BMW are leaving Second Life

I was unfortunately unable to make the inworld announcement today by Munich Express, the Second Life avatar of Achim Muellers, the Head of Brand Relations for BMW. However, he kindly IM'ed me the gist of the announcement:

BMW have decided they will be leaving Second Life in the near future.

This may not be a great surprise, but I have to say I am disappointed. I hope to find out more from Munich/Achim when I can, and will bring you more when I find out more.



On a personal note, I hope this does not mean the permanent disappearance of Herr Express from Second Life, as I have had many enjoyable debates and discussions with him in the past, and would welcome further such debates in the future.

UPDATE 31-07-2008:
I thought you might be interested to see some previous articles I posted on BMW. Perhaps the most illuminating is a chat with Munich/Achim from over a year ago. While This, this and this give you a bit more historical background.

Rosedale to Step Down, Step Up, Whatever

The twitter servers must be under heavy load at the moment as hordes of virtual worlders leap in to speculate about today's announcement that Phil Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, will be stepping down from his role.

According to Reuters: "Rosedale will become chairman of the Linden Lab board when his successor is found, replacing Mitch Kapor, who will remain a board member and the company’s largest investor. Rosedale said he will also keep a full-time role at the company working on product development and strategy."

There doesn't seem to be any air of panic, just the recognition that a big, grown-up company (which Linden Lab has now become) requires an entirely different sort of leadership from a hip, young start-up. I made this point (as many others did) when Cory Ondrejka left Linden Lab at the tail end of last year: "once you have a large (and largely successful) implementation on your hands, your focus shifts from rapid innovation and heads more towards Quality of Service and effective service delivery. "

Provided they get the right person - and that's a big proviso - then this should be a good thing for consumers of Linden Lab's services - that's us residents, both private and corporate. Hopefully, we will continue to see innovation and creativity from the Lab, after all Mr Rosedale is only moving within the outfit, but tempered with the skills needed to deliver a customer-centric, high quality service. Well... I can hope, can't I?

Incidentally, I hope that his replacement does NOT succumb to the temptation to pimp his/her avatar - and sticks resolutely to the no-prim hair etc.

UPDATE: Or indeed no-hair hair.

For a far better read than this - check out Mitch Wagner's post at Information Week.

UPDATE 2: Mr Rosedale's statement and resident responses on the Second Life blog.

Another Second Life Conference is Cancelled

I have just received news that SLCC 2007 - Deutschland, due to be held from 21st to 23rd of September in Dusseldorf has been cancelled.

I only actually became aware of the existence of this community conference yesterday, when talking with the guys at anyMOTION, a German SL build company who were one of the sponsors of the event. I had hoped to do my bit in bringing it to your attention. So it was disappointing to receive a mail today, informing me that the event has been cancelled.

I have yet to find out the reasons for the cancellation, but if I do get to the bottom of it then I will let you know.

That makes a second SL conference scheduled for September to be cancelled. The other casualty being SL Conference 2007, which was due to be held in Berlin.

Voice Goes Live in Second Life

After an interminable wait - and with little or no prior ballyhoo - "voice" has finally gone live in Second Life. It has been available in the so-called First Look Viewer for a couple of months, but at 3:00pm SLT it made the transition to full live implementation.

It will be interesting to see how voice affects the use of SL. I have suggested in the past, and think it is still relevant now, that it could pose an interesting challenge to the many role players in SL. Hitherto, it was possible to hide behind chat/IM. But with voice there may be some unexpected outcomes. Consider for example:

• The once-masterful Gorean slave master with the (presumed) booming, stentorian voice ends up actually sounding like Mr Bean.
• The gorgeous blonde supermodel who now sounds like John Prescott/George Dubya... you get the drift.

OK... there are filters already around that will help disguise a voice, but I would have to question their effectiveness in many situations in SL. What should a blob of Jello sound like? Or a 12ft tall rabbit?

Then there's the acting. "Dialogue" in chat/IM allows the reader to interpret how the lines should sound. But with voice, you get the lines as they are delivered - and delivery is quite literally a far more difficult act to achieve. Some people will be naturals, and take to the acting like ducks to water. Others - most - will sound wooden and false. No amount of filters is going to fix bad acting, I'm afraid. Maybe we will see a 2-tier world: those who can act and those who can't. Interesting times.

A final thought regarding voice vs chat/IM. If you live alone then you can skip this bit. But for those who don't you will also need to consider the others who share your household. They could now be exposed to some truly bizarre conversations. Or rather, your half of conversations. I thought it worth mentioning :-)

Anyway, if you've not already got it, the new viewer is now available for download. Enjoy - and use it responsibly!

