How Clever is Clever Zebra?

Things have been rather quiet for a while over at Metaversed.com. Not quite as sepulchral as 3pointD, to be sure, but nevertheless it is a site that has faded from its early days as a young, snotty, opinionated upstart in virtual world news and views. Latterly it has become little more than a vehicle for advertising the Metaversed/Metanomics inworld meetings. I’ve been curious about this, wondering why Nick Wilson, the original voice and founder of Metaversed, had all-but disengaged from the site. It seems the answer is that he has been busy behind the scenes. There is a metamorphosis underway in the world of Metaversed, with the emergence of a whole new site – and more importantly, a whole new concept: Clever Zebra.

I know… I know… from nothing 24 hours ago, this is becoming the “phrase du jour” – but I thought you might like to know a bit more about it.

Broadly, Clever Zebra is a new company that will offer companies and others a new approach to establishing a presence in Second Life. At its crudest, the approach looks like an uber-version of the freebies already available to newbies and the financially-challenged in SL. Clever Zebra’s first product, Zebra Corporate, will be available later in January. This “will include the buildings, productivity tools, furniture and landscaping necessary to form a corporate build that can be adapted to each organization’s individual purpose.”

And it won’t cost you a penny. “By providing companies with enterprise class virtual world solutions for free under an open source license… All Zebra Corporate pieces will have full permissions to copy, modify and transfer under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. This license allows the redistribution and resale of all or part of the system but stipulates that redistributed copies, whether modified or not, must also carry the same open license.”

Clever Zebra intends to make its money from the services that can be offered alongside, such as customisations, training, support and consultancy.

Won’t this mean a cookie-cutter approach? Well, yes and no. While Zebra Corporate provides a general toolset, it also offers plenty of scope for customisation, branding, layout changes and so forth. And it is worth considering whether “cookie cutter” is such a bad thing. It offers a quick, easy entry point to Second Life for companies that might otherwise have considered the environment too strange – and expensive – to consider. First and foremost, a place has to work as a social environment – looks are secondary.

What about the big building companies? It is unlikely that CZ will have a big impact on the existing virtual world development companies. Large corporates and media groups will still prefer to go the totally bespoke route offered by these specialists. Smaller build companies may well feel the squeeze – but from the conversations I have had over the last 6 months or so, most of these companies are suffering already. I don’t know if this is feasible – but some form of alliance with CZ might actually benefit such companies.

What about artisan builders and craftsfolk? A few people have already voiced concern about the possible threat to existing SL artisans. I don’t see Clever Zebra posing any greater threat than they experience already. In fact, it is part of the company’s ambitions to bring in artisans to broaden the range of objects available under the CZ banner. “By creating a set of standards for Zebra Corporate, including measurements, content, and quality grades, we can invite the creative community to build to those standards and submit variations of the corporate theme for inclusion in the Clever Zebra collection.”

Artisans should benefit from commissions, promotion and direct engagement with enterprise clients. CZ will also offer to help with profiles, contracts and freelance work – in effect acting as an agency.

In the hyperbole coming out of the site all of this is described as a “paradigm shift”. I’m not sure I would go that far – but I do think this is an interesting, new approach for bringing companies into Second Life. The low cost may well attract a large number of new companies to try their hand.

And perhaps here’s the rub…

The business model, in large measure, relies on selling people’s time – time for customising, time for training and support, time for consultancy. Unlike virtual products, which can be sold over and over without any further intervention, people’s time is not a scalable commodity.

Fundamentally, CZ needs to sell time, and that means having bodies, and that has all manner of ramifications. People are expensive. People need to be trained, managed and paid. How do you scale up quickly if there is high demand? In fact, how do you tune resourcing according to peaks and troughs in the market? Sounds like contracting to me.

But it goes a bit further than that: How do you ensure consistent quality? How do you ensure the CZ brand values are preserved? This starts to resemble the Virgin business model. It requires investment in the contractors – and governance mechanisms that allow CZ to monitor quality and conformance.

A final thought is around winning business. The costs associated with bid management, sales and marketing can be high – and the time these activities devour is time that cannot be readily clawed back from charge out. I know this has killed other small companies in SL.

The calculation of running costs, incorporating these and many other factors, looks to be highly complex and full of assumptions. Coupling this with an industry-standard per capita charge-out rate leads me to believe that making a profit will be a real challenge with this model.

I wish CZ good luck with this venture, but I think they need to work through some of these issues if they are to survive (but then, I’m not an open source zealot).

PS: I am glad to see that the "meta" prefix is noticeable by its absence. Here's to a meta-free '08!