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Linden Dollars: where’s the panic?

June 17, 2010 By

I have to say I was a little bemused at the announcement by Linden Lab of their faith in the strength of the Linden dollar, after a selling run over the past 24-48 hours. On checking the current rate, it shows a 10.4 million Linden exchange throughput with the exchange rate deteriorating to 307.9 Lindens per US dollar at its worst but now bouncing back to 288 at time of writing.

Based on a rough benchmark of 285 or so (which is around half-way between today’s low and average highs over recent months), that’s a less than 10% decline. Sure the volume is up, but did it require a full expression of confidence? Like any such expression, it can cause concern rather than provide reassurance. It also arguably shows a lack of confidence in the cohort of veteran Second Life residents who are on the whole likely to sit through any short-term fluctuations like this.

I had a brief chat to Tateru Nino this afternoon and she made the great point that supply of Linden Dollars on the exchange does tend to rise when there’s a decline of faith in Linden Lab – it’s not a lack of faith in the currency itself. This has been acknowledged to some extent in Linden Lab’s announcement, but perhaps a better tack might have been to provide some more transparency around its recent changes. There’s also another angle that could have been taken: that any fluctuation in the exchange rate can bring benefits as well as challenges. If any government expressed confidence in its currency every time it fluctuated 5-10%, there’d potentially be a lot more fluctuations.

Expressing faith in any currency can set alarm bells ringing, so here’s hoping for some more information in coming days to show that faith as justified. For mine, I did log in to look at buying some Linden Dollars if the decline had been significant. That’s the type of reaction that you’d expect from a Second Life resident with a longer-term view, who’s also happy to make a buck ;)

Filed Under: Business, General News Tagged With: , ,

Virtual worlds and business: 2010 overview

March 15, 2010 By

A little over a year ago we created a short discussion paper on the potential impact of virtual worlds on business. Since that time literally hundreds of people have downloaded the paper, so we thought it was worth updating it.

It remains a fairly succinct overview of the opportunities presented by virtual environments in the enterprise, as well as identifying some of the misconceptions around. The updated version now contains some discussion on trends for the coming 12-months (partly based on our 2010 predictions post) as well as a wrap-up of the major platforms to watch.

You can download Virtual Worlds and business: 2010 overview for free by going to this page.

As always, if there’s omissions or alterations needed, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Filed Under: Business, General News Tagged With: , ,

Book Review: Total Engagement

March 2, 2010 By

Byron Reeves is a Stanford University Professor and Co-Director of the Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute. J. Leighton Read is a serial entrepreneur and CEO with an interest in the psychological aspects of gaming.

The premise of the book is the potential for games to become central in the workplace. It sounds a far-fetched premise initially, but that’s the power of the discussion put forward by the authors: they provide cogent, well-informed examples of how gaming within business could work. The focus is primarily MMOs, for a number of reasons, including:

1. They contain “the most counterstereotypical roster of players”, hence being the most worthwhile population from which to apply findings.

2. MMO players tend to have a higher level of engagement with their game and spend on average much more time per week than a solo gamer.

3. The dynamics of raids, quests etc tend to provide situations where teamwork and leadership can come to the fore.

After establishing its premise, the book goes on to provide some fascinating examples of work problems a gaming framework could solve, as well as some fairly detailed discussion around virtual teams, virtual leadership, virtual money and the link between play and work. There’s a useful summary at the end and a handful of tactics to actually start implementing some of the examples given. As the authors themselves say, one of the best tactics for any business is to harness the knowledge of the gamers in its midst.

Overall, this is a very engaging read with realistic, well thought out examples. For anyone interested in the applicability of virtual environments to the workplace, it’s a must-read. For the dedicated gamer who also happens to work for a large organisation, there’s also plenty of information to get you thinking about advocating for change.

The final world goes to one of the authors. Here’s a presentation from Byron Reeves on the topic of the book:

Byron Reeves – fbFund REV, 7/31/09 – Part 1 of 2 (Version 2), “Work Sucks – Games are great” from fbFund REV on Vimeo.

You can buy Total Engagement from our own bookshop, Amazon direct or a local online bookshop like Dymocks.

Filed Under: Business, General News, Review Tagged With:

Immersive environments and the enterprise: new report

January 22, 2010 By

Erica and Sam Driver from ThinkBalm have released a new report. Titled The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide, the focus is obviously virtual environments suitable for business applications. For those not aware of ThinkBalm, they have a growing stable of reports on the state of play in virtual worlds industry, particularly from a business perspective.

Aside from detailing nineteen vendors out there, the guide provides some useful strategies to assist in choosing a virtual environment for an enterprise. It’s pretty standard project governance and needs analysis stuff, but tailored well to the topic.

One of the key points from the guide for me revolves around the regular question of “which platform is best?”:

The vendors come from a variety of backgrounds and have different specializations and strengths and weaknesses. They are not all targeting the same use cases. Just as office productivity suites today now include separate-yet-integrated applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more, immersive software product suites will evolve to focus on groups of related business problems. Eventually, we envision an immersion layer developing that will integrate with multiple enterprise systems and applications. But this is years away.