Finally, here is the straight poop from Linden Lab, including release notes and a mention of a new First Look Windlight viewer coming soon.

Sun gets on the Virtual Worlds bus

Thanks to my friend Port7 Sodwind - hey, I didn't choose the name - for bringing this to my attention. Following IBM's announcement yesterday regarding their construction of big boxes for hosting bitverse 3D virtual worlds comes word that Sun Microsystems is working on 3-D virtual workplaces.

To quote snippets from Information Week:
Sun Microsystems put the spotlight on its next-generation technology and showed off research projects that ranged from faster switches and more efficient servers to 3-D virtual workplaces in an open house for analysts and reporters. Among the projects that would wow even a nontechnical person is Sun's MPK20 virtual workplace. Sun has built a client called Project Wonderland that handles the graphics rendering and provides the controls for moving an avatar through the make-believe world.

While MPK20 isn't a physical office, it contains many real-world collaboration features. A company employee could have their own office in MPK20 and hold meetings with other workers. Within the virtual office, presentations could be shown on a wall, along with documents and spreadsheets that could be modified by the group. Basically, just about any office application can be brought into the virtual world.

Another feature is voice communications, which is handled through headphones and a microphone. The voice capabilities are designed to simulate the real world, so a person, for example, leaving a meeting would hear the voices of the others slowly fade. Walk toward two people talking, and the volume of the voices increase.

MPK20 could be ready for deployment within Sun in six months, said engineer Nicole Yankelovich. Sun would use the application internally before releasing it outside the company. The odd name stands for Sun's Menlo Park (Calif.) Campus, which has 19 physical buildings, and now a 20th that's virtual.

MPK20 is built on top of the new version of Sun's open source Darkstar gaming server. While Wonderland does the graphics rendering, Darkstar handles everything else, such as load balancing, managing game state, and voice communications. For storing avatars and other game objects, Darkstar uses the Berkeley DB database, another open source project.

The Darkstar upgrade is scheduled for release in the summer, project director Karl Haberl said. A major feature in the new version is the ability to tie the servers in a cluster for handling more users. Load-balancing tools in the servers make it possible to move workloads around to avoid overtaxing any one machine.

UPDATE - 29th April:
For more on this here is the relevant webpage on the Sun site. This, in turn, contains a link to their "Collaborative Environments" home page. For their 3D environment they have turned to the Open Source Wonderland project which, in turn, builds on Darkstar (mentioned above).

Merc C Class launched into Second Life

Last Friday (16th) Mercedes launched their new 'C' Class car in RL and SL, and it seems to be something of a hit with the virtual petrolheads of SL. I popped along for a look earlier today, when there were about 20 such afficianados lining up to grab a car and zoom around the newly re-configured track, which now features a jump and a slalom to add a bit of zesty excitement to proceedings.

Given the hullabaloo, it is a surprise that the official blog has not been updated to reflect this. But I guess the RL version is a bit more important to Merc than its virtual sibling. Oddly, even the normally reliable SLNN has not got a piece on this.

I have to confess, as I'm not a petrolhead - and the lag was terrible, even with only 20 people on the sim - I did not go for a spin myself. However, I spoke with a friend who had given it a try, and he found it a difficult drive, mainly on account of the lag. Though from what I could see, it was quite responsive - and fast. No doubt like its RL counterpart.

If I were you - I'd wait until the numbers dropped a bit before giving it a whirl. But then, I'm not you :-)

UPDATE: Tonight (Tues. 20th) the island was quiet, so I took a test drive and found it lived up to my expectations - namely, the car was too twitchy to drive well. Maybe it's just me (I did see far bettter exponents of the art of driving in SL), but the experience wouldn't sell me on a Merc!

UPDATE 2: I was chatting with someone who'd spent some time with the SL car - and they were of the view that it was...if I have word correct... "awesome". It is a simple matter of getting used to the gears, apparently. Having watched a few spectacular laps, I would agree. That said, another friend who'd mastered the gearbox still thought it sucked. I guess you'll have to make your own mind up!

+++

In other news, I spotted a new island under construction (well, I've spotted a lot - but I thought I'd mention this one today) from a company called Maastrek Selection. Never heard of 'em? Neither had I. They are a promotions company specialising in promotional merchandising. You know the sort of thing I mean: mousemats, CDs, mugs, pens, clocks, cameras... the list is seemingly endless. I thought it interesting that they are coming to Second Life. In fact, now I know they exist, it seems like stating the bleedin' obvious. SL strikes me as an ideal location to widen their market (they are based in Germany) both in terms of promoting their RL products, but also (and I'm guessing wildly here) by introducing new lines of SL products for the many companies now in Second Life. As I have mentioned on innumerable occasions - SLers are, at heart, a bunch of freeloaders who like their freebies. This could be your one-stop-shop for all your virtual branded goods needs. I will be interested to see how this plays out.

