Kategorie: Business

Newly opened sims

There are some newly opened sims on the main grid.

To be exact, these are:

  • T-Online Island and T-Online Beach. T-Online is one of the biggest German ISPs, on their island you can find an in world presence of this company open for all, with a modern building, meeting rooms and so on, while T-Online Beach is mostly a beach, open for all.
  • Frankfurt am Main has opened an in world presence, too. It’s consisting of five sims at the moment, Frankfurt West, Frankfurt City, Frankfurt Nord Ost, Frankfurt Ost and Frankfurt Ostend. Not all of them are already finished, you can see most at Frankfurt West and Frankfurt City so far. The initiative to open such sims was made by some private men. It’s basically an in world rebuild of some popular sights of the city. Update: it’s the first official presence of a German city in Second Life.
  • The VHS Goslar has opened an in world presence, too. I wonder where there’s the sense of it, though. But then again, why not, enabling new market reach and such, for sure organizations like that can profit from a voice enabled main grid, when it’s going to be available.

Lindenlabs had less than 11 million US$ income in 2006

The German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is running an interview today with Philip Rosedale. Of course, it’s about Second Life.

Rosedale says that figures which are flowing around, saying that his company had less than 11 million US$ on sales last year, are reasonable. The first quarter ever his company made profit was 4Q 2006 accordings to Rosedale. That’s quite a long time, even for a startup like LL.

Rosedale thinks that one day SL could be bigger than Myspace.com, because of the bigger possibilites in his platform. He said that only about 10% of the accounts are in world on a regular base, that LL has about 130 employees at the moment – adding 20 each quarter at the moment – and he would like to see his company independent over the years. Rosedale is the meaning, that LL should not be sold, there is about 20 million US$ venture capital in the company at the moment, and even if Google or someone else would knock at their door and bid 1.65 billion US$ for a takeover it’s unlikely to happen.

Making money with unfixed bugs

Well, the teleporter bug in the client is still unfixed (don’t we love it all?), how to work around it, was explained by Torley Linden in the knowledge base. Simple: press Ctrl-Alt-V, then you’ve got the button back again.

But well, not everybody reads the knowledge base or spreads the word around, many are still complaining about this unfixed bug. Some are trying to make money with it, selling their own teleportation tools right now.

TP Hud

How about fixing the bug or spreading the word to render this device unnecessary, again? This would be great, don’t you agree?

New whitepaper about SL business released

Yesterday there was a new German whitepaper called „Second Life and business in virtual worlds“ released done by Pixelpark AG and Elephant Seven AG.

The content is split in roughly three parts: first an introduction about what SL is, some things about the economics and three strategies how a RW company could make its in world presence, what to expect and what not, the advantages and weaknesses of the system, and how to be succesful with an in world campagne, how to get experience and so on.

The second part consists of many case studies, like Adidas and so on, what companies wanted to do in here and  how they achieved it – or failed to do it.

The third part lists other 3d world projects, lists their attributes, advantages and disadvantages  compared to Second Life.

For short: the target audience of this whitepaper is a project leader who must decide on if to get into SL or not. It tries to be a somewhat unbiased view of the things and of course is more objective than something from Lindenlabs or the main stream press, so it’s worth a read.