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четверг, 10 октября 2013 г.
Seo market
понедельник, 7 октября 2013 г.
IMBR shares the best)
воскресенье, 6 октября 2013 г.
IMBR Posts Dividend to Shareholders
четверг, 3 октября 2013 г.
понедельник, 16 сентября 2013 г.
воскресенье, 15 сентября 2013 г.
Baby Business is Big Business in SL
воскресенье, 4 августа 2013 г.
IMBR Posts Dividend to Shareholders
Now we pay dividents, more than last time, next time we will pay more again, so here is sence to buy our shares) Investors are wellcome, we also wonna hear new ideas for businesses and now I interested to invest in my real law company and sms-fromsl-sending service) Buy shares you can here: http://slcapex.com/trades/symbol/IMBR
четверг, 4 июля 2013 г.
DIVIDENTS!
IMBR Posts Dividend to Shareholders
Here is bigger dividents again, 11500 LD!!! We keep our promises! Buy our shares and you wiil get more! Here: http://slcapex.com/trades/symbol/IMBR
воскресенье, 30 июня 2013 г.
Please, help to promote IMBR!)
вторник, 25 июня 2013 г.
IMBR advertised)
Hello, friends, our goals are achieved, we have good profit, so we can offer to ourselves to pay 1500 ld per week for advertising on slcapex.com))) We strongly recommend to buy IMBR shares, we are predict very good dividents)))
http://slcapex.com/forums/topic/IMBR/8212
пятница, 21 июня 2013 г.
среда, 19 июня 2013 г.
IMBROKERS inc.
Our structure builded on professionalism, we are trade and earn lindens for you, our goal is to make your lindens grow) If you need help, im to Imbanna Deluxe in SL)
Our offise inworld is here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Scrafito/120/27/22
We earn by: trading shares, make advertising, offer jobs, building and scripting works)
Our shares you can buy here: http://slcapex.com/trades/symbol/IMBR
вторник, 4 июня 2013 г.
воскресенье, 26 мая 2013 г.
Seeking for moderators in group
Ищем модераторов в элитную группу http://vk.com/slgirlstalk , работа оплачивается, пишите в им
От вас требуется
раскрутка, публикации, создание конкурсов, размещение рекламы, поиск клиентов- рекламодателей.
Оплата 400 линденов в неделю плюс 50 процентов от сумм (выходит до 3000 в неделю), уплаченных рекламодателем.
Испытательный срок 4 недели, от вас добросовестность и работоспособность.
вторник, 30 апреля 2013 г.
Can real businesses still find a use for Second Life?
I had a recent conversation with a good friend, after reading this article from Wynd Ling on 10 ways Second Life can help your Business. The discussion was around the use that Second Life® can have for real businesses. Is it still worth for a company to spend some time and money in this virtual world?
Now, all the hype around Second Life has long since gone, and it will not come back again. The tech media are only worried about the following topics:
Mobile Applications
What will Facebook release next?
What will Apple do next?
Crowdfunding and the next batch of Web start-ups
Crowdfunding startups to create mobile applications that run on iOS and Facebook
The rest pretty much doesn’t matter, unless it’s about a company that failed. Virtual worlds and innovation outside the above topics have little relevance. These days, things like Google funding a prize to put a robot on the Moon escape the attention of the news, and even the Higgs boson discovery was just reported because Leon M. Lederman named it “the God particle” — without God, it would not have been news. VWs are sooo 2006 :)
Now for all of you with short memories, it’s nice to remember that the main reason for companies to join Second Life was for the media splash. Media splash can be accurately measured, and whatever can be measured by a marketeer, can be sold to a client. The era of media splash has been superseded by “the era of VW silence on the news”, so companies after brand awareness will stay away from SL.
On the other hand, LL having shut down their Enterprise division, kicking out a CEO with a third of LL’s workforce, doesn’t sound good for companies. The new board has clearly stated that Linden Lab will stick to their traditional, core consumers: residential users. All the rest is worthless to Linden Lab — be it education or corporation. So another reason why companies stay away from SL.
