Last week we managed to catch the Venture Capital panel at the Virtual Worlds Forum, an event set inside a nightclub situated within a rather eerie warehouse district behind Kings Cross train station. Plenty of black leather sofas with bloggers and attendees basked in purple lights, a glitter ball, and three bars provide an odd backdrop for discussions about monetizing the latest WoW wannabe. The overall atmosphere of this panel was very businesslike -- £995 a head means most attendees were on their respective company's ticket -- so if you want to continue believing that video games are solely a creative medium designed to further society through creation of fun, look away now.

If you're interested in this subject, make sure to check out ex-Joystiq editor Vlad Cole's newly relaunched blog on video game venture capital. Now keep reading.

Bigfoot Networks is a startup that's recently obtained $4 million in venture capital funding. Founded by MBA students, the company has a grand ambition--to eliminate lag in online gaming by a vague-sounding "Network Gaming Accelerator" card.

The card will be on show at E3, where curious journos can fire piercing questions such as "So what does it actually do?", but until then we'll have to speculate. According to FORTUNE Small Business, the card "communicates with servers, downloading some of the processes that they perform online and allowing them to run faster". However, according to Bigfoot Networks' own white paper on lag, the majority of the bottlenecks involved in lag are client-side and server-side CPU limitations--not network latency.

The paper's references to latency spikes and packet loss imply that Bigfoot Network's magic solution to lag might involve creating a dedicated network processor (offloading network-related load from the client CPU), allowing the TCP/IP stack to be specifically tuned for low, consistent latency. However, as Greg Costikyan points out, games are designed to allow for network transmission delays--it might only be a product that appeals to gamers for whom every millisecond counts.

[Thanks, Probot]