printed out and delivered to the Western Wall.
Next to come online was Virtual Holy Land on Christmas Day 1998 to target the 70 million members of the Evangelical Christian community around the world. Then he moved into the Irish space, setting up Virtual Ireland on St Patrick's Day last year, followed by Virtual Italy in October and Virtual India which was launched during the Diwali religious festival in November.
All the sites aggregate special interest news and features as well as providing chat-rooms, forums and genealogy in an effort to build communities online. This week, the VirtualIreland.com site is relaunching with a newly designed format. Brian Rohan, editor-in-chief, said: "We hope to provide a spark for conversation. I really see us as being a nightclub. We supply the dance floor, the DJ, the lights, and it's up to the people on the floor to decide what to do."
The Irish news on the site comes through content agreements with Appletree Press in Belfast and the Irish Emigrant in Galway. Adlib Eaterie, a food site, offers restaurant reviews and recipes and travel tips come from the Lonely Planet. In all, Virtual Ireland has 40 content providers.
Irish-American Mr Rohan (30) previously worked as a reporter and columnist with the Irish Voice newspaper in New York and he was a presenter for RTE's E television's Stateside series about television series on the Irish in the US in 1995 and 1997. He joined Virtual Ireland last June. "I came in sceptical of the world of Internet communities," he said, "but we've got a great collection of people".
The Virtual Ireland site received 500,000 page views in December and now has 50,000 registered users. Among the users, 86 per cent live in North America, 5 per cent in Britain, 5 per cent in Ireland and the rest are from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. Although Virtual Jerusalem continues to be the most popular online community with 180,000 members, "we're gaining on them," said Mr Rohan.
It doesn't cost anything to sign on and some of the chat forums have elicited heated email responses. One news piece about Angela's Ashes, contrasting the film with the book, brought in 76 pages of arguments, Mr Rohan said. "It's like the most sober and best argument you could have in a pub."
Three editors make up the staff and their job, said Mr Rohan, is "to promote and facilitate the community". Ms Denise Lowe from Roscommon recently joined the team as marketing co-ordinator. She is currently organising a St Valentine's Day meeting between two pen-pals who met on the site - a man in Fermoy and a woman in Philadelphia. Their rendezvous will take place at Fitzpatrick's Manhattan hotel.
Mr Rohan said one of the most popular features of the VirtualIreland.com web site is the sweepstakes - a computer draw to win a pair of free tickets to Ireland given each month in partnership with Aer Lingus.
By advertising on the Yahoo! and HotBot search engines and in the local Irish press, Virtual Ireland is averaging 230 new users a day. Mr Rohan also sees a marked increase in page views each Thursday, the day after he emails his newsletter to 25,000 users. In this regard, Virtual Ireland is pitting itself against Nua's Local Ireland initiative and Artshapes.com, both special interest sites with Irish content that also email newsletters to their members.
With the new-look site will come new services. These will include a shopping mall which should be live by St Patrick's Day and auctions, similar to what the Jewish site now offers. The re-design has "done away with the shamrocks and stripped down the site to the needs and wants of our members," said Mr Rohan. Particular focus will be placed on travel to Ireland, golf, festivals, music, arts, entertainment and business. He intends to introduce feeds from the Dublin Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, so users can track publicly-listed Irish companies.
"I think people are most interested in what directly affects their lives, like how to pay their taxes, how to get a date, how and where to eat, what car to buy," Mr Rohan said. "Virtual Ireland is about fun and informative stuff with news and politics. It's community-driven."
The holding company, Virtual Communities, went public on Nasdaq on November 1st. Unusually low for an Internet start-up, its stock price has hovered around the $3 (€3) mark. Aside from the online ethnic communities, Virtual Communities makes money by selling its proprietary Community Management Solution to organisations interested in building their own Web-based communities. It recently created and installed a Web-based community for Troma Inc, an independent New York-based film company, at Tromaville.com. It has also signed a letter of intent with Vanco Ltd, a European network services company, to distribute the CMS software throughout Europe.