So what is left? Things like remote training have strangely not caught on. In my field of work, it’s usual that I often get requests to set up “a simple videoconferencing system over the ‘net” — because half a decade ago there were a trillion companies offering that kind of service, often for free, and one assumes that these days such solutions would be commonplace — and free.
Well, they’re neither. To be blunt, if someone wants a cheap, quick, and free videoconferencing solution, that works across Mac, Linux, Windows, and mobile/tablet platforms, there is little more than Skype. Or perhaps Google Hangouts, which is hardly as popular. And there are a gazillion dating sites with webcam chat. Once it becomes more “serious” and starts requiring a lot more complexity — whiteboards, tools to share information among participants, and so forth — solutions exist, but they’re expensive. On the broadcasting side, there are a few more solutions, but the simplest is simply to post a video on YouTube, or — better! — on Facebook (because it allows more selective sharing with groups). Real-time broadcasting is possible, and there are good free solutions out there (many are crammed full with ads because they’re free and, as a result, rather popular) which even include text-based chat for replying back to the broadcaster… but, in general, there are not so many alternatives. On average, videoconferencing solutions are custom-built, possible using Adobe’s framework or someone else’s.
Strangely enough, for very specialised uses, Second Life would fit into this niche market neatly, when all participants know each other well and are thus not “reluctant” to talk to avatars instead of 2D “real” videoheads (and with software like FaceShop from Abalone LLC you could theoretically place your own RL pic on a SL avatar). All the needs for a business conference or academic seminar are easily scripted, and lots of solutions abound on the SL Marketplace or elsewhere. Still, while corporations are fine in using Skype, even though it has its limitations, they’re not flocking to SL as a cheap teleconferencing alternative.
Teleconferencing is not just for “meetings” or “presentations”. It can be used to interview job applicants. It can be used to do employee evaluation. It can be used as virtual classrooms for training sessions. Personally, I think that Wynd Ling is right when she points out how useful SL can be for corporate communication — far beyond intra-corporation text chat, which is used by many corporations, either using their own intranet-based chatrooms, or even going into public chatrooms. She also points out another area which is quite interesting and rarely mentioned: using Second Life as a test bed. This has two main usages, and Wynd Ling mentions them both, very briefly.
The first is figuring out if you have a sellable product or service. Not all can be “replicated” in Second Life, but some can. Imagine that you are an agent or talent hunter and have this band here which has a nice sound. Will they become the next superstar? How do you know? The traditional way is to get them into bars and eventually on low-end festivals and see the public’s reaction; an exchange of favours might get a song or two played on radio — or even on a second-rate TV show — and have the marketeers calculate the actual share that listened to the band. Then start pushing them up into the circuit and see how well they behave.
This has a cost. Musicians need equipment which has to be carried around; they need technicians as well. So once a talent hunter “finds” a band or a singer, they have to invest a lot even for a small-scale promotion. Obviously, talent hunters and agents specialise in finding the “right” groups, and that’s why they’re in business. They also don’t need to be 100% right — they just need a group which gives them a slight edge over the competition — the rest will be handled by marketing.
But in Second Life you can actually introduce the band and measure their performance in front of an audience. You get immediate feedback from the fans. They will join the band’s group. Venues will try to catch their attention and negotiate deals with them. And the band just needs to stay at home or at the garage where they usually train — all they need is to get them hooked up on the ‘net and they’re ready to go.
There are similar things that can be done in SL as well — while stand-up comedy never really caught in SL (there used to be a lot of groups doing it, though!), there are still venues where a good agent might be able to squeeze a stand-up comedian between two bands. Even if that requires some payment — because the venue prefers music to comedy — what’s the investment? L$2000? L$5000? That’s nothing compared to what they might need to pay.
