Caleb Booker

Headlines about virtual worlds just from the past week.

Strange week really. Everything was niche interest, although I suppose the whole nonsense over at LL deserves everyone’s ponderance (see top story).

Oddity makes for a good read though. I allowed myself the luxury of extended commentary here and there, and at other places refrained entirely as all was self-apparent. Overall, a pretty good time to be had here, and it’s relatively short!

Past weeks:

• Oct 20-26 2008
• Oct 13-19 2008
• Oct 6-12 2008
• Sept 29 - Oct 5 2008
• Sept 22-28 2008
• Sept 15-21 2008
• Sept 8-14 2008
• Sept 1-7 2008
• Aug 25-31 2008
• Aug 18-24 2008
• Aug 11-17 2008

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, my blip channel, Jack Skellington, etc etc etc… k here we go:

Business

Second Life uproar over high “taxes”
Alternate title: How to Avoid “Happy Users”. Linden Lab is charging more for certain kinds of servers. They have to do this because they didn’t think people would actually USE these servers much if they just told everyone that they weren’t intended for a lot of traffic. I don’t think I need to point out the obvious here. What were they thinking, really?
Anyhow, the usual pundits are in their glory screaming about rising prices and unfair… whatever etc etc. Some are planning coherent exit strategies. Regardless, Linden Lab is under the impression that they have a permanent stranglehold on the Second Life community. I don’t think I need to point to the obvious there, either.

Virtual Heroes Investigating Funding Round or Company Sale
Virtual Heroes has legs: good tech and good relationships. Certainly worth someone’s VC. (See recent news on them below!)

Training and Education

University of Florida Puts $1.25M Grant into Diplomacy Training for Second Life
“University of Florida engineers have launched a project in Second Life to foreign service and other government workers for diplomatic missions to China. Second China is funded by a $1.25 million federal grant and offers generic Chinese city for visitors to explore and proceed through various activities.” More on this from Science Daily.

St George’s Hospital paramedics train in Second Life
Hmm, this is starting to feel less like news and more like “the way training is done”. More on this from the Beeb, and on healthcare in virtual worlds here.

Energy industry’s virtual world
No better way to do a fire drill than to put the guys on the oil rig and light it up!

Government and Military

NASA Selects 3 Proposal Teams for Learning Virtual World
From the NASA website:

[...] have invited three proposal teams to Goddard Space Flight Center on November 7, 2008, to give live presentations. The selected proposal teams are:

• Mindark
• Saber Astronautics, Nocturnal Entertainment, and Big World
• Virtual Heroes and Project Whitecard

Marketing

Vivaty Launches Embeddable Scenes with Universal Music and BarelyPolitical
The new Queen+Paul Rogers album, “The Cosmos Rocks,” gets a high-tech listening party.

Richest People During the Gold Rush
Commentary over at CZ really covers this, but I wanted to ask about this video from a marketing perspective. Doesn’t it seem kind of… I don’t know… depressing? “Behold our empty, empty world. So empty.” Is that the message they were going for here?

Gaming

Playfish Raises $17M for Social Games
Playfish makes games for social networks - kind of a good gig really. If you’re going to make games, it might as well be for a fully invested audience.

Group Laundered $38M in Virtual Currencies in 18 Months
The world is so strange…

Nerds Only

Vivaty Extends Boundaries Of Its Virtual World
Who doesn’t like Facebook and AIM plugins? Everybody loves Facebook and AIM plugins! (Forbes does a bit more on why this might matter.)

Forterra Integrates OLIVE with Surveilance Tech
Very neat stuff, extending existing real-world surveilance tools with virtual spaces.

Why Sun’s Project Wonderland changes everything
Guys. Pay attention! Hey, you in the back! Listen, these videos are important! I… well look if you won’t take an interest in your own future that’s your business, I’m hitting Play now:

Part 1: Project Wonderland Technical Overview from Nicole Yankelovich on Vimeo.

Newbs Only

Photos: Second Life gets down to business
How do Microsoft, Nasa, Nokia and Peugeot look in the virtual world?

Sociological Oddities

Researchers Find New Way Of Measuring ‘Reality’ Of Virtual Worlds
Academics seeking reality. Good discussion over at Clever Zebra.

Murder in the Virtual World
Drama drama.

Posted on November 2nd, 2008 under new media. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.