Kategorie: Business

PC&E opened in world presence

Packaging&Converting Essentials, a content provider for the graphics and packaging industry, has opened up its in world presence last week in the sim Sede de Marte.

The building is outstanding in regards of architecture; one of the few pentagons you’re ever going to see in world. They’re handing out RSS reader huds and of course you can get in touch with their staff, my good old friend Ludwig "Lu" Stapleton as communication officer. And yes, she’s a female avatar, just being very much in love with Ludwig van Beethoven, hence the name.

Ah and since everybody loves pictures, here’s a picture of the building taken by myself. The building itself was done by Alex Bader. Building PCE

If you want to listen to nice music or inform yourself about matters of the graphical and packaging industry, just go there and get yourself informed.

Taxes on virtual economy

CNNmoney.com ran an interesting article about „Second Life’s looming tax threat.“ What stays in world is in world and not interesting for the IRS. But when you’re trying to convert it into real money that’s quite a different matter.

It is about the possibility that you’ve got to pay income tax in the future to the IRS if you’re earning money in SL and other games like WoW and whether it’s possibile or science fiction. An interesting read.

New things in the making

There’s been a somewhat quiter time now in Second Life, especially in terms of media coverage and company news, but now again the hype is heating on.

Here are some of those events:

  • The Germans Samwer brothers achieved a 10% share of Anshe Chung Enterprises. For those who don’t know them: these are businessmen, who first founded a German competitor to eBay, called Alando and sold it then to eBay for around 50 million US$. Later they’ve founded Jamba, the German or European (?) market leader in ring tone sales, which became vastly popular for their annoying commercials. Many still remember the oh so annoying Sweety or perhaps the Crazy Frog. This is all of their doing. Well, their company got many critics back then because of their business behaviour, especially to underages. The most famous article about their behaviour is called „Jamba Kurs“ (English via Google) from the end of 2004 in the German blog Spreeblick and got them many bad media coverage, especially because the owner of Spreeblick found out that employees of Jamba posted disguised under some pseudonyms pro Jamba comments in his blog. This article made Spreeblick very popular, and it is still today one of the most read blogs in Germany. They’ve changed later there business practics under pressure of the government. Later they sold their company for about 270 million US$ to Rupert Murdoch and founded a risk capital company. Seems they’ve invested now with this company money into ACS like they also before did into the German Facebook copycat StudiVZ. This is, of course, a good deal, since they’ve got the advantage of very cheap and good workers from China. They intend to double the employee staff to 100 persons and to open several, international bureaus. This must be also a good deal for Ailin Gräf herself in terms of money, too. Both are very successful companies and business men.
  • Second Life is in the process of getting voice capabilities. This is going to be a very big leap in the further development of the platform. The reactions about that are diverse; while some say that’s great, others say Lindenlabs should first fix the most outstanding bugs of Second Life before adding new features, that can possibly add even more to the lag situation we’ve got at the moment, others dislike it because it is somewhat disclosing about their real life persona and it can drive a somewhat rift in the playership between people still typing and people who only use voice only.
  • Ah, and the lag, our friend, we all love and cherish: the Lindens claim it’s fixed. Consider that! Wow! What was the reason for it? A saturated network link. Now I wonder how often – if at all – they’re looking at their network router graphs. This is something so obvious to find out if you only take a closer look at your network equipment – sheesh. No fame for the Lindens there.
  • CBS is financing the Electric Sheep Company. Another company getting an infusion of fresh money, this time the company that supports Open Second Life.
  • Mercedes Benz has opened up an own point of business, that seems to be still somewhat lacking. Expect there more things to come, I guess it’s intentional they’ve opened up so early to get first some experiences in handling Second Life before the real shebang of the company starts.

About the economics of Second Life

The Register ran a story one week ago about the economics of Second Life. They are taking a very close look at the hard facts of the economics in Second Life beside the hype. Some measures are really interesting and were even new to me.

First, there is the churn rate. Only about 15% of the people who create an avatar in October 2006 logged in again after their first 30 days in SL. Very interesting measure, indeed. This drastically reduces the number of real residents, of course. Even more when you take all alts out.

There are about 4 million residents at the moment, when you do the math, this means that there are really about 600.000 residents who login regularly (alts included in this measure).

They are also pointing out that the maximum number of avatars in one sim is around 100 at the moment; also a very important restriction on doing business in SL. But then again, the business in SL has found ways around it.

70% of the revenue of Lindenlabs is generated at the moment by land sales and tier fees. No surprise in there. It’s a bubble at the moment, bound to burst sooner or later. Of course, LL would like it to burst later to generate more profit out of it.

Last number is that there are around 50.000 premium users at the moment; that’s not really much for such a big game/platform/whatever.

It’s a nice article with some new insides beside the mainstream and definitely worth a read.

Germans and their Arbeitsamt

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 are also different kind of jobs, too, like a RW company looking for someone to hire in RL, their are looking for event hosts, DJs, hosts, designers, builders and other stuff.

My opinion? If you really want to get a job, it’s perhaps a nice way to get one at the entry level. But that’s all you can expect from them. Better jobs are surely not going to be posted there, they are given away like in RL, too, by reference and the reputation you’ve got in SL.

And it’s always better to look for yourself for a job then taking the service from such kind of agency at all.