It’s not just the arts, of course. A lot of consulting services that don’t require specialised equipment can indeed experiment to launch a new business in Second Life and see how it fares. Psychologists or financial advisors could experiment opening an office in SL. But so could all kinds of conference speakers — from preachers to teachers. If your company is planning to launch a new conference on family economics, why don’t you do a trial run in SL? Just to see what the feedback is? And then use it to improve the conference and do it in the real world, after learning some useful lessons.
Marketing a new product or service is hard in SL (because there is no mass media, and the SLogosphere is scattered and very fragmented). But it’s not impossible. In fact, not every company is able to afford ads on the mass media, and have to resort to different ways to promote their services or products. But this can be very hard and expensive — and it’s hard to predict the loss. It’s not enough to open up a shop and expect that people will immediately flock to your place — you need to learn how to promote yourself. While obviously not all types of business are able to be “simulated” in Second Life — it’s hard to do a trial run of a new junk food franchise! Avatars don’t need to eat, after all — a few can be simulated very effectively. There have been occasional experiments from travel agencies, for example. They found it very hard to promote their new products to their audience. But perhaps they learned that it’s not as easy as merely opening a shop.
In fact, a lot of simulations can be done in SL (some of my clients have developed simulations as part of training courses — unfortunately, most of these projects are internal and confidential, so I’m not allowed to talk about them). The US armed forces do that routinely — and so does the Portuguese Air Force (even though they use OpenSim because it’s cheaper :) ). But there are a lot of simulations for training people in emergency situations (how do you train people to deal with fires or earthquakes inside a fully working hospital? You cannot stop everything while you do a fire drill!) or to follow strict procedures in a controlled environment (think about the procedures to enter an industrial food processing plant, or a plant producing very toxic products, for example, all of which have to comply with a lot of regulations). Or to train people to deal with border crossing issues in Canada. All these can be done much better in SL for a fraction of the cost — and it’s far, far better than studying from textbooks with some role-playing sessions in a classroom.
Training, in general, is a good area for Second Life, and academic research has focused a lot on that. But even corporate training — using simulation or not — can benefit a lot from SL.
There is, of course, more than that.
L’Oréal hired K-Zero a few years back to help them to establish brand awareness for their products in SL. This in itself is not new — the idea that you could get avatars to wear something (in this case, makeup) was well-established before, but was not such a big success as the companies expected. The audience of SL was not significant to convert viewers into customers.
It’s now easy enough to look back and see why this would not be very successful. Due to a lack of mass media, it’s hard to find a strategy that makes a brand very visible in SL. So, instead, what marketeers did was to use Second Life as an “excuse” to attract the RL mass media’s attention. This is a metric that can be effectively measured and it’s routinely done by media communication experts: instead of simply buying ads on traditional mass media (which is expensive), they create an “event” or something similar that attracts the media’s attention, so that they write about it. Getting a journalist to talk about your “event” costs nothing; but the “event” itself, or whatever attracts the journalists’ attention, costs money. If the “event” costs more than an ad on the newspaper, then it’s not worth the cost. But often it costs far less. The problem with Second Life was that 1) in-world “events” tended to be very costly, and often far more expensive than buying ads for the same price; 2) Second Life stories quickly disappeared from the mass media, as journalists lost attention (they’re too busy chatting on Facebook and Twitter!).
However, there is another area which can be well explored in SL. Suppose you are a small shoe brand, and wish to know what is going to sell more this Fall — red shoes or brown shoes? Traditionally, you’d hire a marketing company, who would set up a series of surveys, possibly using a “mockup shoe” and ask panels of consumers for their opinions. If a “mockup shoe” was not possible, then a photoshopped picture would have to work instead. Marketeers do their surveys and present the customer a result, usually explaining how their target group was picked, and presenting lots of statistics about the results, so that the company can make a decision.
Now there is always a problem with these kinds of surveys. One thing is the intention to buy, the other is actually buying it. So thousands of women might answer that they prefer red shoes — but how many will effectively buy red shoes? This is hard to predict, but is usually analysed statistically. If the response from a thousand surveyed consumers is so enthusiastic (“all preferred red shoes”) it’s highly likely that red shoes will sell more. Do enough surveys over enough time, and it becomes possible to predict something like, say, “if a thousand people preferred red shoes, we know that we will sell 100,000 red shoes on our shops this Fall”. But it’s just a prediction, even though, over time, marketeers get better and better at predicting things.
