Second Life Pros

“Does a Second Life avatar need a kitchen if it never eats, or a roof over its head if it never rains? If you can be anything and build anything, how does an avatar find happiness?”
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As good as usual, the Second Life section of Reuters talks about the new “Molotov Alva and His Search for His creator: a Second Life Odyssey“.
It seems a futile question, but… According to Ray Kurtzweil and his books, it may be rather important in a near future.
My take: virtual worlds will become predominant in 25 to 35 years, and people will melt with artificial intelligence …read more

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With a gorgeous post, Linden Lab is inviting people to check their job listings.
Working at Linden Lab should be cool, I think… but I’m not sure that their salaries are competitive.
Fact is that this company is one of the “stars” of the moment, even if they’re still small, compared to Google or Amazon or Yahoo.
Share with us your experiences and thoughts about it!

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Jessica Holyoke on Second Life Herald shouts that Second Life can be seriously threatened by law regulations, in particular those regarding jobs, and media copyright.
Briefly, it’s not clear which law and regulation you must apply to Second Life workers, and this problem will become more and more serious in the years to come; and when you stream music in SL, and someone dance with it, you’re creating a movie, thus you need specific (expensive) licensing for that.
My take is that in the world, sooner or later, there will be an urgent need for a GLOBAL law regarding virtual worlds; I’m …read more

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BreakAway Ltd. bought the license for a project, funded by Federal government in Texas and developed by Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, regarding a virtual learning platform for medical training: Pulse!!
This is what Dr. Claudia L. McDonald has to say:
“Through our collaboration with TAMU-CC to develop a platform solution for teaching and training medical professionals, we realize the urgent need for medical organizations to augment their traditional training methods with game-based technology such as Pulse!!,” BreakAway CEO Doug Whatley said in a statement. “We are honored to be able to use Pulse!! technology as the starting point for delivering virtual learning …read more

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Great news from the official Linden Lab blog: the new virtual land store is open (in beta).
You can find all the informations to register and use the beta version on the blog post.
I think that the land store needed a refresh, and a better usability; I played around a little bit with this new one, and I can say it seems quite good!
Thanks Lindens!

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What Second Life is missing is a real “virtual” democracy, in which residents can vote and be elected. It’s something that you can see on Erepublik.com, a quite new web-based game in which you, as a virtual citizen, engage in economy, politics and war.
Now EVE Online, another huge virtual world, is opening up for democracy: according to Reuters:
“Sixty-one candidates are vying for nine spots in open voting on EVE’s website. The top vote getters will become the official representatives of EVE’s player community, and flown to Reykjavik, Iceland to share their thoughts on the game at the company’s headquarters.”
Great! When …read more

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Torley Linden did what I’ve been waiting for: he better organized the video tutorials wiki page, making easier to find the video you need.
“One of the new features is that when you view the lists for “Tip of the Week” (30+ of ‘em) and “Quicktips” (75+!), columns can be sorted by category! Also, I’ll be updating the main page regularly to show highlights from my most recent videos.”
Check it out!

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UgoTrade has a new great interview with Mitch Kapor (yes, THAT Mitch Kapor) about 3D interfaces for Second Life!
This is exciting, and Mitch says we’re gonna have them by Christmas 2009! Great!

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Wagner James Au writes on Business Week about Marketing in Second Life; in his opinion, marketing is far from dead. Companies need to understand Second Life, in order to be successful.
I agree with him: Second Life has lots of potential, but suffered from a huge hype, like the Internet just before the bubble exploded.
At the moment, Second Life has almost 15 million registered users, but the real number of people actively using it is below a million. It’s not a huge market, is it? Or, better, it’s a niche market, an early-adopters market, in which you can find precious value …read more

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Wagner thinks that, given some approximation, Linden Lab is earning a gross of about a hundred millions a year, and pays about half of it in expenses.
Let’s take his calculations (he honestly says that he’s not an expert of the matter), and modify them according to my little and humble IT experience:
Linden Income
a) There are 14,600 islands, of which about 7,000 were sold in the last 12 months. They bring a one time sales fee of 1500$ (average), it means 10.5 M$ per year (but this figure is growing, almost doubling every year, so we can assume that for the …read more

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