With little fanfare nor notice from the VRML community, Blaxxun has emerged from bankruptcy. The old name (Blaxxun Interactive) has been changed to Blaxxun Technologies, but that's a minor thing. The date listed on the Blaxxun.COM website is April 1, 2003, though this was posted significantly after that date. The German language version (Blaxxun.DE) says essentially the same thing. The quaint grammar errors of the English site are actually refreshing, early VRMLists had to deal constantly with the oddities of translating between German and English. The official press release reads:

Blaxxun Technologies newly founded

All rights secured to continue the Blaxxun success story

Munich, April 28, 2003 - Blaxxun Technologies GmbH was newly founded beginning of April. The Blaxxun offices are located in west-Munich. Blaxxun Technologies continues the extraordinary success story of the Blaxxun Interactive product-family and plans to expand the range of offered products step by step. Technical as well as sales support for customers are immediately secured by Blaxxun Technologies. Blaxxun Technologies has acquired all rights etc. concerning existing installations as well as all rights and intellectual properties regarding software, solutions, furthermore all brands, marks, trademarks, logo-design marks and domains.

"The reliable background of our investor grants us not only the economic security for further product development, but also - aside from an excellent business network - the always important eye on economics, what we some time missed within the new economy" explains CEO Dr. Wolfgang Salzmann. Klaus Eberle was beside Salzmann appointed as COO. Eberle started a successful career as IT sales expert and headed sales at different IT companies. Eberle made a substantial contribution to Blaxxun's success within the last three years.

In future the internationally well recognized and award winning Blaxxun Platform shall be more positioned as a stable and scalable platform for a variety of industry solutions: "Our 3D competence" comments Eberle, "has partly hidden, that within the online collaboration market the Blaxxun Platform is the most powerful, stable and scalable solution". Easy to scale in conjunction with almost as many concurrent users as you like and the integration of almost all relevant communication tools is of decisive importance for medium enterprises as well as large [corporations].

Blaxxun Technologies plans to expand its range of products. We expect being able to offer our new Blaxxun Platform V 7.0 2nd half 2003. An attractive discount will be granted for all orders before this release, including an update for the new version! In addition, relevant adoptions of our client will be made.

Most of the links on the Blaxxun site are currently broken (hint, drop the _down part from the URL and many will work), but there is a notice posted to warn you. Hopefully they'll get fixed shortly as part of the posted redesign. The developer section is an exception, virtually all links in it work, as do the download links for the VRML plugins, Java standalones, and other developer tools.

Current customers are being serviced by the support teams, as they have during the entire reorganization. Internal writings predict that there will shortly be a Platform 7 version of the community server, and a new version of Contact, Blaxxun's superior VRML plugin. Exactly how this will impact BitManagement.DE - where many former Blaxxun people now work isn't known. BitManagement has already released a beta of Contact 6. They also have Mpeg4 and Java clients available. Though the exact relationship between Blaxxun and BitManagement is unknown, several internal sources recently claimed that Blaxxun would concentrate on community server technology and BitManagement would concentrate on plugins and standalones. It would appear that the new Blaxxun has other ideas. Unlike previous bankruptcies involving companies heavily vested in VRML, Blaxxun does appear to have escaped their dark nightmare.

VRML is dead! Long live VRML!