(No piccies today)

SXSW from SL

The Screenburn Festival at SXSW in Austin, Texas is currently running. "The second annual ScreenBurn Festival enables consumers and game developers to preview the future of this industry, hear about soon-to-be-released titles, learn fascinating insights from thought-provoking experts, plus meet up-and-coming new talent whose innovations are powering the next generation of play."

There are a number of panel sessions running through the festival and Second Lifers unable to attend the RL event can watch these sessions streamed live to Sheep Island (virtual home of The Electric Sheep Company). I have to say the sound quality is very woolly*, with a high level of ambient background noise. But at least I can watch and listen from home, without having to travel X thousand miles to actually be there.

If you are not able to attend in RL or SL, then those stalwarts at 3pointD have been blogging the sessions furiously, so you can read and pick over the bones at your leisure (keep up the good work, Mark et al!).

The Festival runs from March10-13th.

BTW, does anyone know if these sessions are going to be podcasted?

* D'OH! Must be the sheep.

Voice Beta in Closed Group Testing

Just a quickie to highlight the speed of change in SL. The Voice facility recently announced is already in beta testing. SLNN has a thorough article on it.

Highlights include (and apologies to SLNN for quoting this verbatim):

• The audio stream will mimic speech in the real world, adjusting the volume of voices heard relative to the distance and direction of the speaker. What users hear will be controlled by their camera, so users can zoom in on someone nearby and their conversation will become louder.

• It will be possible to have group audio of up to 100 people instead of only group textual chat. Group settings and permissions will allow certain people in a group to initiate audio and control the number of speakers.

• Privately owned land will have the option to toggle voice. Estate level land controls will not only be able to toggle voice, but to also indicate the radius of how far a voice can be heard. Whether on public or privately voice-enabled land, two individuals will always be permitted to have a private conversation with each other.

There is a plan within six months to bridge regular telephone systems with this voice capability. This will enable residents to hold conference calls while they are meeting in-world.The voice enabled viewer is scheduled to formally debut in the second quarter.

New Lands a-coming (if only I could log on)

Earlier today I read - then largely forgot - this article in Second Life Herald. I had an excuse: I was at work, where such frippery is frowned on. However, when I finally had some "me time" I thought I'd take a squint at the map and see what I could find.

My first ramble took me to a whole cluster of new islands under construction, and clearly intended for human habitation. However, the first clue that this was not the fabled New Continent was this, emblazoned on the walls of a sleepy, hot Mexican pueblo:

There appears to be a large cluster of new SIMs being added to the already extensive holdings of Azure Islands. As far as I can make out, one part of the cluster is given over to hot, dusty desert conditions:


While a second seems rather more lush and temperate. And this one even has a bit of a Myst (Myst III: Exile) theme going on:

Not being one (yet) given to investing large sums of real money in virtual real estate, the existence of Azure Islands has largely passed me by. "Land is available without the need to pay Tier (ground rent, to us Brits) to Linden Labs. The Azure Islands is tiered per sqm (rather than at abitrary levels), and offers both US$ and L$ rates. "

So having drawn a blank, I tracked down the article again - and sallied forth once more. I opted for the poetically named "Loom Weaver" (it brought back memories of PC games of yesteryear) and, on TP'ing, found myself in a field now filled with For Sale signs. Then it all went pear-shaped. The ironic message on the line at the top of the screen assured me this would be a lag-free experience! Ha! After seeing my poor avatar seemingly catapulted from one end of the sim to the other, I finally found myself totally stuck and unable to move. I logged out. This was about an hour ago - when concurrency was claimed to be in excess of 30K residents.

I've just tried to login again - and was surprised to see the number of residents standing at only 10K. Odd, I thought... and hit "Connect".... nothing happened. A quick check of the LL blog says "[1:47PM PST] We’re experiencing problems with the network, which is in turn affecting log-ins and some regions on the Second Life Grid. Our operations team knows what the problem is and is working on fixing it as quickly as possible. If you’re unable to log-in, please try another location." I followed this piece of sage advice... nada... niente... nowt. On the plus side, I can see that people are getting in - concurrency now up to 12K.

