Yesterday we reported that Chichen Itza, the lead investor in Makena Technologies and There.com, had made significant investment in Trilogy Studios. We spoke with Michael Pole, CEO of Trilogy Studios, about how the investment would affect the two companies' future. "There are three activities we're working with on the team at Makena," he said. "We're working to further the There platform. We are working together on white label projects with several large media clients that both of us have brought to the table. And we're also investing a lot of our time in creating original IPs for the Makena platform with a couple of clients. One is a music-based product and one is related to sports."

"Some of the ideas we have there will redefine the category," said Pole. "Let's just say that we think that limiting an audience to site-based locations is thinking small. We think you need to open up the site-based experience across the globe. Imagine a concert that might take place in Wembley Stadium. I don't know how many it holds, but one of our ideas is to take that concert and channel that across the world."

When asked how the project would differ from streaming concerts into worlds like vSide, Second Life, or even There, he said, "We'd be working with the most prolific bands on the planet. We have some very specific ideas of how to deliver concerts and sporting events on virtual worlds. I'd have to actually show it to you, though, but we have demonstrable prototypes for this already."

As far as other practical effects that the investment will have on Trilogy and Makena, Pole said he doesn't see many. However, Pole mentioned that Trilogy had a team on-site with Makena to work on implementing requested features as we we speaking. Likewise, not mentioned in the press release is that Michael Wilson, CEO of There, will be joining the board of Trilogy.

"I really don't think it's going to have a practical impact on what we do or don't do," said Pole, "but the level of investment we're making on the Makena platform is more significant than in other platfroms, though we will continue to be platform agnostic. If a content partner came to us and asked us to build on Second Life, we'd have to make a decision based on what was best for our studio."

As for other media companies and white label worlds, Pole said he expected to be able to make an announcement next week.

"Our current offerings, like Pimp My Ride and some other work we're doing behind the scenes at MTV, shows them there's a tremendous opportunity to monetize the franchises that had lain dormant," he said. "The media companies will get a huge advantage from having us linked by a strategic investment instead of a simple partnership. With this investment comes a much more rooted and thoughtful relationship when it comes to building out features and infrastructure."