These days, many of those “inverviews” and “surveys” are done over the Internet. It has the advantage of being usually simpler and cheaper to set up, and that you can query a much bigger group. The disadvantage is that you have no idea of who they are — you have to rely on the assumption that they will answer correctly to things like age, income, spending habits, and so forth. Still, since it can reach so many people, it’s a tool worth using. The problem, again, is that it shows only intention. It’s better than just placing an ad — because you can tell how many people saw the ad, but have no idea if the ad was appealing and/or people remember to buy red shoes the next time they go to the shop. So marketeers do surveys for brand awareness as well — they ask different people about the ads they saw and how these ads “persuaded” them to buy red shoes instead of brown ones. Again, with enough time and lots of repeated surveys, a correlation can be found — so a company can, with relative accuracy, “predict” how many people will buy red shoes if they had good results on the surveys made before the ad, and, after seeing how the sales went, asking people if they had been influenced by the ad or not.
All this is incredibly costly and takes a lot of time.
Now imagine you have no budget to do all of the above. Instead, you can just pay a top SL content creator, perhaps one that already has an in-world shop, to create a replica of the red shoes and the brown shoes. Then you just need to watch what people actually buy for their avatars. SL shop owners will do all the required advertising on your behalf, and there is a consumer market of a few hundred thousand potential consumers. What could be better? Well, a nice press release to the SL media will not hurt, either — these will be far cheaper than the RL media in any case. It’s true that they will reach only a fraction of the potential market — but they will reach many existing SL residents, which are the “guinea pigs” for this experiment that actually matter. While the RL media will not pick up another SL story, the SL media, by contrast, will have no qualms in announcing this kind of thing. Even if the shoe company prefers to remain “anonymous”, they can do so: they can ask the SL shop owner to remain silent about the purpose of the whole project. For the shop owner’s clients, it’s just another pair of shoes. Of course, paying for some extra ads on prominent SL fashion blogs and websites won’t hurt, either.
Now of course it doesn’t mean that people buying red shoes for their avatars will actually buy the same shoe in real life. But that’s irrelevant: the company just needs to establish a trend. They just need to see what people’s intentions are. The difference of doing it in SL is that people are actually buying the shoes — they’re not merely stating a preference, they actually will buy them. And that’s valuable information. On the Web, there are similar studies going on with “virtual dressing rooms”, like H&M’s Virtual Dressing Room. Aye, it’s something fun for H&M customers to play with, but there is more than just “a nice feature” — H&M can see, among their offerings, what kind of clothes and accessories their potential customers are actually picking to dress up their virtual doll. It’s not really relevant if they do, indeed, buy them. But it’s a different way of manifesting interest in a certain product over another.
Obviously this makes more sense in the fashion industry, since everything related to fashion is so popular in Second Life, and makes up the biggest part of its virtual economy — an economy worth US$700 million annually. This is real money. Unlike H&M’s Virtual Dressing Room, which costs zero to use, buying items in SL has a cost. A small cost, certainly, but a cost nevertheless. What this means is that consumers have to make decisions based on the budget they have to spend — just like in real life. The choice is not merely between a red shoe and a brown one — it’s also knowing how well a specific design stands out, compared to competing products, so that consumers are willing to buy it instead of saving their money for something else. This is the difference between a “virtual dressing/makeup/hairstyling room” — which is usually free to use — and one done in SL. I might even argue that things go one step further: in real life, there is a limited amount of time for shopping, besides the limited amount of money. This means that the perfect red shoe for the right price might never be “found” by consumers, if it’s not properly advertised, or if it simply fails to gather attention. This is something that regular surveys or interviews cannot figure out. On the other hand, web-based “virtual dressing rooms” are visited during leisure time, and people can find them all on the Web with a few quick searches, and look through them very quickly — so there is a flaw in terms of perception. Putting into other words: you might find the perfect red shoe on the Web pretty quickly, and thus get the perception that it’s a “hot” article — while in the real world, if only a limited amount of shops carry that red shoe, and it’s not easy to find, or if it looks worse than on the picture… it might never sell.
