China’s perverse blanket censorship of the Internet was one thing – if the Chinese people want their thoughts to be controlled by a bureaucracy that’s their business. Public opinion influence and control by political entities is old news. But this is something startlingly new. This is them saying: “keep your filthy stinking money!”
Are they honestly that rich already?
Apparently China’s online games were worth over $900M in Q2 alone. So sure, maybe that’s enough… if there is such a thing as “enough” in modern economies. Still, can anyone really afford to slow down when things are moving so fast these days? Won’t this make foreign investors from a variety of industries flinch a little?
Morality (however you define it) is expensive, and it looks like they’re willing to pay the price. While I’m not entirely certain I agree with their particular philosophies, I have to admit: xenophobia in the digital age takes guts.
It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out five years from now.
For the first time since last August, I missed a week on the news roundup. I didn’t even realize it until mid-week. Please accept my apologies!
Clever Zebra has been busier than ever (our work on OpenVCE being only one part) and until I’m 100% satisfied that everything is running better than anyone could possibly wish for and far ahead of schedule I’ll be just a blur in everyone’s peripheral vision.
Having said that, I did make a commitment to myself to keep this going lest I lose touch with what’s going on out there. Thus, a two-week edition!
Wait, did I really just use the word “lest” in a sentence?
Anyhow, I continue to operate under time constriction and now there’s two weeks of material to cover, so I probably missed something worth reading. If I did, please contact me or leave a comment!
Important links:
Archive page of past weeks of Business in Virtual Worlds News
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:
ThinkBalm Leads Visualization Tours
Proof-of-concept tours regarding the enterprise case for entering virtual spaces. Hey Erica, funny we should end up touching base this week. This looks good! (A more in-depth look appears on the Linden Lab blog.)
Want to Hold a Virtual Event of Your Own?
Clever Zebra offers event support and white-label services for anyone interested in a branded gathering in a virtual space. Everything from venue setup and hosting to VIP orientation to speaker coordination.
Teachers Enroll in Second Life Webcasts
Pretty interesting stuff: “Called A Virtual World for Professional Learning, the session is the final in a series of webcasts and learning resources made available to teachers across Canada, by the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION) and the award-winning Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL) program, from Toronto’s York University.”
‘Virtual Life’: EU’s three year, 3.3 million euro 3D virtual world project
That’s a pretty big project, and one that has some extremely unique notions of how a virtual world should work. It seems to be flying under most people’s radars from the look of things. (WARNING: some NSFW and possibly offensive images.) Discover more about the project on the official site: FP7 VirtualLife.
Adult Content Changes in Summary
A final summary of the changes in Second Life’s handling of adult content that we’re soooooo interested in. Now, we could have just said: “if you don’t like sex, avoid entering brothels” and be done with it ages ago… but that would have involved people taking responsibility for themselves and nobody wants that…
The Dares + Free Realms = New Guinness World Record
For whatever reason the Guinness people seem to think this is the first concert given simultaneously in the real world and the virtual one. Whaaaaaat??? (Clearly the Guinness people just needed some press here…)
Are lawsuits ever a superior option to engaging with your customer base?
(Answer in the comments!)
For whatever reason the issues of “interoperability” re-emerged this week, which is as “Nerds Only” as you get really. There have also been many, many articles this week about Linden Lab attempting to regulate adult content. I haven’t linked any of them… it’s already old news, and honestly, who really cares?
Important links:
Archive page of past weeks of Business in Virtual Worlds News
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:
Help Trinity! My daughter Trinity is gathering donations for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Counting her offline pledge sheet she’s is over 70% of the way to her goal and just needs a couple hundred more to put her over the top. Please donate anything you can – every little bit helps!
Google Bringing 3D To The Browser (Again)
This functions as a browser plugin, see demo below. Apparently they killed Lively because they thought they were barking up the wrong tree, not because of any lack of faith in virtual spaces. Either that or there is no clear company strategy on the issue and they can’t make up their minds.
