SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

Welcome to the first annual Second Life Resident Choice Awards.  Visit the Award site now to cast your votes for your favorite prim food artist, best place to share your first avatar kiss, best Resident blog and a whole lot more.  This is your opportunity to tell us what you love about Second Life.

For your convenience, we’ve included all the award categories on the microsite so you can do your thinking and research in advance.  And don’t forget, we need your SLURLS so we can direct Residents to your favorite locales, and more importantly, the winners’ locations!

Leave your questions and comments below.  We’re sure you’ll have plenty of suggestions about how to do it better next year so have at it.  We’re looking for category suggestions, voting tools, etc.

The contest runs from March 31 through April 7th so get your votes in asap.  Only one vote per avatar will be counted.  Winners will be announced on April 17th.

Resident Choice Microsite

French Resident Choice Ballot

German Resident Choice Ballot

Japanese Resident Choice Ballot

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, one part of my new post-CEO life is leading a small development team.  Our first project was improving the website map.

After considering what to do next, we’ve decided to move our team’s work completely into the public, with the hope that we can engage and support the open source community more directly than before, and move more rapidly in making SL better.  We have created a new version of the Second Life client in a public repository where we will allow direct committing from community members alongside our own daily work.  We have also created a new build system to keep this version continuously building when new submissions are received, with new builds available to everyone.  We will also make this version available as a download alongside the official SL client, once we have it sufficiently stable.  Additionally we will aggressively manage the quality of submissions to this new repository, working with the community to develop appropriate ways of testing, reviewing, and approving changes.

Friends -

When I joined Linden Lab there were many dragons to slay.  The company was growing, but wasn’t getting more profitable.   We were just putting in an accounting system, beginning to understand the key financial drivers of our business and starting to develop our business model.  I took the job because I thrive on slaying those kinds of dragons.

Fast forward to now. We have a comprehensive financial model that ties all the activities of Second Life to our revenue forecast so that we can manage to profitability.  I am proud to say that we boosted profitability and generated a very healthy cash balance.   We implemented all new accounting practices including a comprehensive revenue recognition policy.   We’ve come a long way and I’m proud of my work and that of the great finance team.

Now that the big dragons have been slain, I am off to find the next business adventure and create the kind of momentum we have created here at Linden Lab, together.  And while I’ll miss you all, I’m excited about Second Life’s future.  Linden Lab has an outstanding leadership team with great people and a compelling, game-changing product.  I feel that I’m leaving the company in good hands at the right time.  Success is the company’s destiny.

Thank you for all your support while I was at Linden Lab.

Yours,
John Z.

Greetings,

The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference begins this coming Friday (March 27) and runs over the weekend.  I will be giving a keynote presentation (Friday, March 27, 1pm PDT, Location) as well as speaking on a panel with Claudia Linden and George Linden (Saturday, March 28, Noon PDT, Location).  The full schedule of speakers is simply amazing, and I can’t wait to attend as many of the presentations as possible.

I strongly believe this fantastic conference will be a watershed moment for education in virtual worlds.  And you don’t even need to travel to attend this international event, as it is happening entirely in Second Life.

Here are the latest details from the official press release, and you can learn more by visiting the conference website.  Hope to see you there!

ARE VIRTUAL WORLDS THE CLASSROOMS OF THE FUTURE?

2009 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference (VWBPE) Bringing together Educators from around the World in Second Life, March 27-29.

Virtual world educational environments may not replace real classrooms (yet), but they are becoming integral to the future of education, say the organizers of the 2009 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference to be held in Second Life, March 27-29.  Conference keynote speakers and panels will focus on how virtual world environments can help today’s learners become all they can be and build the work force of tomorrow.

“We are a global grass roots community  that is collaborating and co-sharing knowledge about the role of virtual world environments in education today,” said, Marlene Brooks of Memorial University, CA (Zana Kohime, SL) program chair of the conference. “Our goal at the conference in Second Life is to use virtual worlds as the centerpiece for discussion of the questions that impact all of our futures: What is education? What is teaching? What is learning?”

The three-day conference will be an opportunity for virtual communities from around the world to showcase projects, courses, events, and present research that lead to best practices in education. From presentations on the architecture of designing a virtual classroom and campus to projects that engage middle school students with math, science and languages to the award-winning 3D-Wiki technology created in Second Life used to design a medical clinic in Nepal, the VWBPE conference is dedicated to furthering the creation of innovative, interactive  and immersive environments.

Keynote speakers and panelists for the conference represent a wide range of institutions, leading universities as well as K-12 school systems that use Second Life as part of their educational programs.  Learn more by visiting the conference website.

The Virtual World Best Practices in Education (VWPBE) conference originated from the 2007 Second Life Best Practices in Education Conference. Educators are one of the most vibrant and growing groups in Second Life with an outreach to more than 6,000 SL residents.

For additional information and interviews, please contact;
Marty Keltz  (Marty Snowpaw, SL,  Vice-Chair, Program Committee)
1-416-587-3381
Email: marty.keltz@gmail.com

You can register here. Registration is free to all conference attendees.

When we announced we’d be looking at changes around Adult content, we talked about 3 features in particular -  geographically separating Adult content, filtered search results and account verification.  We also provided the areas where the community could provide useful feedback, specifically about the timeline, more granular definitions of mature vs Adult and how those who need to move want to make that work.

Over the last week and a half the team has been watching and engaging in the forums and will continue to do so through the end of the week.  This week and next we’ll be meeting with small groups of stakeholders including educators, solution providers, land owners and adult content merchants to get their feedback about how our adult content plan affects them.  We are also inviting a few forum participants to talk with us around the question of content definitions.  We will record and provide transcripts of all the meetings so that everyone will be able to access the conversations.

What we’ve learned so far:

Nearly all your questions revolve around the following subjects and while we don’t have all the answers yet, we’re committed to answering them before this program launches.

1) Enforcement
2) Definitions
3) Scope
4) Business Impact
5) Impact on Private Estates
6) Why not a PG Continent?
7) Personal Information / 3rd Party partners

Next steps:

Week of March 23rd and 30th - conduct brown bags, post transcripts of meetings

3/24 - Solution Provider brownbag
Text Transcript
Audio Recording

Please join the Forum Discussion.

We will continue to provide transcripts and recordings as the brownbags continue.After we’ve compiled all the feedback, we’ll announce our thoughts around the next phase of the project.

thanks!

The latest edition of our ‘Inside the Lab’ podcast series is now available. In this edition, we meet up with a long-time Linden - Andrew Meadows, a Senior Developer that many of you may not know.

Andrew started working with Philip before Linden Lab or Second Life even existed, and in addition to describing what he’s currently focused on, he shares some interesting stories about the early days, including how he went from launching rockets to helping to build the virtual world. Hope you all enjoy!

Download MP3