1. LiveScience (USA) – Virtual Government (vGov) Aims to Improve National Security. “The federal government is launching a cyberspace initiative this summer that sponsors say has the potential to enhance national security, improve government collaboration and save taxpayer dollars to boot. Called vGov, it is a virtual world that will function much like a secure “Second Life” for government agencies. “Second Life” is a virtual world where users, or “residents,” can interact with each other and participate in individual and group activities online. It has nearly one million active users, including 1,400 businesses such as IBM, according to Linden Labs, the creator of the virtual world. Launched under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), vGov will initially serve as a digital sandbox for the USDA, the Air Force, Department of Homeland Security and the National Defense University (NDU).”

2. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Pillsbury IP Practice Adds Virtual World Counsel. “Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLC’s Intellectual Property practice is adding a new counsel, Sean F. Kane, who will focus on issues involving virtual worlds and online games. Kane is a member of the American Bar Association and co-chairman of the board’s Computer Games and Virtual Worlds Committee, co-chair of the Section of Science & Technology Law’s Virtual Worlds and Multiuser Online Games Committee, and a member of Board of Editors of the LJN publication Internet Law & Strategy. ”

3. CNET (USA) – Groups push feds for video game age restrictions. “Video game aficionados might have to enter a credit card or find another way to verify their age before playing a networked game, thanks to a new push from advocacy groups who say they want to protect minors from in-game advertising messages. In-game marketing has become so advanced that it “allows advertisers to track game users” and detect if people who are exposed to certain ads eventually use or buy the advertised product, a coalition including the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and U.S. PIRG told federal regulators this week.
They say that because “mobile devices, instant messaging, social networks, virtual reality, avatars, interactive games, and online video” have become so pervasive, the Federal Trade Commission must enact new regulations to protect minors from electronic advertisements and other marketing messages. Not only young children are at risk, but the FTC “should seek ways to provide protections to teens,” the coalition recommends.”

4. MSNBC (USA) – Second Life: Reality Intrudes on Virtual Reality. “While you were worrying about keeping your home, you may have missed the popping of the virtual-reality real estate bubble. In Second Life — Linden Lab’s immersive, 3D game that allows players to trade real dollars for virtual dollars — a nice stretch of mainland coastal property that would have fetched around $65 in 2007 today goes for $16.
That’s partly because the financial crisis crimped spending for the 1.38 million users, known as residents, who have logged into Second Life in the past 60 days. “The real real estate crisis had a direct effect on the real estate” in virtual worlds, says Guntram Graef, a business partner at Anshe Chung Studios, which sells “land” in Second Life. It’s also because the pell-mell growth of Second Life has slowed dramatically since four years ago, when BusinessWeek put Anshe Chung — the avatar for Ailin Graef, Guntram’s wife — on its cover.”

5. VentureBeat (USA) – 3D maps: you’ll be able to walk around in them like in a virtual world. “Online maps are extremely useful, but not very innovative in their present form, as most maps we use today merely mirror paper maps. The road map serves most of our everyday needs, but as more and more data with a location component to it is accumulated – geo-tagged photos, videos, or information from social networks like Facebook and Twitter – we’ll need to represent that data in a way that adds value without overwhelming users. And as mobile devices gain more processing power, they’ll be able to access raw data stored in a server and display it in whole new ways. Mapping technology specialists say that these two developments — the increase of geo-tagged elements and the increased power of mobile devices — mean that browsing a map will increasingly mean moving around in a virtual, three-dimensional world like in the state-of-the-art video games seen on consoles like the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.”

6. MIT Technology Review (USA) – Treating Cockroach Phobia With Augmented Reality. “Augmented reality–overlaying the virtual world on top of the real world–has been used in everything from neurosurgery to iPhone apps. But until researchers at the Spanish Universitat Jaume got the bright idea to simulate hoards of cockroaches swarming over insect-phobic volunteers, no one had thought to use it as part of what’s known as exposure therapy.”

7. CTV News (Canada) – Feds head to virtual world to find workers. “If the heroes of the recent science fiction film Avatar showed up at a career fair, their blue skin might elicit a few stares. But at the federal government’s next fair, avatars are welcome. The Public Service Commission is going virtual to recruit new people to join Canada’s rapidly aging ranks of civil servants. In September, they’ll open an island on Second Life, an online universe that sees about 830,000 people wander hundreds of virtual communities each month. The PSC’s island will have information booths, presentations on jobs and a chance to interact live with current federal bureaucrats and ask questions. “Yes, we’re doing what we can do in the real world but there’s an additional dimension we can add to this,” said Marvin Bedward, director of project planning and innovation with the Public Service Commission of Canada.”

