Linden Lab Appoints New CEO and Staff Are Now Numbers

The search for a new CEO is over as Linden Lab announced the appointment of Mark Kingdon to the position, and residents watched for smoke in the upper window and the choosing of a name, much like the anointing of a Pope, it’s just too bad he’s, well, M Linden, I rather like Marcus Voom (who mysteriously I believe is on my friend’s list, must have been that beach party with the 8 foot avatar dressed as a, um…I digress).

Mark, or M, who is expected to soon name Kate Linden Agent 005 Linden and Sidewinder will become 006 Linden, with Philip Rosedale becoming 007, which is the same as Chair, murmured the right noises in his interview with Reuters about the failures of big brands in 2007…

The rest of this post can be read here on the new domain.

The Thinner the Client the Sweeter the Pie? Mapping Virtual Worlds for Brands

There’s a sweet spot somewhere out there for marketers, a dream space where that elusive beast the consumer (that means you and me, or maybe not, maybe it means Joe FlickrPack with his mySpace page and his Facebook widgets, but in any case), and the Electric Sheep Company are graphing it out and hunting it down.

And they’re on to something. Because what they’re trying to do is build a bridge from the vision and promise of the Metaverse to today – where it’s a lot messier looking, and the technology isn’t quite there yet, and the user base isn’t quite large enough, and the promise and hype of last year and the rush into Second Life was followed by….hmmm, well, it was followed by a rush into the promise and hype of Facebook widgets, or is it viral youTube videos like that bad hair lady, or are they now sniffing around Twitter?

THIS HAS BEEN A TEASER. Head on over to the new domain to read the rest of this brilliant and scintillating article. Or, because I have a picture of an old guy bowling on a Wii.

Summary of TC008 Keynote – E-Learning and Virtual Worlds

Christy Tucker at Experiencing E-Learning liveblogged from the TCC08 keynote address presented by Dr. Barbara P. McLain, a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and Professor Lilliehook in Second Life.

The keynote addressed the question, “Why Do We Need a Second Life?” as it pertains to professional educators. The main point of the presentation was that “change ahead requires vision now.”

Overall, the two professors were effusive in their praise of Second Life’s potential for education. They cited the growth of online education as a precursor to virtual education, and then cited the many reasons that virtual ed. should be a major part of a teacher’s toolkit in the future, including:

- The trend to social networks

- That everyone has the ability to build in SL

- Almost anything can be taught in SL (exemplified by the phrase, “No Subject Left Behind”)

- SL – and virtual worlds in general – are more engaging than the traditional lecture

- “91% of students see the Internet as a place for answers”

The keynote ended with some comments about prickly adminstrators who would need to approve virtual learning programs. The professors concluded that, in order to move ahead a forward-thinking move such as virtual education, “sometimes you have to wait for those administrators to retire.”

Toyota Launches Marketing Island

Toyota, whose history in virtual marketing is already notable, has launched its own virtual island aimed primarily at a Japanese market (the site, thus far, only uses the Japanese language).

The island itself will be self-sufficient and boasts residential areas, a museum for automobile prototypes, a mall, and an event hall.

The technology uses the meet-me platform, a Japanese reality simulation game that some call a “G-rated” version of Second Life. Toyota is connected to the Tokyo meet-me, which was launched in December of 2007 specifically for a Japanese audience.

While the development of Toyota’s 3D presence through meet-me may seem a slight to Second Life, Linden still views Japan as a key market, according to an anonymous source reporting to the AP. The source said that “it plans to strengthen its Japanese services,” and notes that Japan lags behind only the US and Germany in number of hours spent in Second Life.

Virtual Worlds: The Future is in Video Games?

My first virtual world was SimCity. Stuffed at the bottom of a drawer somewhere is a printout of the city I created – printed on a dot matrix printer of course, and I figure I still have the MS-DOS floppy disks somewhere. And sure, it didn’t have avatars or presence, but it was the idea of interacting with a world that was persistent whether I was paying attention to the screen or not (when I’d get the right set of conditions there was nothing finer than to let the PC run all night and come back to find the city thriving), and that while it was run on code, the code formed a sort of policy backdrop against which you were still in control.

So the Second Life world comes along, and I had no idea what it was, booted it up expecting some sort of SimCity kind of thing (as I’ve said before, I stumbled across Second Life because it was in the top 20 search returns for Spore, and I was looking for the release date).

Linden Lab Clarifies Trademark Use

Now, why didn’t they do this in the first place?

Clarification here.

Thoughts? I don’t begrudge them protection of their trademarks. I took issue with how it was handled and the lack of clarification around why they put the protections in the terms of service, which seemed to suggest they might over-rule nominative fair use. Their current clarification seems reasoned, thoughtful, and should allay most fears, although sometimes poorly executed communication strategies leave a sort of bitter taste.

Ah well. Another day on the Grid. Better try to get on before peak concurrency and they shut half the features down.

Carbon Offsetting in SL

A Carbon Offset Exchange in the Vio sim has been set up in SL. For the cost of 400 Linden, you can offset your SL carbon footprint for a year.

And what exactly is the cost of your carbon footprint? According to the sponsor, 4Offsets.com, a Web site hosted on a server that hosts 150 other sites uses approxmately 0.01133 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

4Offsets.com also offers carbon offset purchase plans for your car ($40/year), truck ($60), and your homepage ($1). The company claims you can offset your page – be it SL, Facebook, MySpace, or Friendster – and it will be interesting to see if carbon offsetting became a trend in social networks.

The Garden of NPIRL Delights: Completion, May 14, Tear Down June 23

As usual, Bettina inspires over at Not Possible In Real Life, and this time has a canvas 4 sims wide. Donated by Rezzable, Bettina is sending the call out to her NPIRLers and others to join together into one creative force.

The idea behind the Garden of NPIRL Delights is a build festival, where the takeoff point is Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of humanity. Bettina and Rezzable want users to create their own version of Bosch’s Garden in a communal space in SL, using four sims to illustrate the Underworld, Earth and Paradise:

“If you were to journey into heaven or hell, what would this look like, and how might you make this as immersive as possible? Think Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” but with your own twist. And what are the earthlings doing that might force them into the depths of the underworld or paradise?”