Virtual Banking (16): Keytrade

Upon posting the update RL Brand Directory for Second Life just before the weekend, I received a number of tips on Belgian firms from my pal Pieter Bosch over at the Second Life Crew blog. One of them was already on my to do list, the Keytrade Bank. So, moving from Italy's Banca Carige to Belgium's Keytrade Bank would be a nice contrast.

The Belgian Keytrade Bank is an internet bank and is a 100% subsidiary of Crédit Agricole, also present in Second Life and blogged here at MindBlizzard in summer 2007.

Belgium's first online investment site VMS-Keytrade, saw the light of day in 1998. It experienced immediate success and dazzling growth. In 2002, VMS-Keytrade became Keytrade Bank and acquired its banking status by taking over RealBank.

Today, Keytrade Bank is part of the Crédit Agricole Group, one of Europe's largest banking groups (total assets of € 913 billion and own funds of € 66 billion).

The bank's build is quite simple: One main office at a small island, a little gardening to liven up the terraforming and that's it.

On the inside, there's a difference though. It's quite spaceous, with several seats and small offices filled with Scope Cleaver design.

Upon entering you cannot miss the sim's prime feature: The exchange. This is one of the first actually usefull features I've seen in visiting 16 banks and various financial corporations in Second Life as it gives a live exchangerate of the Linden Dollar against various currencies.

Aside from the live exchange, you'll find some freebees (T Shirts) and a nice Zeppelin to fly over the island. We're not done yet. Among the freebee stands, there's another usefull tool to be found: A HUD which also gives you the conversion rates plus financial news

"KEYTRADE BANK and DOW JONES NEWSWIRES launch on Friday the 23rd of November 2007 a NEW second generation Financial NEWS and Currency Conversion HUD in Second Life.This second generation HUD features besides the currency converter with Real Time currency conversion rates of 12 different currencies in relation to Linden $ now also Real Time FINANCIAL NEWS from DOW JONES NEWSWIRES.The NEWS are accurate financial breaking news and headlines, together with rolling commentary and in-depth analysis.With a click of a button on the Keytrade Bank
HUD a stylish news screen slides out of the HUD and displays more than 2000 characters of financial NEWS.The slide screen displays the NEWS with a Headline and date. You can further browse the NEWS feed by simply clicking on the page arrows." (SL Newspaper BNC)

Although I can't say the build is spectacular, the HUD and exchange make up for it as this actually is a serious attempt at connecting the RL and Virtual markets.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Keytrade%20Bank/128/128/0

(Educational) Self City on Teen Grid

Dutch MDC [Lost in the] Magic Forest finished developing an island on the Second Life Teen Grid for the Waag Society a little while ago. As I don't have TG clearance it took some time before I picked up this story.

The Waag Society is an organisation which started in 1994 as 'Society for old and new Media', de Waag'. Founders were Caroline Nevejan and Marleen Stikker, who is still Waag Society's director. Before, Stikker was the mayor of the Digital City, the first internet community in the Netherlands.

The Society's -soon to be called 'Waag Society'- mission was to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality of living. After a complete restauration of the Waag building, a small group of enthousiastic idealists began their activities in 1996.

The island in Second Life (TG) is called Self City and is an educational project to experiment with new teaching methods for pupils with special needs in the age of 12-14. It is about students which cannot function properly in a normal classroom, often through social emotional or light mental handicaps.

Dobre VanBrugh from Lost in the Magic Forest says:

"We developed a complete city on the island with a movietheatre, (fake)gambling hall, basketballcourt and a Heads Up Display (HUD) to assist the pupils in their interaction (see screenshots). The scientific findings of the new teaching method in Second Life have been gathered in this report (Dutch only): Research Report Self City"

Geek Meet - the Celeb Edition?

Another Geekmeet Friday with a show packed with Second Life goodies went down at Dr. Dobbs island again. Tonight's lineup:

• MSo Lambert and Sensual Casanove from Synthetic speaking on the Subscribe-O-Matic.
• Navillus Batra, aka Jacob Sullivan of i3D demonstrating the brand new LSL unit testing tech that Linden Lab commisioned his company to build.
• Felix Wakmann and Diva Canto of the SLBrowser giving a demo of the new 2.0 version.

Since this was a first (full) voice edition, it was a bloggersnightmare, but a great show once more.

The Subscribe-O-Matic is basically tying to work about a couple of problems business owners face when trying to use groups to stay in touch with their customers, or potential customers. It is a networked system of devices that sellers can use in their shops, which customers can simply touch to "subscribe" to their Subscribe-O-Matic list

The best way to say something on the Unit Testing done by i3D is by giving a quote from Metaversed:

"Scriptors will be able to plug individual units of code into the system and stress test and debug with verbose reporting. They'll even be able to track individual functions performance within different units, helping to narrow down bug hunts, and tune performance of complex apps. "

read full piece here

The final stand was made by Felix Wakmann on the SL Browser, which is to some extend a mash-up of the Metamart hud and the Electric Sheep Search Engine.

Perhaps due to the talks on i3D's testing unit the Geekmeet turned out to almost being a celeb-edition with several Linden employees attending and also Aimee Weber was sighted.

Aric Linden, Linden Labs' QA has enjoyed working with i3D pretty much:

"We've really enjoyed working with them and we're very excited to be able to collaborate with folks. We hope to be doing more of it in the future."

Aimee has told me a few weeks ago that she was too busy to keep up with stuff, but has been meaning to come to one of these events for some time now. This time she finally found some time to squeeze it in her busy schedule.

Sim in a Box

Building a proper sim takes time, a whole lot of time, unless you are a master builder like Lordlfy. But if you're just that average kind of bloke who barely scraped together the money to buy a complete sim and you want to make money from renting out property, you'll want it up and running smooth and (especially) fast.

So your sim is in and you want to rent out as soon as possible, since you don't have Anshe's wallet to be able to leave it unused for a year or so. Monthly tiers can be a killer to many starters. For those the Sim in a Box might be a very good solution that can jumpstart your sim.

The Things to Do group got a demo today of how to build a sim in 5 minutes. Well, it works.

Though I'm not really charmed. I like mine with a little more labour-of-love touch than what this instant-sim HUD does.

However, from a technical point of view, I think this is a big step forward. Predefine content and make it rapidly deployable, auto rezzing your inventory might be huge timesavers.

Kelly Services

Kelly Services, a global staffing service opened up shop on april 21st. The opening party was supported by SL's own blues guitarist, Komuso Tokugawa and Anakin Gallacher did a Jazzy gig later that evening.

The island was built by Wishfarmers. According to KSstarfire Rich, Wishfarmer's Director of Operations, “Kelly services is looking to make an impact in SL. They won’t be having one of those boring CHOAH (crappy house on a hill) situations like other business tend to have when entering SL”

Upon entering the island I was spammed with a HUD that tried to get me to sign up for a new job. Well, there's just no job that can beat mine... so I'll pass. The sim itself is a nice cartoonish build, but not much to do besides looking for a job. We'll see which recruitment / staffing corp sets up shop next (I think it will be Content)

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kelly%20Services/128/128/0