Second Life can simulate all that. Like in RL, we have a limited amount of L$ to spend. Shopping in SL is great fun — some might even think it’s more fun than in RL! — but it also takes time: there is a limited amount of shops one can browse through. Searching in SL is hard. Clever shop design make items stand out of the crowd. People read fashion blogs and e-zines to figure out what to dress their avatars with. This is pretty much the same decision sequence, with similar constraints, that a consumer experiences in the real world. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s sufficiently similar to what happens in real life to make comparisons and correlations much more accurate.
As said, it’s not only fashion that can benefit from that. Furniture, home appliances, and home decoration come as a close second, and perhaps these days vehicles are not far off. We’re now starting to cover a lot of ground!
It’s true that consumer perception can be measured in SL and become a good tool for companies to figure out better what kind of products or services they can expect their potential customers to buy — at least, that’s the case for things like music, fashion, furniture, and vehicles. Communication, training, and simulation are other areas that can be exploited. Doing “try runs” of new business models — specially if they are services that can be sold via a successful “sales pitch” — also work well. All of these can be done very cheaply, have a potential market of a few hundred thousand potential consumers, and can give the company some excellent feedback. This should be the focus for them.
Brand awareness, by contrast, has lost its appeal — because brand awareness, these days, will not reach beyond the borders of the virtual world, as the mainstream media is unwilling to publish anything about Second Life. Directly selling real life products in SL has also been shown to be unsuccessful — web-based shopping is far easier. Even creating a “community” in SL around a brand has shown not to be worth the effort — it’s far easier and cheaper to do that on Facebook or on a blog, and reaches out to way more people. So these “classical” approaches of the Golden Age of Second Life are completely out.
But that’s not all there is to virtual worlds. They still have a potential interest in some areas which are important for real world businesses. Not in all, but in many. Many of the things that rely on real-time interaction with consumers are better done inside virtual worlds than, say, on the Web. If a certain area just needs a limited reach, it might be replicable in Second Life — this is not unlike some “trial runs” done by some companies who start offering a new service just on a single, small town, just to get a feeling on how successful the product and service is, before deploying it nationwide (or worldwide). Second Life can be seen as a small town with a few hundred thousand inhabitants, and while its demographics are not quite in the “average”, they are nevertheless close enough for companies to draw some benefit — for little cost — from doing experiments inside the virtual world.
I don’t think I believe in the return of the Golden Age of Second Life — 2006 was really “too early”. Second Life will not become a mass-market product in this generation. It’s only now that some educators — well, tens of thousands of them, in fact — are introducing Second Life into the classroom and teaching their students the benefits of using them. This might mean that the next generation — by 2035 or so — might become more aware of virtual worlds and how they can be used. It’s much less a “technology” issue but a question of education — getting used to the potential of virtual worlds. We should see this past decade as mostly a very early stage where things like Second Life are just appealing to very early adopters, and, as such, it’s a very tight and small niche market.
Imagine that in 1980 you could predict the usage of the personal computer and the mobile phone and suggest that half the world would be connected with both to a single network, encompassing some 3 billion users. Everybody would laugh at you :) It took us a whole generation until that became a reality. People in 1980 didn’t really need personal computers or mobile phones, they just found niche markets (and, of course, they were also very expensive and clumsy to use). Until they became mainstream products, it really took a lot of time, and the right “triggers” at some points — then they grew exponentially. Second Life is a bit like the days when the Apple II and the first IBM PC were out on shops — suddenly, for a few years, the whole market for personal computing exploded exponentially, from “zero users” to a few thousands in little time. But then it took a while to build momentum until we came to the staggering millions we have today. An interesting article on the growth of the personal computer market can be found on Jeremy Reimer’s website.
