Word of Mouth

Well, here's a few items from other blogs with the latest SL updates.

Sculpted Prims

3PointD, Metaversed and the Gridblog all spend a few lines on Tao's scoop on the new Sculpties. Here's Lordfly's comment:
"According to Tao Takashi, who has the scoop, a new prim type, “sculpties”, will be on the preview grid either today or Monday (my guess Monday). Cubesque is still counting down, but it’s kinda anti-climactic now :D Apparently Cube Linden is down in Georgia giving a talk, hence the latest message on the website. Still, fascinating stuff. I can’t wait to play with virtual putty."

The 3PointD blog is a little more extensive:
"More importantly, it means that SL objects are suddenly a lot more interoperable with objects and shapes from other worlds and modelling programs. According to the Second Life wiki, “We provide an exporter for Maya, and hopefully exporters for 3ds Max, Blender, and ZBrush will be available soon. We also have plans to provide a sculpt editor within the Second Life viewer.” The wiki doesn’t say where this Maya exporter is available, but according to Tao Takashi, it may be in the next preview build of the client, due shortly"

Sunny Worlds

Then there's Aleister who has a nose for good news that gives a little insight at Sun's plans to compete bringing us a story from Informationweek on this:
"Sun Microsystems put the spotlight on its next-generation technology and showed off research projects that ranged from faster switches and more efficient servers to 3-D virtual workplaces in an open house for analysts and reporters. Among the projects that would wow even a nontechnical person is Sun's MPK20 virtual workplace. Sun has built a client called Project Wonderland that handles the graphics rendering and provides the controls for moving an avatar through the make-believe world.

MPK20 is built on top of the new version of Sun's open source Darkstar gaming server. While Wonderland does the graphics rendering, Darkstar handles everything else, such as load balancing, managing game state, and voice communications. For storing avatars and other game objects, Darkstar uses the Berkeley DB database, another open source project."

Cisco

Another scoop-dog, 57 Miles, bloggernaut at the Metaversed blog dug up some more intel at the Informationweek site and here are a few lines by Mitch Wagner, author of the article:
"just got off the phone with Cisco -- we ended up talking for a couple of hours about how Cisco is using Second Life for business-to-business communications. Turns out that quite a few Second Life users are network engineers. These are Cisco's customers, and Cisco is aggressively using Second Life to communicate with them

Cisco has a few hundred employees in Second Life. They have several sims that they use for user-group meetings and meetings among their own international staff. They do customer education and training in Second Life, get feedback from customers on products, and do presentations using PowerPoint, video, and streaming audio. They hold events that combine people in the real world with avatars in Second Life -- a type of event that Second Lifers call "mixed reality."

The real value of Second Life for Cisco is the opportunity for spontaneous customer interaction, said Christian Renaud, chief architect of networked virtual environments for Cisco. "It's like a birds-of-a-feather session that goes on 'round the clock," he said. He routinely encounters customers in Second Life who want to talk to him about their needs and what they want Cisco to do. "I bump into customers and partners multiple times a day in Second Life. In 11 years at Cisco, walking through the parking lot in San Jose, I never get people come up to me and say, 'I'm a Cisco customer, have a second?'"

Entertainment

New World Notes has a nice little article on carting in Second Life