More anon, but for now I'm stumped. I've tried to logon to "Home" and to a number of areas I know... without success. Grrrr!

+++

Haha! Wouldn't you know it? As soon as I hit "Publish" on this entry, I finally got in to SL. For those desperate to know, the New Continent appears to consist of 51 sims. "Area 51?" - who knows! Anyway... here's the satellite views currently available:

You can see Hong Kong Island (which is on the East of the main grid) - so that should give you your bearings if you want to hop over for a look around... or do a map search for the sim of your choice. Happy rambling, ramblers!

Wanna Job?

This just in from the Linden Blog:

I am looking for a Technical Operations Jedi! Linden Lab is going through enormous growth and rapidly getting into operations challenges that most companies have never seen. We are managing thousands of Linux-based servers in 2 locations, use over 6Gbps at peak, do 100M MySQL transactions daily, will soon need to have datacenters in multiple locations around the world, and are watching all these numbers grow at 10-20% monthly.

We need someone to lead us who has a passion for Second Life, has been deeply involved in technical and network operations at the largest scale, and loves to hire people. In terms of titles, this is probably someone currently at a VP or Director level. You will also need to have a strong technical background/degree.

You must be able provide high-level strategy and technical leadership, and your most important role will be expanding our elite operations staff with the best possible people. You should be passionate about hiring and hiring strategy, and have great ideas already about how to quickly get great people onboard. At the same time you will have to manage our global server infrastructure, which will require a sophisticated network architecture and a diverse set of facilities, NOC staff, transit providers, peers, and equipment vendors, in a variety of logistic and regulatory environments.

To handle all of this you should have hands-on experience with the very large-scale routing, peering, and partnering strategies we’re going to need to keep up with our tremendous growth. Planning, finding, negotiating for and then operating remote data centers should be something you can do in your sleep.

If you are interested or know someone who might be a fit, please contact me directly: my email is philip_at_lindenlab_dot_com. If you aren’t experienced enough to take on this role but still can help with Technical Operations, please take a look at our website and apply for one of the jobs there: http://lindenlab.com/employment

Myst Online Uru - Update

In case you missed it - or simply aren't bothered - GameTap has announced Thursday, February 15th, as the official release date for the highly anticipated debut of “Myst Online: Uru Live.” This new adventure-driven take on the massively multiplayer online game genre will feature the ongoing release of new content and will become simultaneously available in fourteen countries around the world. You can get a PDF version of the manual here.

The website also has a cool intro movie and other videos can be found here. It has the familiar Myst look-and-feel (if the screenshots are anything to go by) - but only time will tell if it has sufficient interest to drive it anywhere near the astronomical numbers of World of Warcraft. Somehow I doubt it - but I look forward to being proved wrong!

Right now they claim you can still play the Beta for 99 cents... no idea if that is still true, given the impending Go Live.

Incidentally, when I last checked (a couple of days ago), the Myst Online Uru island is Second Life was still not open to ramblers, so they appear to have blown an opportunity for some appetite-whetting marketing.

UPDATE 15-02-07: It's now officially launched - and you can try before you buy for free - go here for details.

Second Life hits 3 Million accounts

SL, at the time of writing, is standing at 2,980,370 accounts - less than 20 thousand off the next big milestone. Given the rate at which Germans have been coming into Second Life over the weekend, following recent coverage on German TV, we are likely to see our 3 Millionth resident some time later today.

I wouldn't put the champagne on ice just yet. SL is a long, long way from retaining all of these accounts. But at least it shows the power of TV. The same happened a couple of months back with Brazil - an article on TV led to what seemed like a wholesale immigration.

UPDATE: This is about 4 hours later - and the total now stands at: 3,020,735

Al thinks it's Balls (Plus an update)

And using that corny pun, Al has stumbled across Ball State University (Indiana), who have 2 islands in SL: Middletown and Media Design. This is quite an interesting site, in that it was the Rhetoric course that led the way here - with design following after. Why Rhetoric? Al is glad you asked. Well... in a classroom environment the students are less inclined to participate, let alone stand up and spout forth rhetorically. Apparently a depressingly low %age are up for it. But in SL, the buffer between self and avatar is sufficient to break this reluctance... which is nice. Also, students have cool gizmos to play with - which is also nice!

Here's where the Media Design folk have reached so far...

UPDATE: On Ohio University. The Outreach island is now open - and offers a tour. Some (all)of it is Aimee Weber --- Al, you should've guessed from those textures! Stoopid Al.

What's that Al? Chants of "All hail Aimee" you can hear? Your febrile imagination is playing tricks again - but the principle is sound!