8. BNET (Australia) – Second Life Needs to Stop Having a Separate Life from Other Social Nets. “If you’re like most people in social media, you don’t spend much time anymore thinking about — let alone playing in — Second Life, the virtual 3D world that, a few years ago, had “it” social networking status. But with the news on Friday that Mark Kingdon, the current CEO, was stepping down, it’s time to think about it again — and wonder if its reputation for being a geeky hangout for people with no real-world life has proven somehow self-fulfilling. Other social nets, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, have a degree of interoperability — people can broadcast their location using Foursquare, for instance, and also have it sent to their Twitter followers. But not so with Second Life.”

9. The Malaysian Star (Malaysia) – Risk failure to succeed, says technopreneur. “Societies must encourage innovation by creating a culture that tolerates risk, said famed San Francisco-based technopreneur Mitch Kapor. “Risk involves failure and failure isn’t so shameful. People assume that if you’re a failure, you’re finished. This is not true,” he said at the Innovation and Entre preneurship: Lessons Learned From Silicon Valley talk here on Friday. Kapor explained that failure was part of the risk culture needed to raise a breed of able technopreneurs in the country. He said that besides having a risk culture, there needed to be other practical considerations, such as investing in affordable broadband and having a well-trained IT workforce.”

10. Escapist Magazine (USA) – The Escapist’s Publisher Speaking on Interactive Storytelling via Second Life. “If you’ve ever wondered about the function of storytelling in an interactive environment (i.e., videogames), pop in to Second Life this afternoon to hear Escapist publisher Alex Macris enlighten you. Linden Labs’ Second Life has quite a few uses outside of its (in)famous depth of user-generated content. Some tech-savvy teachers use it to hold classes in the virtual world, and then there’s Metanomics. A “passionate community” of people who are interested in exploring “the serious uses of virtual worlds” – that is, videogames and places like Second Life – Metanomics is perhaps best known for its weekly web show Wednesdays at 3PM EST (12PM PST), in which speakers discuss the nature of the virtual worlds surrounding us.”

1. BusinessWeek (USA) – Linden Lab’s Virtual Second Life Eyes Second Life. “Linden Lab’s virtual world called Second Life was seen as the Web’s next big thing following its 2003 debut. Investors including Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos and EBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar poured millions of dollars into the project, where 3-D avatars sunbathe on virtual islands and operate virtual companies. Businessweek featured Second Life on a 2006 cover, and Reuters opened a virtual bureau. Coca-Cola Co. held a virtual contest. Philip Rosedale, who founded San Francisco-based Linden Lab, said Second Life has yet to reach its potential. He was named interim CEO today, replacing Mark Kingdon, who stepped down. In 2008, Rosedale predicted that virtual worlds will become “bigger in total usage than the Web itself.”

2. Ars Technica (USA) –Saving “virtual worlds” from extinction. “Sometime this August, librarians at the University of Illinois will finish archiving over a dozen famous computer games, then step back to consider where to go next with their project. These programs go back over four decades, and include a 1993 version of Doom, various editions of Warcraft, and even MIT’s Spacewar! circa 1962. We wondered, given the gaming nature of most of the software being preserved, why the venture is calling itself the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. So we called up the project’s coordinator, Jerome McDonough, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, to ask him about the name.”

3. University World News (UK) – Save money switching to OpenSim. “Educators in post-secondary institutions, colleges and schools looking for lower costs, better controls and no age restrictions might consider switching from Second Life to its open source alternative, the OpenSim virtual world server platform. The OpenSim server software can be used to power an entire public grid or a small private, behind-the-firewall installation, and can be run on an institution’s own server or hosted with third-party providers. Educators say they find OpenSim offers significant cost savings over Second Life although there may be hidden costs. “OpenSim is far less expensive to us to run,” said Shenlei Winkler, President of the Fashion Research Institute, in an online comment to the International Society for Technology in Education. “We pay less a year for most of our regions than we do for a month of our Second Life region’s hosting bills,” Winkler said.”

4. Inside Higher Ed (USA) – ‘Rebundling’ Liberal Education. “In 2009 a group of 42 researchers, educators, and entrepreneurs met together at the invitation of Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm, to discuss how the Web could transform education. A major theme of the daylong discussion, which took place under the theme “Hacking Education,” was “unbundling,” the process through which online distribution of digital media and information breaks apart and erodes existing industries. At the center of “unbundling” are new technologically-enabled relationships that democratize access to the means of production and collectively create plenty where scarcity once existed. An often-cited example of “unbundling” is newspapers: with blogs and other online tools, one no longer needs a printing press or fleet of delivery vehicles to be heard. The newspaper editorial room competes with an army of bloggers and other online media outlets. Craigslist emerges as the marketplace for used household items, local job listings, and community announcements, replacing the advertising function of the traditional print newspaper. The combination is a perfect storm leading to a steady, nationwide stream of newspaper closures.”

