Bartholomew Gallacher – Seite 317

Where BMW is, Mercedes-Benz will follow – and vice versa

I’ve stumbled right now about an article by Pham Neutra from the 9th February. It again shows that the saying in the topic is absolutely right. BMW shows in world their clean energy technology only so far right now.

And Mercedes-Benz? Well, according to a press notice from the 15th of February (seems to be published too early, why should Pham Neutra know already otherwise?) they are entering Second Life officially on the 20th February 2007.

They are not only entering it with one island only, like BMW has right now; no, they’ve got nine islands to their hands, which are not opened at the moment.

It seems that they are actually taking a different approach on their presence in SL than BMW does; there are already some pictures in the blog entry from Pham Neutra showing the Mercedes Sprinter, although not from the region itself, since the region is still inaccessible. They are going to celebrate the opening with a live concert and there is also a blog, too, about it, although still not working at the moment.

So, the competition of the German carmakers in SL is heating up and I wonder where this development is going to lead now.

SL roundup

After not posting entries for some days, I’ve got to dequeue my queued posts now. So, with no further delay here they are:

SL had terrible problems yesterday. They bunch varied from not being able to login to problems with teleporting up to problems with the assets. So it was unsafe to use the inventory at all. This reminds us: when you really want to do business in SL, the platform tends to be fairly unstable. Count that always in. The whole drama lasted over 10 hours. Hopefully it is over now.
Zee Linden posted an Excel spreadsheet about the key measures of SL. Very interesting read, you should give it a read. There are some big differences from SL’s statistics to other games, and it shows. For example:
- The time of hours spent online per month seems to grow exponential at the moment.
- There is a big growth in land. But the area covered by private islands is 2.5 times bigger than by the mainland (102.72 square kms mainland compared to 258,08 square kms private islands).
- Also again: big economy growth in world and big growth in the sales of the LindeX.
- Also as it seems a big exponential groth in the number of residents at all, but the number of premiums more in some kind of linear growth, also taking off right now, too.
- The top 100 countries of the residents: 31.19% from USA, 12.73% from France, 10.46 % from Germany, 8.09 % from the Netherlands. I would have thought that more people are coming from the USA, but it shows that the audience of SL is truly international and not dominated by US residents only. So this leads of course to separated communities and some gated communities, too.
- Average age on the main grid: 33. Bummer. Now this is really worth mentioning it. The audience in SL seems to be much older than in other online games, which makes it of course more interesting for commercials, real life companies entering it and so on and on.
- More males using it than females (58,89% male compared to 41.11% female), though the female population keeps growing and growing.
RL issues are coming strongly into SL, too, right now and this is going to be a big, big thing. Mainly: violation of copyrights. It is the title theme of The Avastar from last week. Only because there were not really actions taken against some people because SL was not on the radar of the companies and copyright holders at all does mean that it is safe to use copyrighted material. On the contrary, RL copyright of course applies also to the in world. This is a lesson people should have learned from the booming days of the Internet already, but history seems to repeat itself right now. For example they are interviewing King Pascale who sells his articles under real life brand names like Gucci, D&G, Chanel and so on. Now this guy seems to come from Denmark. The graphical ad for his shop looks like this:

To cite him:

I don’t do anything illegal. Producing articles and use of real life brands is forbidden. However, I don’t only sell on what other people create for me. I got it in writing from the Lindens that it was not illegal to sell on RL brands.

Dude, you are sooo wrong! When a brand is copyrighted, it can be applied to several fields. For example the name of a computer must not apply to gardening utilities and so on. But what you are doing is to use the already established brand names to sell your own goods and make your own profit out of them. Read my lips: when a brand owner/copyright owner is going to sue you, and this is bound to happen sooner or later, you will be sued. Period. Don’t take the naive stance, it is not going to help you. Only a letter from the Lindens is no absolution that never anything will happen to you or binding legal consultation at all. Go to a lawyer with experience in this field and ask him for a consultation in that matter – and be quick! Be so quick!
Of course violation of copyright does also include streaming music, videos and much more fields to cover. With the rush of RL companies into SL expect them to take some actions against it. Otherwise you’re naive.
Another matter if importance are the still way too much high prices for land on the mainland. The prices are still not falling down, despite some other opinions. It seems that there are still land buying bots in the grid, buying new land under your feet. The Lindens should really do something about it, like introducing Captchas and other countermeasures. This is getting frustrated.

