Business in Virtual Worlds News Roundup – Oct 20-26 2008

Headlines about virtual worlds just from the past week.

This week was a bit of a struggle. I’m in the habit of cutting mercilessly when it comes to this list, eliminating repetition, false promises and irrelevance. Even so, there are two or three stories here that are staying in because of special circumstances. It’s eating me up inside… gah!

How to read this week: just read the headlines and descriptions, and that’s it. For whatever reason, this is is the week of the self-explanatory headline. Follow-up on the stuff that really strikes a chord, but otherwise just read this post and call yourself up-to-date.

Past weeks:

Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, Joy Division, Kings of Leon, etc etc etc… k here we go:

Business

NICTA and VastPark Launch P2P Virtual Worlds Platform to Private Beta
Here’s a potential game-changer. Low cost, high resolution 3D spaces. Visit the P2P Closed Beta registration page here.

Stagnation in the enterprise virtual worlds space
When geeks rule the world, sometimes discussion of the tools replaces actually applying the tools themselves. This may be one of those times.

Metaplace Lands $6.7 Million in Funding
Good news for Raph Koster’s game-making-machine.

Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS in Second Life
Hooray for 3D demos, and double-hooray for neat videos:

Second Life now offering Business Teleconferencing
This isn’t actually news at all since there have been “teaser stories” for months, but STILL no public demo available and competitors abound, so once again, judgment reserved. Anyhow. They get a link purely for this conceptual video that covers the kinds of things we talk about at the vBusiness Expo:

Training and Education

UD’s Second Life islands paradise for rafts of ideas
University of Delaware covers it’s Second Life entry.

Government and Military

Canada Post schools Second Life entrepreneurs
Canada Post recently launched Bright Idea Lab, which centres on virtual small business needs.

Metaversum Gets Gov Funding in Singapore
Singapore’s having a big week… see below under “Nerds Only”.

City of Birmingham establishes virtual island in Second Life
Getting to be a popular thing to do for many municipalities.

ČR has tourist office in Second Life
Oh speaking of which – the Czech Republic jumps on in.

Marketing

Linden Lab CEO: No credit crunch in ‘Second Life’
This story keeps getting recycled into various publications. It’s in week 3 now, so it’s officially marketing hype.

Updated: Quick Stat: 7.5M+ Fairies Created for Disney Fairies
If anything, this is a story about how effective TV marketing is. After all, they did a massive ad campaign to achieve these numbers. As radio failed to kill books, and TV failed to kill radio, so too will the Internet fail to kill TV and virtual worlds fail to kill the Web. Each is merely an envelope for the next.

Gaming

FlowPlay Wants You To Join ourWorld
BusinessWeek covers ourWorld – a browser-based hangout.

Reebok Partners with IGA, Football Superstars
Ads in games stuff.

Nerds Only

Second Life in our backyard
Linden Lab is building servers locally in Singapore.

Leading Virtual World Community RCE Universe Becomes ‘mindhive’, New Professional Services Offered
Press Release. I got this in my email awhile ago but got a little busy and didn’t end up posting… anyhow. Good bunch of guys over at RCE/mindhive, and crowd-sourcing ideas is a model whose time has come. See also: Thinkbalm.

The Next HTTP Server?
An interesting teaser about the Open Metaverse Foundation’s efforts.

Newbs Only

Meet Mark Kingdon, Second Life’s governor
An intro to Linden Lab’s CEO. Everybody, meet Mark. Mark, everybody.

Virtual world poses real threat to kids on the Internet
Dangers lurking! Oh the lurking of the dangers! DANGERS! WWOOoooOOOooOOooOOHH!!

Sociological Oddities

Muslim Virtual World Coming Soon
A virtual world that won’t be IP banned in the United Muslim Emirates.

Everybody is Stupid
Ok, that’s not the actual title, but … well you should see the commentary I deleted.

Posted on October 26th, 2008 under futurism, new media. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.

Caleb Booker