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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Tomorrow (sunday, april 27th) at 10am PDT, Ben Lorica (O’Reilly) will present the Virtual Worlds Business Guide by O’Reilly and discuss their recent findings.

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The conference is just one among many at the Virtual Business Expo, taking place in Second Life (or “inworld”, as we use to say) for four days, with the following topics: virtual workplace, virtual education, virtual marketing, virtual commerce.
It seems a very interesting event, even if on the website they forgot to mention dates and times!

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I’ll probably pass by for a couple of hours, to see what’s going on, and I’ll try not to miss …read more

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Mitch Kapor (to understand who the man is: Mitch Kapor on Wikipedia) just presented a new promising technology, allowing people to move avatars, interact with objects, fly and run in the virtual world of Second Life.

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In my opinion, mouse and keyboard will remain the main tool for years to come, but this kind of technology will open up new possibilities, expecially for virtual tours of simulated “real” places, or applications in which the user is supposed to interact with the environment using his body, rather than sitting in front of a PC.

We’ll see… for the moment, I’m excited about …read more

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It’s not just virtual worlds, but Disney predicts to have one billion dollars in revenue this 2008 year, up from the 700 million for last 2007 year.
This is interesting, because it means that online technologies, and virtual worlds in particular, are definitively here to stay.
I also think that as soon as we’ll have more bandwidth worldwide, and better interfaces, the use of virtual worlds, and Second Life, will reach the masses, and become very profitable for companies offering virtual services.
What do you say? It’s a good, or a bad prediction?

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Download this PDF and read it, it’s well worth it.
It’s a forecast for Virtual Worlds in 2008.

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Most of you are certainly familiar with real estate, and aware that it’s a business field in which good salesmen get rich quickly, and foolish proprietors can lose or gain huge amounts of money based on their choices (price, real estate agent, etc).
Second Life is no different than that, despite it’s clearly a platform that allows novell forms of transactions and, therefore, of quarrelling.
It’s the case of Mark Bragg, a lawyer that used a dirty (but maybe legal) trick to win a virtual land (called SIM, short for Simulation) auction for a very low price; he basically hacked the URL …read more

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