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October 2010
The Archives
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10.30.10Emotional Bandwidth: Virtual Worlds and Games in the Age of ImaginationWe were talking about fruit. Bananas, a cup of melon wedges. He couldn't remember the pear. He could picture it, I think, but it took some effort to connect the image and give the pear its name. It wasn't exactly silent in the room. There were the bleeps of the machines and someone talking in the hallway. But there was a sort of silence in that space while we waited for the word 'pear' to materialize. There was something profound in that moment of silence, of waiting, and somehow it held larger silences, the deeper rivers of meaning that run ...
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10.19.10Philip Rosedale, Once Back, Is Now Back Out at Linden LabPhilip Rosedale has stepped down from his position as interim CEO of Linden Lab effective immediately, In one of the more bizarre turn of events in what has already been a bizarre year for Linden Lab. The announcement comes with a relatively terse post to the Second Life blog: After about four months as interim CEO, working closely with Bob Komin, the management team, and the board, we've decided we are ready to start the search for a new CEO. I'll be leaving day-to-day management of the company and continuing in my role on the board, including helping in the search to ...
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10.16.10Please Give the Kids Commerce: Second Life and the Teen GridThe Teen Grid, while technically on the same 'map' as the Main Second Life Grid, was always partitioned off with a set of technologies that were difficult to maintain. Any time you made a change to the server code, you'd need to double check to make sure the Teen Grid was still, well, separate - an odd thing to understand, but there were all kinds of protocols built in to the server code to maintain separate access streams and accounts and inventories and whatever else. When Linden Lab announced that it was 'merging' the Teen and Main Grid what it was ...
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10.16.10Metanomics Monday: Virtual Goods – Acquisitions, Implications and OpportunitiesThe virtual goods industry has broken out of games and Silicon Valley and increasingly has the interest of mainstream companies and Wall Street. Michael Bobroff, who cut his teeth on the emerging markets in Russia in the 90s has brought his talents to assessing the virtual goods industry, and will be discussing his take with Robert Bloomfield on Metanomics this coming Monday. I'm particularly interested in his opinion that the virtual goods industry is ready for larger companies to get a foothold into the market through acquisitions. It's worth noting the day - Metanomics has moved to Mondays, although we made an ...
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10.12.10Mesh Is On Strategy for Linden Lab, But You Are Not a CreatorAllowing mesh imports into Second Life is on-strategy for Linden Lab and part of their broader 'Fast, Easy, Fun' mantra, according to Jack Linden with whom I appeared on last night's Designing Worlds. (Video after the break). I actually thought it was a good discussion, although I'm not sure I personally made a lot of sense, but that's par for the course. It was only in the latter minutes of the show that Jack said something which felt like something more than 'tech talk'. One of the things that the Lab does astonishingly poorly is putting platform changes into a broader context. ...
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10.09.10Dusan Writer Off the Deep End: Please Raise Prices on EnterpriseOK, seriously - I think I've gone off the deep end. I seem to be the only person associated with virtual worlds who doesn't think the Lab is having a liquidity crisis, who thinks that they're going to announce a massive technology change when there's actually no real hint that they have it in their plans (other than some comments Philip made off-hand at SLCC), or that they're up for sale. And now, in keeping with my delusional streak, I'm going to propose something else: Linden Lab needs to increase the fees for enterprise use of Second Life, and align this to ...
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10.09.10Gaikai Cloud Service for Games: Bringing Virtual Worlds to a Site Near You?While OnLive and Otoy are the tip-of-the tongue names when it comes to server-side rendering approaches to delivering games, Gaikai promises something else: a business model in which affiliate Web sites can host games (or virtual worlds) and earn money by doing so. Develop a Steampunk game, embed it in your Steampunk site, and make money from the users who access it. Now, I've been thinking about this because I've been thinking about Second Life in the browser, about whether Linden Lab is truly for sale, and all the rest of the speculation from the past few weeks. I set myself ...
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10.07.10Why Linden Lab is Not for Sale (Yet)There's a pretty simple rule for investing: buy low and sell high. Now, there's another set of rules, and they're a lot more complicated: how much something is worth will depend on who you ask. In Silicon Valley, for example, something can be worth a lot even though you can't seem to find any money changing hands. In the rest of the world, there are formulas for valuation, they're often well known (a services company in Industry X might be worth 1.5 times earnings, for example), and they're often adjusted based on intangibles like "synergy" and "goodwill" but you'll usually ...
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10.06.10Geeky Goodness: The Sexy Crazy World of Research AccountingOn the most recent episode of Metanomics I interviewed none other than Robert Bloomfield himself for an in-depth discussion of economic theory, virtual economies and why people sometimes make stupid economic decisions. (OK, I'm not sure we actually talked about that, but if you listen hard enough I'm sure you'll hear it). In the very last minute of the show, news filtered in about the raise in prices for non-profits and educational users of Second Life and we briefly touched on it. As a side note, this is a "like clockwork" thing for Metanomics - invariably in the middle of a ...
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10.05.10Decoding Linden Lab 2: Second Life StreamThis morning I proposed that you could read the tea leaves of Linden Lab's announcement of a price increase for the education and non-profit community and, if you tried really hard, see the outlines of a master plan in which Linden Lab would eventually split into multiple companies: - Linden Lab, a software services company focused primarily on making money from virtual currency, markets, identity systems, server rental and infrastructure and other systems - Second Life, a virtual world which makes money from fees earned from its users, and which "buys" services from Linden Lab to support that world - The Linden Foundation, ...
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