вторник, 16 апреля 2013 г.
https://twitter.com/ASGARDTylman some about dividents))
Business Ventures
Land Barons - because individuals can own virtual land in SL, there naturally has arisen a brisk and large business in virtual real estate, from land sales and rentals on mainland sims controlled directly by Linden Lab, the owner of SL, to land sales and rentals in private "estate" sims that estate owners lease from Linden lab which they hold "estate powers" over (slightly less powerful than the God mode of Linden Lab employees). SL Land Baroness Anshe Chung appeared on the covers of several real world news and business magazines when her inworld assets reached a self proclaimed value of $1 million, with over 500 simulators under her control.
Builders - if you can imagine building anything, you can build it in SL.
Animation - avatars need animations and poses to look realistic doing or using just about any content: dances, weapons, combat, sports, vehicle operation, even simulated sex.
Scripting - making anything work in SL requires use of the LSL scripting language, and like in RL, LSL programmers can earn good money doing so. Notable scripters include Redux Dengaku, Nexii Malthus, Zwagoth Klaar, Ford Edelman, among others.
Textures - no build can look good without high quality textures. Many individuals create their own textures, but there are also significant texture selling businesses.
Capital Markets - in December 2007, the World Stock Exchange was formed by Lukeconnell Vandeverre and the building built by Land Baron IntLibber Brautigan. Read Capital Markets to get more info in this.
Strip Clubs and Escorts - strip clubs and escorting are lucrative businesses in SL, as "pixel sex" remains a major industry in the virtual world as it is on the internet and phone networks.
Fashion - anything a person in RL needs to wear, so to does an Avatar need, and so the fashion business is huge in SL, from shapes and skins to clothing, shoes, and other accessories.
вторник, 5 марта 2013 г.
пятница, 22 февраля 2013 г.
Honah Lee Surf
We are all friends and citizens of the great kingdom, the existence of which is unknown for many inhabitants of the Earth...
I want to tell you about one little particle of this secret world - called "Honah Lee Surf". For this I came here and sitting at campfire. There is the fire in front of me, located on the ocean shore. And the sky - the starry sky. All four
elements connected to this shore.All four elements are connected together on this shore.
Others think that this is an airport. And so it is. One can observe takeoffs and landings of great liners, small sports planes, helicopters and gliders .. Inevitably start thinking the brave pilots leave the land and left alone with God only... Columbus once went looking for America, not knowing whether or not the wind, not knowing whether or not the continent after the ocean. And these people leave the land can no longer tell about tomorrow with
certainty...
It is an airport with all its features - hangars and runways ... But this is not full true. It is also an exclusion zone - a place where there is no time of day, location, where just forget about the other worldly affairs. You're in the way. Even if you do not move, you're already in the way . Way - is your state. It differs from the rational life outside the exclusion zone.
Walk here and feel the atmosphere of the old city, in which all were built at different times and for different purposes. Plants, houses and other objects create what is called "comfort" ... That is such a lovely place.
And in addition you can meet here excellent people living in the sky ...
четверг, 14 февраля 2013 г.
Second Life's First Millionaire
Posted by: Rob Hof on November 26, 2006
Anshe Chung, the virtual land baroness that I highlighted in my cover story earlier this year, My Virtual Life, has apparently become the first millionaire in Second Life. That’s millionaire in real U.S. dollars. Her real-world persona, Ailin Graef, figures her net worth based on her substantial in-world land holdings, cash in “Linden dollars,” which can be converted to real cash, as well as virtual shopping malls, store chains, and even virtual stock-market investments in Second Life businesses. As the release explains:
Anshe Chung’s achievement is all the more remarkable because the fortune was developed over a period of two and a half years from an initial investment of $9.95 for a Second Life account by Anshe’s creator, Ailin Graef. Anshe/Ailin achieved her fortune by beginning with small scale purchases of virtual real estate which she then subdivided and developed with landscaping and themed architectural builds for rental and resale. Her operations have since grown to include the development and sale of properties for large scale real world corporations, and have led to a real life “spin off” corporation called Anshe Chung Studios, which develops immersive 3D environments for applications ranging from education to business conferencing and product prototyping.