Sinner’s paradise – closed

Today there was a group notice for all members of Sinner’s paradise. It was closed at 09:00 am SLT by the owner, Hunter Tempura. She said, she thought about it over one month, but she came to the decision.

The reasons? You could only speculate about them. Perhaps too much griefers attacking the sim again and again and/or the much too large entrance area. Well, it’s sad, that the sim is not available anymore, since it stood out in terms of landscaping and quality!

Article about „The new economy in Second Life“

Yesterday there was a very good written article about "The "New" New Economy in Second Life" in the German web magazine Telepolis written by Karin Wehn (English: Google).

It is a very good written article about the economy – or the lack of – in Second Life, what SL is, why Lindenlabs did not herald the 3rd million resident and so on, the stability of the grid, how some land barons got rich and so on and on. Also has some very interesting pointers to other sides or articles.

Well worth a read. Very important is perhaps this link to the official economic statistics from SL: http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php. Just about 229 users had in December 2006 an in world income from 1000-2000 US-$, 140 from 2000-5000 US-$ and 90 greater than 5000 US-$.

You should always keep those statistics in mind when you think you can get there rich very fast and live off it. Mostly not happening for you, until you work really hard and are really good, so better scratch it.

The conclusion of the article is: the usage statistics should be read carefully. While Second Life is innovative, it is still unstable as a business platform and the downtimes can hinder the business for sure, so that it is no wonder that the declared priority from Lindenlabs is to stabilize the grid. Some are also in doubt if Secondlife is here to stay or not, because the prerequisites to connect to it are quite high and it should be more userfriendly in terms of usage.

I doubt it, of course, but we are going to see.

„Where can I get a job…?“

Arg! Newbies are coming around in masses again at all places recently. I’ve got no problem with this. But some of them are just getting too much annoying!

I’ve noticed quite a change in the last few weeks about the newbies behaviour; some of them are still good mannered, though they are the minority, it seems. Others are just thinking "money makes the world go round" and looking for the perfect job, though they are still newbies and inexperienced.

And guess what? They are bothering many people on many places with questions like "Where can I get a good job?", "Are here jobs available?" and so on… d’oh!

Get a life! You don’t need a job at all in SL. You can play for months, still have some money and have much fun without having any job at all! And if, I repeat, if, you are really in need of money – first learn to calculate!

What I mean with this one? Well, one US-$ could be exchanged into 280 Linden-$ at the moment. Most good clothes are around 1000 L$. So… which job is getting paid most in here and all can do it? Right: being a prostitute, or nicer called being an escort. An escort gets around 1000 to 1500 L$ normally for an hour of sex. These are average rates, first they need to invest into themselves let’s say 10.000 to 15.000 L$, to have a nice skin, hair, shape, dresses, toy for sex and so on.

If you calculate now those rates back – 1000 to 1500 L$ would mean around 3,57 to 5,35 US-$ per hour. That’s not much money, and if you are earning for example 10-12 US-$ normally in your daytime job per hour – well, you’re blasted there.

So, what’s the bottom line of this? When you want to get money in SL – either play in a casino, or just, for goodness sake, buy it! And if you really, really want to earn money in game, become an escort, or better a custom builder, shop owner with a nice niche, scripter or try to rent land to people at affordable prices!

But, hell, stop bugging us all for jobs! It’s annoying as hell. If you’ve get it inside yourself – fine. Be your own self-made man or girl. If not – take some time to grow up. Most better paid jobs are only available for avatars at age > 30 days, and that’s for very good reasons.