While stilll doing business with IBM (haha!) I’ve stumbled upon this somewhat older article about the formation of IBM’s Second Life business group. What the goals of IBM are, what they’re planning to do and have already done. Quite interesting read!
The well known sim Amsterdam has been sold for about 50.000 US$!
Well, the price for sure is real enough when you take in account the work needed to build such a big sim and calculate the prize you would need to pay if you order it at some agency.
But what’s to say about it… while the sim itself is nice and well done, I don’t like the crowd that’s normally populating it so much, I wouldn’t have paid so much for it nor felt the need to buy it myself. I wonder in which kind of direction it is going to develop, now, since it’s been sold. This has been for sure a good deal for its previous owner.
Now that’s something out of the IBM article, but worth an own entry: the open available JPEG-2000 library OpenJPEG got faster! This means you don’t need the proprietary libraries from Kakadu anymore to get a good open source client, if you’re living on the bleeding edge and this is making its way in the main tree of OpenJPEG after some time, I guess. Yeah!
The nice folks over at IBM Developerworks have started a series about Second Life. The first article of it is about how to compile your own client, the pitfalls and how to achieve the goal, since it’s not so trivial to do.
Quite worth a read, better than the wiki page over at Lindenlabs and I am looking forward to the next articles of this series!
There are some newly opened sims on the main grid.
To be exact, these are:
I’ve spent today again some time on the voice beta test grid. It has been quite fun and interesting to see how voice is going to change the SL experience.
It’s also a good way to see the Lindens live; no wonder, since it’s beta and only under 10 regions are online, you can see them there. I saw Pathfinder Linden and another Linden, Monroe Linden, even used voice and talked with us a little! Great!
So, basically when you’re going online on the beta grid it’s first looking where the crowd is. There are perhaps 30-40 people online the same time, and they use to flock around, well, that’s my experience so far.
Today was also interesting since we’ve seen an avatar from the company that is providing the voice technology, Vivox, Rockin Randall, who talked with us and answered some questions to us. Nice guy and some very interesting insights, for sure this is going to scale at great lengths, if necessary!
Well, here’s also a little snapshot to show the speech indicators in action, just click on the thumbnail to see the big picture. 
Bartholomew Gallacher