Archive for eBay
June 14, 2007 at 5:48 am
· Filed under Amazon, Business, Companies, Croquet, Second Life, Statistics, eBay
Although there are serious problems with governance, marketing, programming and even core infrastructure in Second Life, overall the future prospects for Linden Lab look pretty strong. That doesn’t mean Second Life can’t lose the market lead it currently enjoys, but it’s unlikely Linden Lab will end up a non-factor in the meshverse. They’ll probably fare better than Netscape which while living a very low key life at AOL, has um, uh another life at Mozilla. Second Life has survived difficult transitions in the past, they have a visionary and resourceful board, momentum, a stable economy, passionate premium members, thriving communities, critical strategic partnerships, virtual world management expriences and last but not least over 7 million registered residents. Nearly a half million of these folks logged in during the past 7 days. Yes, you can take exception and say that many accounts are owned by the same person but consider the following question. Has anyone gone Shopping for Virtual Worlds and found any with comparable numbers and capabilities? Let’s assume that one or two alternatives to Second Life really start to ramp up. Not only will they face most of the same challenges as Second Life does, some of the millions who registered for SL will take another look and find that it’s changed for the better. Perhaps it will be the cool new weather LL acquired with Windward Mark Interactive or some innovation from the Amazon developer community. Last week eBay’s Meg Witman was interviewed in Second Life and said she wanted her people to revisit their involvement with Second Life because of the sustained growth. If eBay comes up with a way to attract its customer base into Second Life, real estate values in SL will climb. Then again, SL property could be greatly devalued by one or more of the many virtual world developers including Google, MySpace, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and AOL whose virtual economies are powered by PayPal/Linden Lab exchange servers. It’s hard to find a scenario in which Linden Lab is not a significant player in the meshverse.
Related Links:
Amazon’s Second Life Virtual Marketplace
Marketers ‘floundering’ in Second Life
Reloaded Again and Again(is anyone counting?)
Opportunity Fading: Why The New Second Life Offers Less for Business
Second_Life
Permalink
May 31, 2007 at 8:29 pm
· Filed under Amazon, Croquet, Google, Grids, Second Life, Services, eBay
There’s broad recognition that the Google Gears announcement is one of high impact, but I haven’t seen anyone getting close to just how big. Yes, working offline is important, but it’s not new. As Dave Winer points out, the Radio blogging system was doing it in 2001. It actually goes back further than that as I’ll show shortly, but what is new is that Google Gears builds on open standards and has potential to become a very widely adopted standard itself – they’ve already got Adobe as a partner:
Adobe chief software architect Kevin Lynch says his company is happy to be working with Google to create “a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability.”
PCWorld
The idea that a Google Gears standard could make cookies obsolete is a big deal too, but none of the above even begin to scratch the surface of what it will mean to have a standardized database server running on hundreds of millions of machines – that is key to answering the $64Billion Dollar Question about how the meshverse will grow to support tens of millions of simultaneously collaborating participants. Google Gears will eventually make a dramatic change in the economics of the web – probably in ways Google may not have really anticipated.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
February 28, 2007 at 3:34 pm
· Filed under Augmented Reality, Business, Games, Things, Virtual Currency, eBay
Citing a study that places a $588B pricetag on productivity problems caused by e-mail, this CNET article talks about
a Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up called Seriosity has come up with an e-mail management system that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies found in WoW and other large-scale online games.
… Known as Attent, Seriosity’s system is essentially a new currency–called the Serio–that corporate e-mail users spend to indicate a message’s importance: the more important they believe the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.
… But Serios is a currency, and therefore a scarce resource, so people get a limited amount. The idea is that they have to spend the currency wisely, always making sure they have enough to send more with future messages.
There’s no way to tell just how effective this can be in isolation but it’s almost inevitable that it will find uses in the broader exchange of virtual currencies that are starting to flow through the meshverse. As devices and services become deeply interoperable and the number of things connected to the meshvers explodes, we’ll find that
In the 24/7, agent-driven marketplace of The Meshverse, service providers may deal with multiple hardware providers whose interoperable equipment is used in product placements and partially compensated for by some virtual currency such as Linden Dollars.
Rhythmeering: Location, Location, Location
The CNET article goes on to say: Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
February 19, 2007 at 6:34 pm
· Filed under A Quick Link, Companies, Games, Second Life, eBay
When this MMOG chart was done in June 2006, Second Life was barely a blip. Today it would probably show up near the top but MMOGChart hasn’t been updated since June last year. A chart off the charts? Ok bad pun but it’s not my fault – JK made me do it 
Anyway, I came across MMOGChart from a blog that called eBay an MMOG way back in 2005 which may prove to be true given the Google-MySpace-eBay triangle I recently wrote about.
Permalink
