Business – Seite 47

New lottery in town: SLMillions

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.

They are also claming that they are donating about 10-25% of the income to RL charity projects, like the Red Cross for example.

Well, what to think about it? This is something were already big in world money is involved. They are trying to be good businessman and take their lottery for serious, so much is certain, because they want to stay.

But: if you want to be a good human being, you just can donate money on yourself to the charity organization of your choice. You don’t need a lottery to do that.

The maths is simple. To make this business sustainable they need at least 4000 sold tickets per month, otherwise they are going to be in a loss. Add the social component to it with the minimum of 10%, this makes then 2.200.000 L$ of monthly income they need or 4400 sold tickets. After this point they are going to be profitable.

These are quit big numbers they need to sell, so they need a big vendor network, which they already have. This is one point. The other point is: when I attend such a lottery I’d like to know with whom I am making business and where to catch him. Ok, I can get their represantatives in SL. On their website are even to phone numbers I can call and an email adress, terms of services and so on.

All very fine and professional, but the most important thing is missing: an adress. Yup, right. Of course I’d like to know from which country these operations are based and where to reach them with snail mail. Even in the oh so virtual times of Second Life. But there is no imprint on their otherwise very professional made side, nada, nothing. And this is, of course, a big lack for me with this lottery.

Don’t get me wrong: they talked with the Lindens and if ever there would be a serious need to reach them, you could either do it the way with Lindenlabs or trying to call them. They are doing a serious business inside the world, take it serious, so no need to be afraid to buy a ticket from them. But I am old fashioned and miss the imprint – seriously. Period.

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.

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.

Serverside to be opensourced within three years – or so

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.