Second Life Pros

First two months of Second Life’s CEO at Linden Lab.
I’ve been with Linden Lab for two months and each day has surfaced something interesting — and often quite unexpected. So, what have I seen? Read on.
Second Life has evolved dramatically but perception has not kept up with reality in five important ways:
1. Second Life users are more mainstream than many assume. It’s not just tech-savvy early adopters or gamers. It’s a much broader cross-section of society with a median age in the early 30’s and nearly half the time spent in world is by women.
2. The diversity of use …read more

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A great interview with Mark Kingdon, on GigaOM, by Wagner James Au.
A few interesting excerpts:
- Google Lively is not even a competitor; you have much more use cases in Second Life.
- They are focusing on three things:
a) “solidifying our proposition for what we’re defining as our core markets”;
b) Improving Second Life’s interface;
c) Stability and scalability of the platform.
- 3D is much better than 2D or 2.5D (as in the Habbo Hotel virtual world)
- Second Life is profitable (but less than 40 million USD a year).
- The partnership with IBM on interoperability is GREAT.
Well, good points. And good luck, Mark!

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I’m reading it in my RSS feed reader, even if the post has been somewhat deleted from the blog… anyway:
“Ever wondered how to find out when the next Linden Talk or Event is? Ever wondered how you would find out about a Linden’s Office Hours?
Well we’ve set up a calendar just for you! Linden Lab now has a Public Events calendar that everyone can access and see when and where a presentation or talk is going on. We’ve also added in Linden Office hours to make it easier for you to attend.
You can view this calendar here.
To add this calendar …read more

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[news source]
According to the new Linden Lab’s CEO Mark Kingdon (his first week’s blog post is here), Inworld collaboration is going to be the killer application for Second Life.
Hmm… I can agree, of course, but it seems to me that Second Life has a lot left to do, to provide a GOOD interface and environment suitable for business purposes.
And, by the way… What about their data center? Are you still going to turn down the Grid almost once a week? Please, man.

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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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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!

[image source

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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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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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If you have doubt, questions, or are a bit confused about LAND, watch out Linden Lab’s Land video tutorials, which include: basics, land use, region and parcel prim limits, selling and buying parcels, land options, parcel access controls, property lines and land owners, joining and subdividing parcels, terraforming.
Let me know if you find them useful!

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Reuters shows a video interview of Philip Rosedale on why they’ve chosen Mark Kingdon as the new Linden Lab’s CEO.
Short, but interesting!

[image source]

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