Caleb Booker

Headlines about virtual worlds just from the last week. See the archive page for past weeks.

It appears that this is launch week! We’re swimming in new worlds to try out, new education projects begun, and new marketing spectaculars.

Coincidentally this week marks the exciting release of Virtual Worlds for Business; a continuously updated, comprehensive guide to enterprise virtual worlds for meetings, training and collaborative work. If you’re serious about making good decisions in this arena, it’s definitely worth checking out.

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, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:

Top Stories

MyMMO Acquires MyMMOShop.com For $10 Million
No need to blush if you haven’t heard of them. MyMMO is a consortium formed specifically to purchase MyMMOShop.com, which sells a variety of virtual currencies. Yes, this is a crazy world.

Mixm8 developing a virtual world for music lovers
The “virtual world traveling music lover” market is currently owned by Doppelganger through vSide or vLES, but competition is on the way. This article is a bit short on details so we’ll have to wait and see what unique value they think they’ll be able to bring here, but add Franktown Rocks and Music Mogul and this starts adding up to yet another trend to watch.

New web.alive Project Underway
This pushes some boundaries and is very much worth looking at. Click here to go straight to the demo.

Club Cooee Heads to Open Beta
While we’re at it, check this one out: a virtual world hovering on your desktop on top of whatever else you’re looking at. Not sure what to think about that idea, but someone thought it was worth a few million Euros of VC so it’s worth testing out real quick to avoid a knee-jerk opinion. Click here to check it out, or watch the video below:

Interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon
I usually skip these as they’re usually just fanboy fodder, but this one has content. You actually get a sense for where the company is and how it’s moving here, and other news elsewhere shows he means what he says.

ON24 Survey Shows Explosive Growth for Virtual Events in 2009
Press release, but ain’t it the truth. Things are really moving in this sector. If you’re thinking of running a virtual event, do let us know if we can help.

Layoffs at Disney Interactive; Virtual Worlds Largely Unaffected
First Second Life’s economy seems immune to the US “economic downturn”, Nortel files for bankruptcy but keeps it’s virtual worlds, and now this. Are virtual worlds bulletproof?

RRR and Futuresource Launch Conference and Research Tools in Second Life
At the risk of prompting some “really real person” coming to the blog and trolling the comments again: marketing fluff. Make the demo publicly available, be specific about how you’re adding unique value.

Training and Education

Printalution Island Launched in Second Life by the Education Summit for Graphic Communication
Press release. Interesting if you’re in the industry.

Virtual World Classroom to Transform Corporate Training
Press release. Bray Leino BroadSkill and Ambient Performance are launching a new training product in OLIVE.

Artist Brings Dystopian Vision to Second Life Island
… what, for a change? “Dystopian” is only the single most common artistic direction in Second Life, if you don’t count “blocks ‘n spheres”. I kid, I kid, it’ll be good to see what a University can bring here. Might bring new life to the art of bad places.

Intel Launches ScienceSim Today
The edu-tainment train keeps on chuggin’!

Printalution Island launched in Second Life
The Education Summit for Graphic Communication has launched Printalution, an island in the virtual world Second Life. This is partially marketing outreach as well.

Techy educators opening new worlds to students
An overview of the general trend in education, naming several schools.

Government and Military

Missouri in Second Life
Missouri’s Information Technology Services Division in Second Life.

Moving to the virtual world
State legislators take a peek at a school’s use of virtual worlds.

Marketing

Twinity Exclusive: THE SPIRIT enters Twinity
Large sections of their “virtual Berlin” are now black and white during the promotion. Big project here!

The Lady Hannah Launch Party
Kaneva works a promo deal with this British “neo soul songstress”.

ITM conference in a virtual world
The not-for-profit Institute of Travel Management sets up in Second Life to promote conversations about the Icarus project – its environmental toolkit.

Heroes and Habbo: Interactive Storytelling in a Virtual World
NBC and Habbo Hotel work together to create some interactive fiction for the “Heroes” franchise. I stopped watching as soon as it turned out Syler didn’t die at the end of the first season (lame!) and everyone insisted on being chronically depressed so… whatever.

Gaming

EA Launching Free Need for Speed MMO
Hear that? That’s the sound of thousands of gamers gasping simultaneously, followed by the splash of gallons of drool.

Judge Rules WoW Bot Violates DMCA
Apparently the Glider “actually qualified as a circumvention device under the terms of the DMCA and was therefore illegal.” Hear that? That’s the sound of thousands of WoW fanatics heading for the forums to argue about how wonderful/horrible this is.

Nerds Only

You know, I just couldn’t find anything sufficiently nerdilicious that was news worthy. Here:

Newbs Only

Second Life’s Losers
Prompted by CBC’s documentary (see below), The Tyee attempts to explain what this “chat room with graphics” is all about and how it can all go horribly, horribly wrong.

Sociological Oddities

CBC Documentary Looks At Second Life Cheaters
What, you thought that divorce from a few months back was the end of it? No my friend, no. There’s plenty of muck to rake yet. Watch the full video here, complete with naked virtual breasts.

Posted on February 1st, 2009 under business, hype, press, virtual worlds. Tags: business, hype, news, press, virtual worlds. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.