Wednesday, May 30, 2007

A closer look at Amazon

A little while ago I blogged on the great Amazon build. Today it was on the Things To Do list and we received a personal tour guided by Amazon's Webservices resident guru Jeff Barr.

He told us how it all began: "Last year I got an SL account and started to attend all sorts of events. After attending a NASA launch with live video, I started to get the crazy idea that I could actually do part of my job from within SL. People looked at me like I was crazy. But I persisted, and gave some talks last year on Info Island and at other places. The response was awesome and told me that I wasn't crazy. I proposed to my management the design and construction of this island. They thought it was a good idea, and now, here we are."
This time I got round to asking a few more indepth questions (ahum), like how Amazon teamed up with Joshua Culdesac from Virtuool, a freelance French builder.
Jeffronius Batra: "VeeJay, this is a great story. I bought a little plot of land in Athabasca. Shortly after I started building, this wolf started to hang out nearby. We started chatting and he showed me some of what he was building. I was very impressed with his skills and we became good friends. I shared with him my vision for what we could build here, and it turned out that he was in the process of making a career change to become a full-time SL builder. He's based in Bordeaux, France and has a background in building 3D objects as a hobby, by the way. When I had approval to start building, I wrote a spec and asked him to submit a proposal, and the result is what you see here. He did an amazing job of taking my ideas and turning them into something even better than the vague pictures in my head. We never once talked on the phone during the build phase. I didn't even meet him in person until last month. All in all the process worked out very well and I am quite happy with the results. I wanted to make this place look like it had been buried for hundreds of years and then rediscovered."

This story is off course one hell of an example how inworld collaboration can work out. From idea to end product without ever meeting once
We toured the sim then and saw a very imaginative auditorium, probably one of the most original ones I've seen so far and we toured the Amazon again in the boats I blogged on in my previews posting on Amazon. This time, even the boats caused havoc as one actualla sank!

Virtually Shipwrecked !!!

Actually, we were all kinda amazed that it could happen, even Jeff who certainly knew of no premeditated scripted intend to sink us. Anyway, our clothes dries quickly and we moved on.
The sim is filled to the brim with places to stimulate the 240,000 people Amazon Webservice development community using their S3 (Amazon's storage service) and EC2 (their compute cloud) in various ways related to SL. Linden Labs is also using the S3 as building block for their client. This morning saw their first tech meeting with about 20 developers present.
Finally it seems like Amazon turns out to be one of the places to watch when it comes to rallying the community, potentially more so than IBM or Intel for that matter.

Labels: , , ,

Sunday, April 15, 2007

AMD

In the deep south of the Developers Archipelago lies the sim of AMD which opened mid February 2007. AMD is certainly not pushing the limits of Second Life's innovative potential, the sim is mainly used as a meeting point for techies with a few events. The design is quite sterile and you may have to wear sunglasses to protect you against snow blindness.


The sim was constructed by the guys at Metaversality.


From the press release:
"MD Opens Developer Pavilion to Promote Collaboration and Innovation in Second Life and Beyond- Contestants face off to win an AMD powered Dell Dimension SystemDev Central Pavilion on AMD Dev Central Island located within the Second Life (SL) metaverse, to extend its Developer Outreach program into a virtual space for meetings, lectures, training courses and networking opportunities for developers. To celebrate the launch of the pavilion, AMD will host a three-month treasure hunt contest with interactive Linden scripting language (LSL) and open source programming challenges. Developers who successfully complete the challenges in the Pavilion will be entered into a prize drawing for a Dell Dimension E521 system, powered by an AMD dual-core Athlon(tm) 64 X2 processor, 4GB DDR2 SDRAM, 320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive, 20 inch widescreen digital flat panelmonitor, and more."


SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/AMD%20Dev%20Central/128/128/0

Labels: , , , ,

Friday, April 13, 2007

IBM megacomplex

Since february 2007 IBM has pushed sim after sim into their growing continent.
Here's the current sattelite map. At least 16 of these sims are IBM. Most of the work on these sims is done by the Electric Sheep Company.



Aide from these BigBlue sims, there is a cluster of several other sims that could be shared into the IBM PMWIN project which Google tells me is IBM PartnerWorld Industry Networks, No, I haven’t the faintest idea what this is, either. However, I did stumble upon this description at another IBM PWIN website which says PartnerWorld will allow partners to:
  • Gain access to the best solutions, offerings, and skills to help you win in the marketplace.
  • Quick and easy Web access to valuable IBM benefits and resources
  • Competitive advantage in industries, services and solutions
  • Increased opportunity to generate awareness and leads
  • Teaming for success to deliver the expertise to meet client needs
It will be interesting to see where the development goes. Most parts are unaccesible right now, but here and there you might get in. The pics below are from the island IBM1 where a huge primmy sphere hovers on top of a shakespeare-theatre like foundation.



Probably one could write tons of blogs about IBM, here's a few by our guestwriter Aleister Kronos:
SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IBM%20CODESTATION/134/121/67

Labels: , , , , , ,