Business

There are many Germans in the game. Many of them are looking for a job. So, what would have been a better idea then to found something like a job agency for them? Yes, there is one, called SLArbeitsamt, the homepage is here.

Well, what is an Arbeitsamt? It is the job agency, founded by the government over there. But, it is already called since some years “Agentur für Arbeit” (Agency for Work), so no more Arbeitsamt anymore.

Whatever, taking a look at this homepage can be quite amusing. Most people looking for work are really young, so to speak; they should first hone their skills, then get to work. Of course, there are the typical jobs like model or escort - but hey, everybody can look good in SL without doing much, so there are masses of them. No wonder about that, but actually there are not soo much vacancies for them as you may think when you read the press about it.

There is a new lottery in Second Life, called SL Millions. The driving force behind this lottery is Lederberg Investment, a group run by Mar Lederberg, who seems to live in Geneva, Switzerland.

Here is the deal: you buy one ticket from them for 500 L$ and get the chance to win 1.000.000 L$ per month. The other million will be split among several people. They spoke to the Lindens and made them crystal clear that they already have the claimed money, to make sure they are serious about it and just not want to take the money out of the peoples pockets. Well, even if still “only” L$, 1.000.000 L$ is quite an amount of money. Right now the best selling rate for L$ is about 277 L$ convert into 1 US-$. This means that the jackpot is equal 3610.11 US-$. Still quite an amount of money in real life and you can make much things with one million in world.

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.

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.

    [Mehr]

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.

I’ve stumbled about an interview with Mitch Kapor through a blog entry of Prokofy Neva about a possible happening decrease in land prices. Seems the interview has been edited since then, but the lines Neva cites where there. Definitely.

So… Mr. Neva is upset about the possible opening of the server side. Well, I can understand him (and needs to write an article of biblical propotions again, just to say: “This is nuts”, like always…), but it is the only way to take it on the next level.

How Lindenlabs can generate money after opening up? Well, for example perhaps like this:

• You want your own server connected to the maingrid? Well, you can, but you will have to pay a monthly fee to LL for it.
• You want access to the central login- and asset-manager of LL? No problem, also available for a fee.
• Need to backup your database? Yes, do it with LL.
• You want to be able to buy and sell L$ on your own server? Sure thing, again availabe for a monthly fee…

and so on and on…  I would not be surprised if some of those ideas are going to manifest in the future.

Today Lindenlabs dropped the bomb: there is going to be a new continent in the east! Not only that, they are adding the new regions at a higher speed than earlier (which was 4 regions per day) and putting up some mechanisms to avoid the buying of the parcels through bots.

This sounds like a nice move. Ok, the people seeing land as an investment are going to cry if the prices drops significantly, but in the end it’s better that way, because so more people are able again to get new land and for Lindenlabs to generate more income, of course.

If LL would not have taken this step, it could have been that many people were leaving the game or just not buying land anymore, so that LL would have been on quite a stock of unused land sooner or later. Now, there is a new force in the land business, a new motion and I am thrilled to observe in which direction this might leed us!

Darius Lehane did it, again. This time he wrote an article about the land bubble in Second Life. Quite an interesting read and he got some critical points absolutely right.

He’s right: land prices are out of control, taking off to unseen heights and are prone to crash sooner or later. Why? Well, what are you buying actually? Not really. Actually the partition of computation time of one server. One server normally hosts two sims and consists of a dual-core CPU. And servers can get added day by day, a fact unseen in the real world. So you theoretically can add as much land to the grid as you like.

Why is it going to burst? Because sooner or later the point of no return will be reached when most people are unwilling and/or unable to pay the prices. That’s why, and the fes are eating up he owners.

The German magazine “Der Spiegel” (English translation via Google) has opened up an own avatar for media coverage in Second Life. This is after “The Avastar” and Reuters another major media player - well, at least in Europe - joining this world. The main usage seems so far to report Second Life and make some entries in a blog actually.

The avatar him(her)self is named Sponto; no surename given in the article so far. It’s a rather nice read about the impressions a newbie can get out of SL and seems to be the first in a series of entries. They even opened up a German forum on their website to discuss SL, well, we’re going to see how it is going to develop.

In this article I am referring to a posting from today in the blog Valleywag about the virtual economy in Second Life. Actually Valleywag themselfes are referring to a bigger article from Randoph Harrison. It’s not the first nor surely the last article Valleywag is posting against Second Life, but one of the more interesting ones. And since it was featured today on the front page of Slashdot, thousands of people of not even more read it.

The article in Valleywag is a very opioniated piece of writing, again. The article from Mr. Harrison itself is more serious written, but they are both referring to the same fact and most of the article in Valleywag is just a big quotation from Mr. Harrison, anyway.

So, to cut it short: Mr. Harrison thinks that the economy in SL is just some kind of big, overhyped pyramide scheme. Why that? Because on the ond hand it’s simple to make Linden dollars in game but he thinks it is real hard to convert them again into real dollars after that.