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I’ve taken a look at the Land Auction page from Lindenlab today for closed auctions. Seems they’re adding eight new regions per day at the moment, most appear at the new continent in the east, I guess.

The average prize a new region is sold for is around 3.000 US$. Now 8 regions auctioned off per day makes 24.000 US$ income per day and for the tier-fees later 1.560 US$ safely per month. Not bad, he?

And all that for a dual CPU machine which can host two regions alone.

Well, and if you convert the price into land values and the owner wants to make some profit with the region, this means high land prices. Of course.

A region has 65.336 square meters. So, you can buy 270 L$ at the moment for 1 US-$. This means already that you need to take about 12 L$ per square meter only if you want to get this investment in. Now take the tier-fees into account, too, makes around 0.80 L$ per square meter in the first month. Let’s say if you want to sell the region without loss in the first month you need at least a prize from 13 L$ per square meter.

Well, seems the Lindens are clearing their backlog and delivering today (!) about 300 islands.

Let’s calculate a little. For normal users (non educational) reserving a region costs 1.675 US$ and the monthly maintenance fee for an island is 295 US$.

So alone on reserving costs 300 new arriving islands mean: 300 islands * 1.675 US$ = 502.500 US$ income for Lindenlabs. Of course not all of it profit, since they’re using these fees to pay the server hardware, plain and simple, but surely are still making some profit with it.

Then 300 islands * 295 US$ maintenance fee per month and per island = 88.500 US$ income on maintenance fees per month with these islands. Most are surely used to pay the staff and the location, but that’s where the real profit comes from for Lindenlab.

So - not bad, hu?

According to this article the European Union considers opening an own presence in Second Life. They’re saying it could happen in the future, but right now they don’t have enough manpower to do it, so it’s still in consideration to communicate via unusual mediums.

Hm… could be starting a new trend, that nations are entering the space like many RW companies have already done it. We’re going to see.

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.

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.

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.

The Netzeitung runs an article today how the German criminal law is applicable to Second Life and not.

To sum it up in short: if you’re going to make pornography publicly available there, it is applicable; also child pornography falls under it. Sex between furries - is against it. A dutch attorney is already investigating in case of “child age play” as an act of child pornography.

Well, some new insights, it sums it up to - better don’t do anything evil and be sure with whom you’re interacting.

The Lindens are putting together another of the so called First Look Viewers. Nothing wrong about that one. But what strikes me is this passage in their posting:

Also, regarding the removal of the old particle systems. We are evaluating whether or not we can transparently migrate the deprecated functions to use the new system. If you have any information about how best to map the old functions to use llParticleSystem, please IM Steve Linden in world. Surprisingly, we no longer have anyone here who is familiar with the old particle systems (one of the reasons we want to remove them entirely).

I mean, what’s the problem there? They should have documented it entirely in house, they have the code, so they should really, really know how it works.

And if not, they should know how to get in touch with former employees who know how it works. But this? Very, very strange…

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.

My experience told me normally that especially handicapped people like to experience and try to live in games like Second Life what they cannot do anymore in real life. For example it can be very nice for blind people to play in a MUD to socialize with other people, or for deaf people to play in Second Life.

It can also be very accomodating for people who cannot walk anymore and need wheelchairs to play Second Life to forget about that for a little while.

Well, but not all wheelchair users seem to feel that way; there is a usergroup of people who are unable to walk in real life anymore in Second Life who don’t want to hide this behind there avatar, quite the opposite. They’re saying this is an undeniable part of myself, of my life, whereever I am and I want to show it.

I’ve been programming around a little yesterday and made my first simple LSL-script - a notecard giver keeping track of unique visitors. Really simple when you get the heck off it and quite useful for different things, not so far fetched to turn it into a greeter, visitor counter and other things, also or make it into a big whole-into-one-package.

What bothers me, though, is that LSL is unable to save data into a notecard stored into the object. This seems to be really a big drawback of the language - hopefully there is going to be some support for this in the future. So, in the meantime, you have to save data - if you need it - on external webservers with llHTTPRequest() - seems that’s the only possibility when you don’t want to use instant messages or open chat, to have a nice formatted file of data. Bummer.