Virtual Banking (17): Banca MPS

Banca MPS

Amidst all the turmoil on the financial markets I decided to see if there has been any chance in the status of a couple of banks I spotted a while ago in Second Life. The sim is called Banca MPS, which stands for Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SPA

"Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SPA (MPS) is the oldest surviving bank in the world. Founded in 1472 by the Magistrate of the city state of Siena, Italy, it has been operating ever since. Today it consists of approximately 1,800 branches, 28,000 employees and 4.5 million customers in Italy, as well as branches and businesses abroad. A subsidiary, MPS Finance, handles consumer finance.

Its headquarters in the Palazzo Salimbeni in Siena are host to a magnificent art collection and a large number of priceless historical documents spanning the centuries of its existence. However, this collection is not usually open to the public" [wikipedia]

On the sim you see a complex of buildings, in which nothing much happens. I've spotted this sim about a year ago and the evolution has been slow. Yet the the detail on the buildings is pretty good.

As I couldn't get in, I couldn't explore the buildings. However, I could peek through the opened doors allowing me to get a view of classical Italian paintings. I suspect this is the collection Wikipedia refers to. If the Real Life collection is not usually open to visitors, giving them a free entrance in Second Life would probably be a good thing. So why not open up folks?

In the Netherlands, Banca MPS is primarily known for acquiring Banca Antonveneta from Grupo Santander late 2007, which took over a part of the Dutch ABN Amro Bank, which in its turn had just aquired Antonveneta, making it the first non-italian takeover in the industry in Italy

(Okay, this is a soap... ABN AMRO was taken over by a trio of banks, aside from Santander, these were Barclays and Fortis. The latter of which is now being rescued by Belgian, Dutch and Luxemburgh governments and there are talks of selling the ABN Amro part again at a severe loss, most likely to the Dutch ING or French BNP Parisbas).

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Banca%20MPS/128/128/0

Banca Transylvania

The second bank on my list is Banca Transylvania, but this one is also closed for public. It has no neighbouring sims so I couldn't get any snapshots of that one. Hopefully someone can give me a few pointers.

SLURL http://slurl.com/secondlife/Banca%20Transylvania/128/128/0

It's Captain Jack

One of my daily routine jobs as a blogger is checking Technorati to see if there are new links to my blog. When following one of these links I noticed a familiar face...

Yes it's captain Jack Sparrow. It's not Johnny Depp though, but Tay Runo. The beautiful lady at his side is Jojamela Soon. The picture is taken by Paisley Beebe at Sailor's Cove.

Do have a look at Paisley's Flickr Photostream as there is a ton of really great pictures of Second Life, utilising almost every option provided by the WindLight client.

Rumsey Maps

VeeJay has asked me to cross-post this from Ambling in Second Life...

The following interesting find, ironically perhaps, came about from some random searching of the Second Life map. You have to be something of a map nerd to spend as much time as I do poring over maps - including the Second Life grid map. So it was an unexpected pleasure to hit upon the 4-sim island of Rumsey Maps.

The island is the Second Life presence for the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. This is an online collection comprising some 17,400 maps (and one I plan to delve into in more depth when the opportunity arises). To quote the website: "[The] Collection was started nearly 20 years ago, and focuses primarily on cartography of the Americas from the 18th and 19th centuries, but also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, school geographies, books, maritime charts, and a variety of separate maps, including pocket, wall, children's and manuscript. Digitization of the project began in 1997."

Not surprisingly, the island is full of maps. Indeed, the main ground plan of the island consists of one large map, with valleys and hills contoured in 3D. Floating above these are a couple of globes - one terrestrial, one celestial - with phantom surfaces. Inside each is a giant orrery, where you can take a seat for a leisurely view of the globes' inner surfaces.

Elsewhere there is a richly textured modernist building where you can find out more information, and pick up some nice freebies - including orreries and a variety of globes. There's also a small, comfortable seating area and a meeting room. Outside there's a large map where you can place your own map pin, with up to 140 characters of text.

The one big downside of the site - indeed, the only downside in my view - is that the size and number of map textures means that lag was a huge problem for me. OK, I was using Windlight, but even with the settings turned down it was taking an age to display anything. In fact, it only started to make much sense when I'd been there fully 15 minutes. As you will see from the pictures, there seems to be a lot of "map eggs" - but these, in fact, serve to provide some infrastructure, as the 3D terrain is overlaid on top of them.

I can't find any reference to the Second Life island on the Rumsey website, so I do not know if it is officially open yet. But if you like maps - or just want to see somewhere a bit different - I can recommend the trip. Oh... and that map of the UK? The map pin is very(!) roughly where I live.

UPDATE 8th Feb'08: I've been having a bit of a think about those "map eggs" and it has dawned on me that they're actually sculpted prims, but seen in there half-rezzed state. Give them long enough and they will finally snap into chunks of contoured map. Just thought I should clarify that one!

UPDATE 9th Feb '08 (VJ): Well, I have to replace that Flickr embedding with real piccies.

UPDATE 9th Feb '08 (AK): In the meantime here is a link to the Flickr set.

Second Life Artists Rightfully Upset Over “SLART” Trademark Registration

Guest Commentary: Second Life Artists Rightfully Upset Over “SLART” Trademark Registration
January 25th, 2008 by Thayer Preece

Outrage recently erupted among Second Life users, particularly those involved in the art scene, regarding the fact that artist Richard Minsky (Second Life’s ‘ArtWorld Market’) has registered the trademark “SLART” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (See Vint Falken and Massively, among others.)