I’m a little more bullish on the ‘years away’ aspect. Two to three years, sure, but I’d be surprised if more widespread adoption took longer than that.

Overall, the guide appears to be a rigourous, well-researched piece of work that should provide a useful base for enterprises looking at integrating immersive environments into their operations.

You can view the full report here

Filed Under: Business, General News Tagged With: , ,

The reverse argument for virtual worlds in the enterprise

January 11, 2010 By

With thanks to Tateru Nino for the heads up, this machinima just about perfectly encapsulates the tug-of-war within the enterprise in regards to adoption of virtual worlds as a collaborative tool. It’s an incisive piece that strips bare some of the stereotypes and barriers put forward by business as ‘arguments’ against utilising virtual worlds in their operations.

It’s the sort of piece that may be useful after some initial discussions have been had within an enterprise. It would probably make some people defensive if used up front, but its power is likely to be found after the stereotypical arguments have been made by those less convinced of the opportunities virtual worlds provide.

Watch and enjoy:

Filed Under: Business, General News, Humour / Satire Tagged With: ,

Surfing the virtual world hype

December 1, 2009 By

Riding the hype wave of a new technology with a “world-first” isn’t exactly unusual. We’ve seen this a lot with Second Life, right?

But there’s actually other, more interesting lessons to be learned.

Firstly, the newspapers and magazines don’t really check if you’re first, so if you want you can just copy what someone else is doing. This happened a whole heck of a lot. If anyone actually does ask, you just slice it more finely. “First by a Fortune 500 company”, “First by a West-coast marketing firm run by octogenarian teachers”. Slice it finely enough and you can pretty much always claim a world first – and by golly, they do.

There were, from memory, four national embassies that opened in Second Life. Each claimed to be the first one (presumably using the slicing technique above, or just not doing the research). That brings us to the second technique, the one that gives you the most PR bang for the least buck:

Don’t actually do it. Seriously, this is a proven strategy.

Write and issue your press-release, outlining what amazing world-first you’ll be performing – then don’t follow through. By the time that peak of the hype cycle wore off, nobody noticed that you actually didn’t. Instead it became a fait accompli. Everyone more or less assumes that you did do it.

Assorted media pieces still refer to pizza-deliveries, programmes and concerts by famed celebrities that never actually happened, but the writers just assume that they did.

There’s your return-on-investment right there. All the hype, and none of the work. All you have to do is hit the timing right on the cyclical hype.

There’s a whole lot of businesses and organizations using Second Life in various ways. Many of the ones that you can name from media-coverage though, never actually did. However it didn’t apparently actually harm their PR efforts at all.

Anyone want to bet that this won’t happen with future virtual environments?

Filed Under: Business, Op-ed, Virtual worlds in the media Tagged With: , ,

Telstra responds to questions on Second Life withdrawal

November 18, 2009 By

bigpond-secondlife-nov2009-3-smlAs mentioned yesterday, Telstra have announced their withdrawal from Second Life, and there’s been no shortage of discussion on it around the blogosphere.

We’ve had some passionate comments and a couple of emails from residents quite upset at the decision.

I took the opportunity to put some questions to Telstra’s media spokesman, Craig Middleton, to get some further clarity on future plans and what will happen to the content that’s been successful for their presence:

Lowell: After more than two years of operation, what are the key lessons Telstra has learnt from the experience?

Craig: From our venture into Second Life we learnt a great deal in a variety of areas, including online community anagement and how to foster event-based traffic – experiences in relation to the in world support team and management of frequent in world events .

Lowell: It’s arguable that Telstra has been one of the more successful examples of a business building a community, through regular activities, dedicated staff support and a large presence. Was the costs of delivering that service too much for the returns it provided?

Craig: We don’t discuss the commercial aspects of our business, however we were very happy with the popularity of the islands and the interaction they allowed us in-world.

Lowell: In regards to cost – how does Telstra plan to report to shareholders on any substantive outcomes from the Second Life foray? BigPond’s involvement on the face of it has been a success, so how will those successes be captured?

Craig: BigPond’s activities and investment in Second Life have been widely reported since our launch. I do not expect any further reporting beyond that.

Lowell: Are there any particular issues with Second Life that have hastened the decision to leave?

Craig: Our focus is now moving towards other social media options that are gaining in popularity and functionality on computers, mobile phones, TVs and game consoles. Watch out for such announcements in coming months. It is important for a communications company like Telstra to continue to experiment with emerging Web 2.0 applications

Lowell: What will happen to all the BigPond content? Does Telstra have any plans to archive it or even make it available for BigPond customers to use as a basis for further content creation?

Craig: There are no plans beyond helping our customers transition their inworld residences to other locations

Lowell: Does BigPond have any plans to continue development of products in virtual environments at all?

Craig: As per above.

—

For mine, after the impact on the community of residents, the disappearance of all the BigPond content is the biggest shame of the decision by Telstra to withdraw from Second Life. It appears they’re not ruling out further forays into virtual environments, but aside from that and anything they’ve learnt from the experiment, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of joy for BigPond customers who are Second Life residents.

Filed Under: Australian News, Business Tagged With:
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