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Valley-based PR company Edelmann and The Electric Sheep Company are teaming up to sponsor what is most probably the first business plan competition for entrepreneurs in the virtual world of Second Life. according to the official announcement, applications are expected to be focused on improving the SL community, including business ideas like development of products, services or machinima-movies. requirements for filings include:

• Clear, detailed description of the product or service you plan on offering
• Description of how you intend to make money, and the cost structure that would be needed to support operations
• Description of your target market and any research you have done proving out demand for your product or service
• Description of how you intend to bring the product/service to the market, i.e. sales and marketing strategies
• Analysis of direct or indirect competition
• Background of your team (i.e. show why you are the people to get it done)

the winner is entitled to use a private island for 6 months and, more importantly, the amount of L$350.000 - equal to approx. USD 1.280,-. while this might not sound a lot, it could at least free an aspiring web-developer or gfx-designer from everyday-work for a few weeks, to get things started.

this weeks issue of austrian news-weekly Profil features (afaik) the first major story on Second Life (german language, obviously) in traditional austrian mass media (thegap, of course, published my own article on the matter few months ago, but I wouldn’t consider thegap ‘traditional’ or ‘general interest’ per se). good work, Sebastian Hofer! (and that’s not only for quoting me ). I think news agency Reuters’ recent installment of a full-time reporter within the metaverse of Second Life, as well as reaching the 1.000.000th user milestone, are good indicators that Second Life is here to stay. as for myself, visits to the virtual world have become kind of rare, mostly because of a general lack of time. maybe that’s about to change, now that winter has almost begun

those of you badly missing their second life during work may respire: Fabjectory produces amazing 3D-printings with full textures of SL-avatar models to put on your desk. prints are starting at USD 75$ for a 5inch figurine, support for 3d-models exported from other games/software than SL is planned as well.

(Via 3pointD)

everyone even slightly interested in MMOG SecondLife, probably already heard yesterdays bad news: an official security announcement on Linden Labs (creators of SL) reported a hack of SL’s database earlier this week. Linden Labs admits that user-data (account-names, reallife-names and contact-information) was compromised, which is why all residents are required to re-new their passwords in order to reactive their currently inactive accounts. LL claims that creditcard- and payment-information has not been disclosed, as these are stored seperately. clearly, this is a major bummer. as TechCrunch notes, SL-chatlogs and behavioral data (and yes, that includes tons of sexual actions performed!) publicly available in large scale, would even make AOL’s recent privacy-waterloo look like peanuts.

LindenLabs will not only have to tighten their security (please!), but also have to deal with an accusation silently vocalized by some commenters: apparently there was a span of 2 days between the actual hack and LL’s official announcement. this stinks like a company at least considering to sweep something under the rug, therefor demanding further clarification. given Philip Rosedales (CEO of LL) openness towards the community in the past, I’m confident that he’ll handle the situation with all the care appropriate. if anything, this issue re-emphasizes the importance of an open(source), standards-based and decentralized virtual world. just imagine the WWW was built on top of a single centralized user-databases storing all your online activity… sounds weird, right? so than why do it in Web-3D…

update: there’s a - rather pissed - post at Second Life Herald, which I’ld like to recommend reading. other sources suggest, that encrypted creditcard-info might have leaked as well

I just tried out an in-world text-to-speech (tts) synthesizer built by Christian Westbrook from the Electric Sheep Company. the prototype (which can be publicly tried out at Christian’s house) basically translates every message on public chat (=channel #0) into synthesized speech. the resultig audio-sample is streamed to the parcel almost in real-time and can be received by all avatars in presence. the current prototype seems to have problems with simultaneous speeches by several avatars, leading to cut-up samples. due to SecondLife’s audio-architecture, Christian’s script probably won’t work on-the-go, but only connected to particular land (afaik internet audio-streaming is only supported on parcels). still, integrate a decent cross-language translator and - voila - get a cool audio-Babelfish…amazing!

Linden Labs just published the august/september issue of their second opinion newsletter. while the newsletter is focused on internal issues and the upcoming closure of the user-forums (not really a great idea, imho), LL also unveils the new official - user-generated - movie-trailer promoting Second Life: “Second Life: Get One”, by Silver and Goldie - a really great piece of machinima.

earlier this week, the grid was campaigned by a major US-politician for the first time. former Virginia governor and Democrat’s possible spare-candidate (in case Hillary Clinton opts out) for president, Mark Warner, did a live-interview with Wagner James Au from the New World Notes-blog (which btw is another recommendable SL-blog). the event attracted about 30 residents. while the talk itself (transcript by Mark Wallace, as well as the pic below) wasn’t that interesting, in particular for non-US-citizens, it sure is a strong sign of SL going mainstream.

More coverage: Second Life Herald, New World Notes

while the grid was down for maintenance during most of the evening (CET), I found this Second Life Herald-article about the Second Life Liberation Army. the SLLA basically demands Linden Labs to establish a referendum on the recent changes in account-registration. besides their goal to unwind the abolition of enforcing payment-information, they further claim the right in ‘owning’ a share of Linden Labs for all residents. while the latter sounds way over-the-top, I’m sure Linden Labs will eventually have to introduce a global voting system in the not too-distant future.

however, since the SLLA seems not to be of the patient kind ;); they started in-world military action only 10 days after proclaiming their initial manifesto. in a first run, they stopped commerce at the American Apparel store by griefing away potential customers - see coverage from SLAA and Aimee Weber, the designer of the store. while it’s pretty clear that the involved parties are not too dead-serious about the strike (rumours claim that the assault even earned AA some badly needed PR and traffic), the underlying issue remains: how and when will Linden Labs be able to transform SL from a ‘friendly dictatorship’ to a truly democratic system?

in other news, Mark Wallace from 3pointD transcribed SL Community Convention’s keynote speech given by Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Labs. furthermore, SL Herald has some pics from the event.

the second annual Second Life Community Convention taking place in San Francisco just finished yesterday. Mark Wallace from 3pointD.com was kind enough to transcribe the kick-off speech by Mitch Kapor. Mitch Kapor created Lotus 1-2-3, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and at the board of Linden Labs (creators of Second Life). with a record like this, it’s not a big surprise that the speech he gave on SL’s history and long-term perspectives is inspiring, to say the least.

with currently almost 550.000 residents (half of them being active during the past two months), SecondLife has seen an exponential increase in usage since creditcard-checks were abolished - a measure heavily critized by many long-term-users. as for content, more and more companies take the step to go virtual: recent announcements and rumours included Adidas Reebok and Toyota. jack in!

3pointD reports: Rivers Run Red - the virtual agency responsible for Duran Duran’s recent live-performance in Second Life - in cooperation with publisher Penguin, is going to create a Second Life-sim dedicated to Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk-novel Snow Crash. written 1988-1991, Snow Crash anticipated many aspects of virtual communities and even coined the term ‘metaverse’, which is now used in reference to the virtual world of Second Life. details about the sim are not yet disclosed, aside from releasing parts of snowcrash as in-game audiobook.

being an admirer of Stephenson’s books - stunned by the paralells between Second Life and the metaverse of Snow Crash since I logged in for the first time - I think it’s great that this finally comes full circle. unlike William Gibson (author of Neuromancer, and father of cyberpunk) Stephenson unfortunately doesn’t blog - but you may still want to visit his personal site or Metaweb, the company he’s involved with.