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Archives for 2007

SecondLifeGrid.net launches – Linden Lab chases business a little harder

September 5, 2007 by 2 Comments

Linden Lab have announced the launch of SecondLifeGrid.net, dedicated to businesses and other organisations wanting to find out about the opportunities Second Life may present. Notice I said opportunities and not threats. I spent five minutes looking around the site and couldn’t see any information alluding to the challenges and threats of doing business in SL, though to be fair there are lots of links to external resources which will contain some of the downside.

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The intro blurb pretty much sums up the pitch Linden Lab are putting to business:

“The Second Life Grid is a full-featured service platform of revolutionary technologies that support the globally renowned virtual world experience, Second Life. The Grid offers a comprehensive system of infrastructure, consumer features, tools, and services that allows any organization to provide its own unique immersive experience in the world’s largest interconnected virtual world.”

The formalisation of support programs for groups of non-English speaking new users is a welcome addition. A lot of other services already provided such as the ability for a company to offer their own registration and orientation portals, have been brought across to the new site.

In retrospect, this is an obvious thing for Linden Lab to have done and it’ll be interesting to see the impact it has on conversion rates for business – you’d think a more integrated approach for business would remove one of the barriers to jumping into the SL experience.

Filed Under: Business, General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Ubrowser

September 4, 2007 by Leave a Comment

The uBrowser website states that uBrowseruBrowser “is an open source test mule that renders interactive web pages onto geometry using OpenGL® and an embedded instance of Gecko, the Mozilla® rendering engine. Its primary purpose is to help me integrate Gecko into my company’s software – a 3D virtual world called Second Life.”

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The developer behind this browser experience is Callum Prentice. Callum is part of the Linden Lab team and he goes into great detail at the uBrowser website on how he sees this software integrating with the content and developments going on in SL. His aim is to have “residents … put interactive content anywhere they like – the much rumored “Web-On-A-Prim”. As well as allowing for the display of regular Web pages”.

If this is the case and uBrowser achieves the goals that Callum is setting. it would bring about a synergy between the realtime interactions in SL and the semi-static text, audio, video and graphics that make up the bulk of websites.

Put your hand up if you’d like web on a prim?

Filed Under: Open Source, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

CSIRO launch seminar series on ABC Island

September 3, 2007 by 1 Comment

The ABC Island Ampitheatre has started playing host to CSIRO scientists. Each week in September there’ll be a seminar. Tonight’s featured Dr Peter Clifton, a researcher in Obesity and Diabetes at CSIRO and co-author of the CSIRO Total Well Being Diet Book. He presented on “Anti-Aging; The Prospect of Human Life Extension”.

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More than 40 people attended so you can expect next week’s will be popular as well. To find out details of upcoming events, join the ‘ABC Friends’ group in-world.

Filed Under: Australian News, Education, Health, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

SL music discussion list launches

September 2, 2007 by 2 Comments

Jesse Linden has announced the formation of an email discussion list devoted to music development in SL. Promotion of events is off limits but it will provide a useful forum for discussing ways to improve music options in-world. Linden Lab describe their aims in the welcome email received when joining:

“Second Life has amazing potential for musicians looking to reach a global audience. Music performances in Second Life are a growing phenomenon, creating exciting social events where artists can not only perform live but also interact directly with fans.

Resident musicians, venue owners, buillders, scripters, audiences, and promoters are all working together to make this community happen. Linden Lab recognizes all this innovative work, and we want to do all that we can to help it thrive and continue to grow. We’ve started assembling a team of Lindens who will work together and with Residents to ultimately provide better tools and policies for the music community of Second Life.

This mailing list is open to anyone who is interested in sharing their ideas with Lindens as well as each other on how to better support the Second Life music community. What are some best practices that are currently working well for the music community? What are the biggest challenges? What would you like to see Linden Lab provide to better support this community? These are the types of discussions we’d love to see!

One rule: please don’t use this mailing list to announce specific music events. Information about such events can already be found on the Second Life events calendar. We’d like to keep traffic on this mailing list focused on discussions about ideas for improving the music community.

As we at Linden Lab get a better focus on specific tools and policies we think could best help this community, we’ll share them on this mailing list. Your ideas, feedback, and insights will be invaluable to us as we work to determine what we should focus on. Lindens will be reading and participating in the discussion as much as possible.

Please introduce yourself to the list, let us know a bit about your interests and area of expertise, and thank you for helping us learn more about how to make music truly ROCK in Second Life.”

Subscribe to the list here.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: ,

AIIA forum discusses opportunities and threats for Australian Business

September 1, 2007 by 1 Comment

On Wednesday 29th August, the Australian Information Industry Association held an in-world forum entitled: “Are Virtual Worlds relevant to my Marketing Effort?”.

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Moderated by yours truly, the panelists were:

1. Lise Robiani (Lisa Romano), Project Manager, Strategic Development, ABC Innovation – ABC
2. Gizzy Electricteeth (Kelly Yeoh), Virtual Worlds Engineer, IBM
3. Caliope Voss (Mandy Salomon), Senior Researcher, User Environments, Smart Internet Technology CRC – Swinburne University of Technology
4. Texas TimTam (Grace Roberts), Founding Director – Second Life TV Network & Cattle Puppy Productions

The discussion ranged from engagement strategies to brand opportunities and threats with a variety of questions from the twenty or so attendees.

