In 1995, a small company known as "3F Ltd", was founded as an off-shoot of the University of Durham as a company specialising in Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition software.
Their work led to the development of a game known as "Girland" or "Through The Eyes Of The Girls" which used their in-house NLP engine extensively. They collaborated with an Italian firm on design and artwork, and through this, the brand "SoulSim" was created - partly to mark this collaborative effort and also to distinguish between the company's games brand and its "serious" AI software brand.
SoulSim was then sold to an AI Technology company based in the USA, called "MindMaker, Inc", in around the year 2000. Girland then evolved from having a website to promote "Through The Eyes Of The Girls", into a fully fledged social website, which reportedly had hundreds of thousands of users.
They finally went out of business in 2008.
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