Tech -- Culture -- Humour
If weapons are your thing, then Armory island may be worth adding to your landmark list. It’s owned by Australian Apollo Case. Apollo describes his island thus:
“Armory Island is Second Life’s largest virtual arms area with almost fifty independent exhibitors. There is a broad range of weapons, shields, clothing and gadgets for every avatar”.
An example of what’s on offer can be seen here:
Armory Island even has a motto: “Come for the guns, stay for the funâ€
The ABC’s Abi Goldflake has clarified the cause of the damage done to ABC Island on 22nd May:
“We’ve now finished investigating the ‘griefing’ episode on ABC Island on 22 May with Linden Labs. I’d like to set the record straight publicly here. It was definitely not a deliberate act of vandalism but was in fact a server error caused by the island crashing during a routine back-up. Linden Labs were able to restore the island to its normal state through a rollback a few hours after we requested it. Despite some inaccurate stories in the press, there was no cost or long-term damage to the ABC Island. As I said at the time, we’re very grateful that we have such a strong community on the island who alerted us to the problem and were on hand all day to help with the situation.”
As we reported at the time, we believed the damage was unknown rather than griefing-related. Either way it has indeed been a great example of members of the Australian SL community working together.
Yesterday we received the information from Second Convention organiser, Zatzai Asturias, on the ‘Summer’ iteration coming up next week. I’m not sure using geo-centric seasonal titles is the best idea for a virtual world event, however Zatzai summarises it as follows:
“Second Convention is an opportunity for people to come together at a large, organised, and fun event and see a part of the Second Life community they might not have otherwise known about. It’s a chance for businesses to connect with their customer base, show off new ideas, products and get feedback. It’s a chance to listen to a musician perform live, compete in an exotic sport, riff on a friend and network with potential business partners.
The convention is open to all who wish to attend, no pre-registration is required and there are no fees for attendance. The events take place on the sim Artificial Isle from Thursday June 14th – Saturday June 16th 2007″.
The Artificial Isle blog is the place for event updates. If you’re an aussie and going to showcase yourself or your business at Second Convention, we’d love to hear about it.
The Music Lounge is a small-scale virtual world that exists to promote the artists that perform within it. Music is the name of the game with specific songs playing as you walk into different areas.It’s currently at Beta 11 stage and it’s a slick product.
Logging in took around three times as long as the SL viewer but once logged in the whole experience was a lot more responsive than SL – given the tiny size of the world that’s not a great surprise. Configuring your avatar is simple though the options aren’t huge.
Graphically the whole experience was very appealing (powered by the Torque engine) but the inability to do anything but walk / run and jump is limiting. Activity is also limited to listening to music, watching events, shopping (using ‘creds’) and interacting with other avatars.
If you have someone wary of the whole virtual world thing, this may be a very painless introduction.
The viewer is available for both PC and Mac – the Mac version was an 80MB download.
Over the past few months the level of interest in Australian-run presences in SL has grown significantly. On an international basis, New World Notes have a comprehensive system covering the top 10 companies for that week. Our measure, the SLOz Traffic Index (STI) will be a little broader than that. What we’re setting out to achieve is:
1. an indicative measure of what Australian presences are getting the most attention.
2. we won’t be comparing against international presences, just Australian ones – there are already measures out there for that.
3. where a presence has multiple areas (like ABC Island, BigPond) we’ll measure the most popular area only. We’re not looking to provide exact traffic, more trends on what areas are attracting people on a continual basis.
Each business will have their traffic stats measured a minimum of ten times across the month – more on the methodology when we publish the first report.
Whether you’re a business owner, educational institution or other organisation, contact us to give us your presence’s location and we will add it to our monitoring list. We’ll publish the first STI in approximately two weeks time.
Knightsbridge, Liverpool (recently relocated from a mainland sim to an island) and Amsterdam are just three cities that have their SL replicas, of varying accuracy and purpose.
Other city areas replicated include Times Square in New York (currently in development) and Paris (circa 1900).
They all have their appeal, but I’m wondering when someone will take on an Australian city. I personally believe Melbourne would be the pick – iconic parts of Sydney have been well and truly covered now (Sydney Opera House, Darling Harbour, Sydney Harbour Bridge) whereas Melbourne has a character that would make it sit nicely aside replicas like Liverpool. Amsterdam well and truly has the red-light district covered so not sure a virtual King’s Cross or St Kilda is required.
What are your thoughts on city sims – do they have a contribution to make in SL and if so, what contribution do you think an Australian city sim would make?
This morning, World Stock Exchange CEO LukeConnell Vandeverre provided SLOz with a notecard which in his is “the announcement I was provided to post at will”. It’s an explanation by Anshe Chung of her relationship to investment in SL and the WSEWe’ve posted the full text below:
“Dear fellow pioneers in the Metaverse economy,
As interest in this topic increased recently, I think it is time to let you know a little bit about what role my company and I played in regards to seed and venture capital in Second Life and what you can and can’t expect in the future.
Since summer 2004 I have actively and with very significant funds supported almost 100 startup businesses and non-profit projects in Second Life. Some of these have been successful and are widely known, others failed. We talk about more than L$60 million that I, and later ACS, have invested in people’s ideas, creating opportunities.
Most of these investments, even some donations to non-profit projects, I decided to keep low profile and not disclose to the public. This has several reasons. The first is, that when I am helping the newbies I am helping the newbies for the sake of helping the newbies and not for PR. The second is, that I don’t want the newbies to become collateral targets of bad people who tend to go after prominent targets and whatever they can associate with these. The third reason is that I tend to be pretty hands-off with most of these ventures.
I also noticed that some people, especially newbie investors, think something is “safe” when they hear “Anshe is involved”. This is not the case when it comes to undisclosed seed and venture investments. There is a fundamental dilema between giving newbies a chance and excluding fraud or risk. What is worse, some people even confuse the role of an investor with the role of somebody who is actively involved in management.
I would be careful with businesses who advertise to you that I am an investor. You will most likely not be facing the best investments in my basket, because the really well managed and trustworthy companies will not have to advertise their shares to you by revealing my investment without my consent. In some cases I might not even be an investor.
In the future I don’t plan to change much about this. I will be launching the Dreamland Stock Exchange (DSE) that aims to bring a small number of companies on as IPO’s that will have gone through a rigorous review by me and my team. However the “majority” of SL ventures will be traded on exchanges such as the World Stock Exchange.
I hope the WSE will continue to grow, especially after the huge investment I have made to support Luke’s project. I look forward to the new shareholder voting features along with the increased measures to deal with fraud and insider trading. Please understand that I am in no way involved in the management or decision making at Hope Capital Ltd and the WSE. Like all of you, I hope that everyone in charge will remain honest and professional.
Wishing you and your money a nice time, much fun and I hope your Linden$ will have many babies!
Yours,
Anshe Chung”
This message from Anshe Chung is certainly taking a conciliatory line in relation to investment in SL and her encouragement of increased transparency measures for WSE will likely assist its legitimacy amidst some regular criticism of its operations. Transparency of such operations, whether they be the WSE or DSE will be pivotal to instill the level of confidence required to ensure either virtual institution moves beyond the support they currently have.
Recent Comments