An audio transcript should be available soon and we’ll add it here.

More pictures from the event here.

Filed Under: Australian News, Business, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

Aussie population update – 15K and rising

August 31, 2007 by 2 Comments

Linden Lab have released the metrics for July 2007 and the rate of growth is slow but steady.

The active Australian population is cited as 14,832, up from the 12,910 reported last month. Australia is back to 11th place overall.

One of the interesting new metrics released was number of SL sessions that ended abnormally i.e. crashes. Since January 2007, around a quarter of sessions ended in a crash. That’s an astounding level – imagine any established software vendor trying to sell a product that only works correctly three out of four times. That said, it illustrates just how committed Linden Lab are to transaparency that they even publish figures showing their key weaknesses.

Filed Under: Australian News, Metrics, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Weekend Whimsy

August 31, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Each Friday we provide a sampling of content generated by SL users and posted on services like YouTube:

1. BiJuncto – Il trailer

2. What the Heck Happened to ‘Blink’?

3. Koelner Dom in SL

Filed Under: User-generated, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

NORML make the jump into Second Life

August 30, 2007 by 4 Comments

The National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is an American organisation that has set up a presence in SL..

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Who are NORML?:

“Since its founding in 1970, NORML has provided a voice in the public policy debate for those Americans who oppose marijuana prohibition and favor an end to the practice of arresting marijuana smokers. A nonprofit public-interest advocacy group, NORML represents the interests of the tens of millions of Americans who smoke marijuana responsibly.”

A launch event is scheduled for September 6th at Noon SLT (5am on the 7th AEST) will feature a chat with NORML’s founder and Legal Counsel Keith Stroup, talking about NORML and answering questions plus “marijuana related music, NORML info and freebies.”

Whether you agree with the decriminalisation of cannabis or not, this may be a fascinating event to attend.

Filed Under: General News, Health, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

Victoria University joins the class

August 29, 2007 by 2 Comments

Recently, Victoria University established a large holding in SL.

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It is pretty obvious that Victoria University is taking a ‘from the ground up’ approach to their SL presence. There is none of the polish or professional builds we have seen with other Australian or other Universities. In fact, there could be said that this presence is akin to that of the MIT area that was set up some time ago. A lecturer and student led development aimed at learning by doing.

Visitors may at first blush be dissapointed at what they see. Objects and items such as sheep and chickens, helicopters, vehicles and bits n’ pieces floating either in water, in the air or strewn about the land. Buildings that look like they have been grown one atop the other or blocks of grey granite style cubes pushed together in a very haphazard fashion.

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How refreshing! It is heartening to see SL being used for this kind of activity in an age where education institutions are expected to perhaps display polished and “marketable” product. Victoria University is displaying education in the raw. Experimentation, trial and error and cooperative learning enterprises. It should prove worthwhile watching how this initial offering in the Sl world evolves.

Check it out in-world

SLURL:

Filed Under: Australian News, Education, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

Coldwell Banker Australia’s non-presence in Second Life

August 28, 2007 by 11 Comments

I came across a press release dated August 23rd from Coldwell Banker Australia, touting its win of an innovation award, partly for its Second Life presence. To quote from the press release:

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COLDWELL BANKER’S USE OF ONLINE VIDEO AND ENTRANCE INTO SECOND LIFE® EARNS “MOST INNOVATIVE FRANCHISE” TITLE

HOPE ISLAND,QLD. (August 23, 2007) – Coldwell Banker Australia is pleased to announce that Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC has won the 2007 Inman News Innovator Award in the franchise category. The announcement was made at the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference in San Francisco, just one day after Coldwell Banker® made history by being the first national real estate brand to market a real home in the virtual 3-D world of Second Life. Inman News is a
leading independent real estate Web site and media news service.

Mr Alex Caraco, chief executive officer of Coldwell Banker Greater Australia said, “Coldwell Banker has a long and distinguished history of keeping up with customer’s demands in regards to property information and innovative forms of consumer control, this award recognizes that we have become “the next generation” real estate brand” Coldwell Banker entered the second phase of its involvement in Second Life recently when it unveiled a 3-D reproduction precisely matching the specifications of a newly constructed $3.1 million home in Washington, currently listed for sale by Coldwell Banker. Users can visit www.coldwellbankervirtualhome.com for immediate access to the “real world” home and to Second Life.

Previously, Coldwell Banker became the first national real estate company to open a virtual headquarters on Second Life and in March began selling 500 virtual homes to Second Life members.

“Second Life is a great example of our willingness to explore new channels,” said Charlie Young, senior vice president of marketing for Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. “We are gaining insight into the potential of 3-D as a marketing vehicle and learning how a tech-savvy consumer wants to interact with the brand prior to even contacting a sales associate.”
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Of course, Coldwell have been in SL since March but I thought I’d contact the Australian contact listed in the press release to ask what the Australian operation’s involvement was with SL. The response was:

“Coldwell Banker Australia at this stage is not involved in Second Life , the media release was an announcement of the brand’s initiatives.”

Here’s a perfect example of a subsidiary attempting to look innovative by riding on the coattails of a parent company. It’s one of those examples where there’s zero interest in engaging with SL residents and maximum interest in hyping the perception of innovation.

Filed Under: Australian News, Business, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

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