Events
BIZZin3D Meet Up
On May 31st in Berlin people will gather to “meet, talk & discuss about business opportunities in 3D Internet & Virtual Worlds”. No idea why this is being done in Berlin rather than the virtual world, but I suppose that’s their prerogative. Discussion of trends and expert analysts will be featured, and they will avoid Powerpoint presentations in favor of moderated panels.
Want to Hold a Virtual Event of Your Own?
Clever Zebra offers event support and white-label services for anyone interested in a branded gathering in a virtual space. Everything from venue setup and hosting to VIP orientation to speaker coordination.
OCAD’s Second Life
Ontario College of Art and Design’s (OCAD) Integrated Media students enter Second Life. Article is very… ah… well they call Second Life a “computer game”. But it’s otherwise well written. Torontoist covers it too.
Taser International vs Linden Lab: Crack Den crackdown
Taser International sues a long list of defendants over various virtual goods bearing the Taser name (but not replicating the functionality), and other virtual goods simply using the word “Taser” in the name but in no way resembling any Taser products. Apparently the lawsuit is quite clumsily assembled and includes lots of fun pornography, but that’s not the point. The point is that this is yet another case where someone is suing potential customers instead of engaging with them. Dumb.
Virtual worlds and web ‘merging’
Mark Kingdon introduces the basic concepts of interoperability, which personally I think is a bit of a red herring in the quest for mass acceptance or the next quantum shift in virtual worlds… but hey, have fun with that guys. Intel tossed in their two cents on the interoperability issue this week too.
Newbs Only
It’s a Virtual World
One business-minded writer’s sojourn into the virtual world for the first time.
Even with adult content regulated, Second Life is dead in ed
Wow. We’ve officially progressed beyond the era of ignorance and into some kind of bizarre pathology. With the constant, unending buy-in from educational sectors into virtual spaces (see every single past week for months), how anyone could possibly make this argument is beyond me. Something is seriously screwed up over at ZDNet; I haven’t read anything there that made any sense in ages.
Did I miss an important story? Got feedback? Leave a comment below, or email me at info [at] calebbooker.com
If one of these people applied for a job with your company, would you hire them? Would you enter into any kind of business relationship with them? Would you even want to risk selling something to them? Filing a frivolous lawsuit is an excellent way to make yourself into a pariah.
You would think that this was self-evident, but it appears that there are several companies and organizations out there who feel that acting like blithering idiots is the way forward. Here are three cases of legal threats and actions. Ask yourself: are you encouraged, or discouraged, from ever doing business with these people or those they represent?
RIAA
RIAA Took My House Away
Out of dozens of anti-RIAA videos I chose this one … and now watching it again I’m wondering why. Ah well.
Most people had no idea who the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was until they started suing kids and dead grandmothers around 2003 for illegally downloading music. Of course, it wasn’t illegal until they lobbied to make it illegal – but hey, let’s not split hairs. At least, not until we’re in court.
The war against children encouraged the development of new kinds of digital rights management (DRM) which infected hard drives with spyware, crippled a number of devices, restricted the number of times you could play a file, and occupied a legal gray area nobody had the time or money to challenge. They eventually dropped this not because of the bad press, but because it cost a lot to produce and wasn’t getting results.
They also targeted internet radio stations, suing for 125% of revenue. I’m not completely sure why or what harm they were perceiving, but here’s hoping nobody tells them about “regular” radio.
In the aftermath, more and more bands started to realize that they didn’t need record labels this badly and started self-producing music or going with smaller labels that weren’t affiliated with RIAA. Independent music exploded and is continuing to develop in a viral fashion. RIAA itself has very recently dropped DRM and stopped suing people (although it is still pursuing pending lawsuits), and is trying to figure out just what the hell it’s supposed to do with itself.
For the record: artists never saw a dime of the money from the lawsuits. RIAA represents record labels only. One more postscript: Weird Al Yankovic’s “Don’t Download This Song” is viewable on YouTube, but oddly not embeddable, and has a “Download This Song” link to iTunes directly underneath.