Not only has Minsky registered the mark (for which a notice of allowance recently issued) but he has also allegedly been speaking with people who use the terms “SLART,” “slart,” and “SLart” to refer to art in Second Life in order to accuse them of trademark infringement and threaten them with legal action. Minsky is using the SLART trademark in-world and in connection with his magazine — a publication concerning virtual art, particularly art in Second Life. His trademark registration covers the publication of various types of works, art exhibitions, and educational programs concerning art.

Read full article here at Virtually Blind.

Rezzable EBuddy and looking for VC

Rezzable 2007

One of the big surprises in content development for Second Life in 2007 was new kid on the block Rezzable which launched the Greenies sim in July which has been a top 5 attraction in terms of visitors ever since. Quite a lot of residents and bloggers have been impressed by this build, though many were wondering about the business model as the could see any clear sponsors.

There's no doubt Rezzable injected a lot of money in developing this sim, and the dozen of other places, like the Toxic Gardens, the Cannery and the Black Swan and they've not been very forthcoming about their financing.

First of all, the Rezzable sims are a showcase to get on the serious side of business. Not tampered by marketing agencies or corporate restrictions they have build experiences which showcase their ability. This would be an expensive calling card, but a serious one at that which might be worth a few bucks. Revenues are created in multiple ways though such as goodie shops and in context advertising at the Greenies Home.

When talking to Rezzable founder Jon Himhoff he told me Rezzable was looking for Venture Capital and they're putting together a funding round. Off course I raised an eyebrow. Does Rezzable need funding to maintain the dozens of sims?

[13:45] You: what will be the motivation for the funding round?
[13:45] RightAsRain Rimbaud: ah...That's a good question
[13:46] RightAsRain Rimbaud: In general our existing work doesn't need it

So on the whole it seems the 3 streams of revenues generate enough income to keep up the good work.

Rezzable Ebuddy

Last month I saw the sculptures made by Lightwaves appear on the SLexchange as well, at serious prices (ranging L$ 9K -35K, or US $ 30 - 130) and to support this Rezzable opened a new sim last week, the Ebuddy Sandbox which also shows and sells the sculptures you can find in the Rezzable sims. Here are some snapshots:

Rezzable is going to push this sim (and thus their complete works) hard with real world promotion as well such as an Art Gallery in London and a print magazine.

Rezzeble 2008

To get back to the funding, what is Rezzable upto that needs a serious financial injection? In general you can state that there is a serious difference between gameworlds such as World of Warcraft and social worlds such as Second Life when it comes to user activity. Capturing the resident's attention has been hard for all MDC's in 2007, resulting in a number of corporations to be dissappointed in Second Life as a medium.

The basic premises is that social worlds need more of a storyline which led Millions of Us to redo the Scioncity sim and Electric Sheep Company to experiment with converging media with CSI:NY in the last months of 2007. One of the underlying concepts in Rezzables development has been to create immersive experiences (such as the Greenies Home) all along. A second element has been pushing for a storyline at the Toxic gardens, which has been build as a big decorum and is accompanied by a small story outline.

Rezzable has massive plans for 2008 to expand on this interactivity:

We have a massive idea for content play and we will launch this in SL, but...it is a virtual world play across many platforms in the future and also 3D web in general. Rezzable is still very committed to SL. Our main focus here is more interactivity, so we are workin on lots of simple, fun games with web databases."

"We think it is a major play for establishing 3D web content and user engagement. Virtual worlds are still very new. Once there are a few more credible platforms running--which we think is a 2008 thing--main issue is what will engage users and we feel it is quality content. Quality content can be defined as visually stunning, interactive and immersive. It is not porno, gambling, camping, real estate speculation. We see a lot of opportunity for
real-world cross-overs. Stay tuned, lot of new stuff coming in 2008."

Since they're still putting together the funding round, which is supposed to bring in about 3.5m USD, Jon couldn't disclose much more, but I'll be paying close attention to this as I think one of the keys to generating traffic will be in serious content play.

Second Life as an Artist Center

Earlier this year we saw a van Gogh exposition where you could walk into one of van Gogh's paintings and June saw the coming of Brian Eno's 77 million paintings to Second Life to name a few. Due to its very nature Second Life is becoming a haven for artists, like Paris was in the days of van Gogh and Monet.

This very nature is Second Life is its incredible freedom that makes it so easy to create new things, a freedom that can't be found to this extent in any other virtual world. Second Life gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself inside art, to participate instead of observe. Several studies of Second Life have reported that a large part of Second Life's inhabitants have backgrounds in creative professions. These creative artistst were among the first settlers to conquest this paradise and have a long track record but many new artists start to explore Second Life now as well, as a creative platform in which they can let you experience what could only be visualised on canvas before.

One of these artists with a long track record is Robbie Dingo, who just came up with another sublime machinima (a movie shot in a virtual world) to show the incredible potential of Second Life. On his blog he introduces the movie:

"Ever looked at your favorite painting and wished you could wander inside, to look at it from different perspectives? Spend a single day in one of mine, from early sunrise on a new day, to dusk when lights come on in cosy homes; through a peaceful night, till morning."

Find the links to this incredible movie here. For more detail on how this was put together, have a look at this article by Wagner Jame Au over at New World Notes).

Van Gogh exposition

Even artlovers don't have to leave their pc's anymore if they want to go to the museum.
Raceman Dal took the initiative for a virtual van Gogh exposition; "Virtual Starry Night - Vincent van Gogh's Second Life"


The exposition is a great build, having three alternate routes; landscapes, portraits and stills.
The virtual paintings give info about the original and in which museum they can be found. Top attraction is the painting below, which is a virtual reproduction. Visitors can walk into this painting.

Second Life's an excellent medium for cultural expression, I can't wait to see a reproduction of Rembrand's famous Night Watch.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Luctesa/105/199/66