I relate this all with a straight face, but I still find it rather hard to believe that someone can become a millionaire through virtual-world creations. No fun and games, indeed.
среда, 13 февраля 2013 г.
Starting a Second Life Business Find out what entrepreneurial opportunities the virtual world of Second Life has to offer.
A million dollars of virtual loot. It's a concept that's difficult to wrap your head around, but in November, that's exactly what virtual real-estate developer Anshe Chung accomplished in the 3D virtual world Second Life, in which users live "second" lives as avatars. When her entrepreneurial success story hit the press, it spread like wildfire, leading many to ask: What exactly are the business opportunities available in Second Life? Are people really turning their love for Second Life into a full-time business?
Marketers have already been exploring the world, with big-name businesses like American Apparel, Starwood Hotels, Scion and Cisco setting up virtual areas for their products--a store for American Apparel, a hotel for Starwood--in Second Life. Even Reuters has assigned a bureau chief specifically to the site.
If you've never visited Second Life--or even heard of it-here's a quick look at it. Second Life is a 3D virtual world where people use avatars to explore and commune with other people. It's often lumped in with such online games as World of Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies (which insiders refer to as "massively multiplayer online role playing games" or MMORPGs), but it's a different beast. There's no slaying of dragons to level up a character or collecting weapons to prepare for battle, but you can buy and develop online real estate, import images to craft your own in-world creations, or attend a drum circle with avatars created by users from all over the world. Based on the futuristic Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's seminal sci-fi novel Snow Crash, Second Life aims to truly be a second life for users, with opportunities for both work and play.
It's the work element--the embrace of entrepreneurship--that's perhaps most unique to Second Life. Linden Labs, the creator of Second Life, has welcomed the entrepreneurial inclinations of its community in two important ways. First, Linden dollars, the in-world currency, are easily traded for U.S. dollars at an official currency site. Second, Linden has taken the remarkable step of allowing players to retain the copyright for their in-game creations. It's these aspects of Second Life that attract entrepreneurs like Peter Lokke.
Time to Quit the Day Job
Lokke started his online adventures in the 3D virtual universe There. It was "there" that he discovered his love for virtual clothing design. That's also where he met his business partner, Theo Lament, and it was Lament who introduced Lokke to Second Life in 2004. Once he'd learned how much more creative he could be in this new world, he was hooked. Linden's intellectual property policies also helped.
"When I found out how expressive I could be in Second Life and that I retain copyrights for the things I make, I knew I was in Second Life to stay," says Lokke, who lives in Brooklyn, while his partner Lament, whom he's never met face to face, lives in Milwaukee.
Lokke has never considered himself a gamer but he did enjoy tinkering with computer graphics. Creating online clothing came naturally, and after designing his own duds in There and Second Life, he found that others wanted them, too. "[My business] has grown from [generating[ a few bucks a month two years ago to selling more than enough to live on now," says Lokke, who goes by the name Crucial Armitage in Second Life. "And it's growing every month."
Indeed, 2007 may prove to be a watershed year for Lokke: He's quitting his 17-year job as a supermarket manager to make the 50 hours he already spends in Second Life as the owner of Crucial Creations his true, full-time career.
Julian Dibbel, an MMORPG expert who chronicled the year he spend trying to earn an income in Ultima Online in his book Play Money, says Second Life--and not MMORPGs--is the place to look if you want to make a virtual living online. For one thing, it's often hard to earn much in online games because they often shut down the accounts of those selling in-game items, since such activities are against the rules.
Another major issue with multiplayer game money-making, as opposed to Second Life, is that many foreign businesses have cornered the market on entrepreneurial opportunities using inexpensive labor and cheap overhead. Dibbel says this isn't yet an issue in Second Life. "What's not so easily off-shored is the really creative and culturally specific stuff, and that's what you see in Second Life."