Worlds.com
Worlds.com sues NCsoft
Worst. Report. Ever. Moving on…
The Worlds.com story has been breaking over the past few months. In December of 2008 the first news of any kind in years about Worlds.com was that they were hiring an IP firm over the ownership of the very concept of virtual worlds. That anyone could own such a thing is clearly ridiculous – it’s like saying you’re the only one allowed to make a blender or a car. We thought maybe this was a joke, especially considering the only thing anybody had heard out of Worlds.com in ages was some very amateur video.
Imagine our surprise when they actually filed lawsuit against NCsoft, creators of some fantastic MMORPGs. Why NCsoft, as opposed to anyone else? Well, the thought is that they’re big enough to serve as a good precedent for future lawsuits but small enough to perhaps not have the money to defend itself.
For the record, they did make a world for Aerosmith. I had heard about it back in 2006, but the website sucked and I couldn’t figure out how to get in. As far as I can tell this is the only video of it out there.
No matter what the results of the lawsuits, I cannot imagine what would drive someone to do business with Worlds.com at this stage.
Associated Press
AP threatens station for posting AP’s YouTube videos
LOVE his look of shock!
I heard about this today from the TechCruch article which actually sparked the blog post. The Associated Press (AP) is a news clearinghouse, where reporters the world over send stories that then get picked up by other news affiliates for re-publication. They have a YouTube channel, but apparently have no idea how YouTube works.
It’s enough that we don’t really understand what the difference is between a reporter and a blogger. Now we have AP proudly ignorant of the way new media works, issuing a cease & desist against its own affiliate (ie: customer). It’s no wonder organizations like IndyMedia are thriving in the digital age.
Now, I’d like to toss an olive branch in AP’s direction here and say that no, it isn’t a lawsuit and yes, it’s awesome they even have a YouTube channel in the first place. It’s most likely just one guy working at the AP that’s acting up. The AP haven’t gone off the deep end yet!
Still, this truly underlines the importance of creating a new media policy, and bringing everyone in your organization up to speed on it. Lawsuits deny the reality of the Internet and try to make it all go away. If that’s your goal, good luck with that. The safer bet, though, is to accept the way things are and move accordingly.
This was the week of non-news news. There were more stories about nothing of significance than I have ever seen. I’ve done my best not to post any of them. I may have failed here and there. Apologies.
Oh, and for those of you who had been celebrating it on Saturday, I hope you had a happy Pi Day!
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:
Worlds.com CEO: We’re ‘Absolutely’ Going To Sue Second Life And World Of Warcraft
Yes, Worlds.com is actually filing lawsuits over ownership of the concept of virtual worlds. No, Worlds.com is not making any friends anywhere on planet Earth. Yes, there are more opinions about this whole thing than you can shake a stick at… no point in augmenting the pile with mine.
Want to Hold a Virtual Event of Your Own?
Clever Zebra offers event support and white-label services for anyone interested in a branded gathering in a virtual space. Everything from venue setup and hosting to VIP orientation to speaker coordination.
Training and Education
Second Life a tool for teaching in 3-D
University of Western Ontario does some Psych classes in SL. Nice overview at Canada.com, but I’m mostly linking it for the picture of these photogenic fellas. Smile!
Webcam Brings 3-D to Topps Sports Cards
Ok, that’s a pretty cool gimmick. I might even buy some baseball cards this year. Haven’t done that since I was a kid!
Gaming
SOE Introducing LiveGamer RMT Service To Vanguard
So basically, you can now buy yourself the super-powerful character and equipment you always wanted with a little USD. Anybody have word on community backlash here?
No, There Were No “Terrorists”
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) drops the whole notion of terrorists in virtual spaces. See the official report (PDF). I remember being completely baffled by all of these people warning of terrorists in virtual spaces back when it was in vogue to scream “everybody panic”! Glad its over.