5. VentureBeat (USA) – VenueGen lowers pricing to take virtual meetings to the masses. “VenueGen said today that it’s taking its 3D virtual meeting tools to a new audience, with a version aimed at freelancers, small businesses, bloggers, and do-good organizations. Company president Jeff Crown said that most of the existing virtual world products for businesses, such as those offered by Inxpo and Unisfair, are out of reach for smaller organizations, because they cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. And VenueGen’s initial service, which it launched at the DEMO conference coproduced by VentureBeat, was similarly priced for large enterprises.”

6. BusinessWeek (USA) – Second Life: Reality Intrudes on Virtual Reality. “While you were worrying about keeping your home, you may have missed the popping of the virtual-reality real estate bubble. In Second Life—Linden Lab’s immersive, 3D game that allows players to trade real dollars for virtual dollars—a nice stretch of mainland coastal property that would have fetched around $65 in 2007 today goes for $16. That’s partly because the financial crisis crimped spending for the 1.38 million users, known as residents who have logged into Second Life in the past 60 days. “The real real estate crisis had a direct effect on the real estate” in virtual worlds, says Guntram Graef, a business partner at Anshe Chung Studios, which sells “land” in Second Life. It’s also because the pell-mell growth of Second Life has slowed dramatically since four years ago, when BusinessWeek put Anshe Chung—the avatar for Ailin Graef, Guntram’s wife— on its cover.”

7. Scientific American (USA) – Grand Theft Auto Is Good for You? Not So Fast… “If your children are like 99 percent of boys and 94 percent of girls, they play video games. And, if they are like 50 percent of boys and 14 percent of girls, they prefer games with “mature” – read: violent — themes, such as Grand Theft Auto, an urban dystopia of gun fights, car chases, pole dancers and prostitutes, where blood splatters realistically on the “camera lens.” Should you worry whether such a game will warp your children’s minds? A new paper by Cheryl Olson, a public health specialist at Harvard, suggests the answer may be: au contraire. Olson surveyed children’s reported motivations for video game playing and found that their top rated choices were to have fun, compete well with others, and to be challenged. She then elaborates on the psychological benefits such play might afford, describing how video games facilitate self-expression, role play, creative problem-solving, cognitive mastery, positive social interactions and leadership. Sounds more utopian than dystopian, right?”

8. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Real Economist Learns From Virtual World. “In the first quarter of this year, while Chinese demand for copper, aluminum and nickel helped the London Metals Exchange’s index of prices rise to a 4% gain, the minerals price index for EVE went in the opposite direction, dropping by 1.8% over the same period. The deflationary trend in EVE was led by sharp declines in high-end metals Zydrine and Megacyte, mostly explained by a positive supply shock. A hitherto inaccessible asteroid belt was opened up in null security space, which created an important new source for the two metals and counteracted the upward effect of stronger demand from spaceship builders. These observations and more are laid out in the latest quarterly report on economic activity in EVE by Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, chief economist for Reykjavik, Iceland-based CCP Gaming, the company that designed, created and now manages EVE.”

9. TechCrunch (USA) – Amidst Turmoil, Linden Lab’s CEO Steps DownJune has not been a good month for Linden Lab, the creator of virtual world Second Life. A few weeks ago, the company announced that it was laying off 30 percent of its staff and taking Second Life into a new direction. Today, Linden Lab is announcing that current CEO Mark Kingdon (pictured here) is stepping down. Company founder Philip Rosedalehas been named interim CEO, and CFO Bob Komin has assumed the additional role of COO. The company did not give a reason for the reshuffling of the executive team but it’s safe to assume that it reflects Linden Lab’s new strategic direction. When announcing the layoffs in early June, Linden Lab also said that it aims to make SeconfdLife more browser based, eliminating the need to download any software. The company is also pushing for Second Life to extend to social networks.”

10. Escapist Magazine (USA) – Rumor: Star Wars: The Old Republic Closed Beta In Progress. “The Star Wars: The Old Republic community has been in a fervor over nearly confirmed rumors that the game has entered a public closed beta phase for this weekend only. The game isn’t expected until mid-2011 at the earliest, but those with the force in them may be playing as we speak… err… write… as I write… and you read. They’re playing it now is what I am saying. BioWare has not confirmed the beta, but rather than a denial, Star Wars: The Old Republic community manager Sean Dahlberg wrote in this forum thread: “Thanks for the information and it’s definitely interesting that people are posting about our Game Testing Program. We don’t have anything official to say at this moment.” He also said that members of the beta were only allowed to say that there is a beta, and that they are in it, if one were to be ongoing.”