What's also interesting about Second Life, says Dibbel, is that while you can be wildly creative, you don't have to be. The aforementioned Anshe Chung (real name: Ailin Graef), who was the first Second Life entrepreneur with a net worth of more than $1 million, made her cash through virtual real-estate dealings. The German resident has even gone real-world with her talents, starting Anshe Chung Studios, a 3D environment developer with offices in Wuhan, China.
Opportunities Abound
The number of opportunities available is really only limited by your imagination. Real estate is a big moneymaker, as evidenced by Chung's success. Even Lokke has a side business as a landowner, subletting property on the 10 islands he owns. There are also numerous opportunities for coders who want to build more complex creations using Second Life's unique scripting language.
Even a B2B community has sprung up. When Dibbel decided to promote Play Money in Second Life, the infrastructure already existed. He found a bookmaker to create a virtual version of his book, and a pre-existing vending machine to sell it in. "There's already a community of solo entrepreneurs there to fill the gap on a B2B level," says Dibbel. "If you have an idea you think would be a good thing to have programmed up, you don't necessarily have to do the programming at this point."
Next Big Thing?
In December, Linden Labs reported there were more than 2.3 million Second Life "residents" (avatars that people have created), and that number seems likely to continue to rise. Some have criticized this population figure as not being representative of the true user base because it includes people who visited Second Life only once and never returned, as well as users who have more than one avatar. Regardless, there's no doubting that Second Life's popularity is growing and the media circus surrounding the virtual lifestyle has exploded.
But the bottom line for entrepreneurs is, will Second Life really pan out? Or is it just hype, since the majority of people have never ventured virtually or even heard of it?
Possibly both. After all, there are a lot of people who could care less about blogging, but it's now a well-established publishing and marketing tool that's here to stay. The audience for blogs may not be universal, but it's big enough that some writers--like Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com or the four bloggers behind Boing-Boing.com--are bringing in a nice, full-time chunk of change for crafting their thoughts for the world.
Second Life may prove to be a similar venture. Your mom may never understand exactly what a 3D world is, or the point of an avatar. But enough other people do that a whole new class of entrepreneurs has been born to serve their needs. Just ask Peter Lokke.
Getting Started in Second Life
First and foremost, you've got to start visiting this virtual world. It's free to start an account, but tiered pricing levels will allow you more access to the world in the form of a Linden dollar allowance and the ability to own property. And you can't jump into a Second Life business--you've got to get to know the world and decide if it's the type of place you want to really build another life in.
From there, your personal interests will guide you to potential business ideas. (Check the list below for some ideas from Linden Labs.) You'll also want to start developing your own community of contacts. Much of the work in a virtual world business--like a real-world business--comes from networking and building a list of contacts and friends.
Finally, be prepared to spend a heck of a lot of time on Second Life. Just because it feels like a game doesn't mean your work will always be fun. Like any hobby-turned-business, the "business" parts can suck much of the fun out of what was once your passion. Be prepared to spend 40 or 50 hours, as Lokke does, on top of your normal, full-time job before you can break free and take it full time.
Second Life Business Ideas
On the Second Life website, the company lists the following businesses as some real examples of in-world enterprises run by residents:
Party and wedding planner
Pet manufacturer
Tattooist
Automotive manufacturer
Fashion designer
Custom avatar designer
Jewelry maker
Architect
XML coder
Freelance scripter
Game developer
Tour guide
Real estate speculator
Publicist
суббота, 9 февраля 2013 г.
вторник, 5 февраля 2013 г.
вторник, 29 января 2013 г.
воскресенье, 20 января 2013 г.
вторник, 1 января 2013 г.
Group for IMBR
Dear friends! Here our group specialy for you)
To join group: insert in local chat and press
secondlife:///app/group/ee7d6b3e-1193-dac1-7c1c-d38a7f4676ad/about
Sincerely yours, Imbanna, director of IMBROKERS
P.S.
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