Philip Rosedale at the Davos conference

One of the hottest tech events these days is the World Economic Forum in Davos. Through twitter I've received a lot of updates, especially through Robert Scobleizer's stream. Seems like things get pretty seesmic over there.

One of the interesting points from a Second Life point of view was Adam Pasick of Reuters' interview with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs. The interview touched some interesting topics and even though Philip tried his best to stay as political as possible, some to the point questions resulted in some interesting answers (as summarized by Digado)

…HTML in Second Life

“Maybe, quite possibly in the next couple of months. Not on the main grid but in a close to ‘finished’ state so…. May 2008. Definitely.”

…People leaving second Life soon after Signing Up

On the question whether Philip regrets seeing so many people leave Second Life close after they signed up he told Adam he did. He tells us he would have loved to step in a time machine, go back, and change things before they left. But he also says the problem was or is twofold. One is obviously the software, Linden Labs ‘part of the deal’ - and then there is the community, responsible for the content of Second Life. The content of Second Life wasn’t appealing enough to these people either to keep them from leaving, but he is confident this will change in the future as he talks about media the media coverage of 2006.

…the media hype

Philip goes on to say the media has created a ‘too pretty picture’ - thats why many people came into Second Life to early, and left when they were faced with disappointment. Second Life has not been able to live up to the High expectations but Philip was confident these people will return once they find Second Life offers more applications, and is able to meet at least some of these users in their expectations. He continues to say we will see more Hype Cycles because of this every 12 to 18 months for the next 5 years.

…Signfarms

Sounds like Prokofy has been calling in, and Philip says: I don’t care. Well spoken Philip.

…Copyright issues

Technical rights management is not too difficult, he claims it is within the range of Linden Labs capabilities at the moment. What will take time is to implement these rules and get them right. He wants to make certain he doesn’t underestimate the issue of ‘Content Right Control’ and is well aware Linden Labs is on an experimental level here.

The complete interview can be found on Reuters and is well worth a listen.

25% of Global top 100 in SL

In June I wrote 30% of Dutch Top100 corporations in Virtual Worlds, listing the top Dutch companies in Second Life. Earlier this month though SLionheads' Timbo Urbanowicz did the math on the global top 100 companies.



Based upon the Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard he checked to see which companies were in Second Life and concludes 20% of these Global brands have a presence in Second Life:

"Interbrand takes many ingredients into account when ranking the value of the
Best Global Brands. Even to qualifyfor the list, each brand must derive at least
a third of its earnings outside its home country, be recognizableoutside of its
base of customers, and have publicly available marketing and financial data. "

1. Coca Cola

2. Microsoft

3. IBM

6. Toyota

7. Intel

10. Mercedes-benz

13. BMW

18. Cisco

25. Sony

29. Nike

31. Dell

42. Philips

43. Siemens

44. Nintendo

52. MTV

62. Amazon

69. Adidas

76. Reuters

81. ING

98. Nissan




Missing on this list are apple (33), SAP (34), eBay (48), Accenture (50) and BP (84) though, so it's closer to 25%.



Some, like Coca Cola and SAP only hold a small spot in Second Life, others such as IBM have a multble island presence and others (like eBay and BP) are still under cosntruction.

Linden Labs Legal Stuff

In a week that most citizens are getting annoyed over the SLCC code of conduct, Linden Labs themselves are working hard on Legal suits.

Reuters reports that a French court dismissed a complaint against Linden Lab on Tuesday that was filed by a French group opposed to adult content within the virtual world.

"Linden Lab said in a statement: “The Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris dismissed the complaint filed by the French association Familles de France against Linden Lab, holding that the evidence brought by the association was unduly biased and should be thrown out.”

Linden Labs themselves is explaining their point of view in the Case Linden vs. Bragg":

"In his complaint, Bragg attempts to cast this as a case with broad implications about whether ‘virtual land’ – actually, access to computing resources that enable a virtual representation of land in a three-dimensional online digital ‘world’ – is subject to the laws governing real property. That is not what this case is about. It is a dispute about whether an online service may suspend a user from that service for engaging in a fraudulent scheme to obtain money, to the detriment of the service and its user community.”

and Linden Lab also alleged that

“The objective of Bragg’s scheme was to obtain access to ‘virtual land’ that was scheduled to be auctioned by Linden in the future and thus before it was available to any other users, and to acquire it for as little as one U.S. dollar rather than whatever winning bid (in excess of the minimum opening bid of U.S. $1,000.00) might have resulted from a legitimate auction” and that “After acquiring the ‘virtual land’ through this fraudulent scheme, Bragg intended to subdivide it, sell it to other Second Life users, and potentially obtain thousands of dollars in U.S. funds in ill-gotten profit.”

Reuters spam

I'm not sure wat the problem is, but it's starting to annoy me a little. A while ago I purchased the Reuters Vendor 2.1-something, now I'm getting spammed for version 3.0.

I've tried to discard, keep, mute to it, without any succes.. I've deleted all old and obsolete versions from inventory and trash, but still the spamming continues (4 times a day I think)

The object '[Reuters] Vendor' in Second Life
has offered you inventory.
Log in to accept to decline this
inventory.
Object Details:
Region: Reuters
Position: { 131.573,
119.286, 20.5407 }
Owner: Holding Box
Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Reuters/131/119/20

I've even contacted Reuters about this. No success yet. Any suggestions?