This is something that has been cooking since Linden Lab’s 2008 partnership with IBM : an appliance for an Enterprise version of Second Life. The price is a bit hefty, 55KUSD, but for corporation with many remote locations who recognize the value of Virtual World to organize live meetings without the need of actually having people fly to a same spot, this is going to be a good value for money. The only drawback is that it still requires a 3D video card in your laptop to render somehow nicely (read, LL, please do invest more in your viewer!).

I hope F-Secure will try this soon, since this would definitely help save on plane fares and phone bills !

If you’re a corporation and you’re wondering what Virtual World could bring to internal communication processes, I suggest you read Thinkbalm’s reports on the topic who are more than insightful (I’ve been myself a contributor to some).

Orange Island has been one of the livest place in Second Life for the past couple of years. With high-level conferences and events the highland was really showing how SL can be used by a company to create and distribute a corporate image in virtual worlds. I had the chance to be part of a few panels as a former SL resident (yeah Linden Labs killed my account and dropped ALL my inventory – suckers !!!).
I guess this just stresses the fact that SL has not been evolving for years now and that the enthusiasm around this platform is stating to fade, while real corporate use-cases start at last to emerge.

Thinkbalm is probably the most interesting analyst group I’ve seen on the Immersive Internet field. They just released a Machinima where they present a lot of data on the status of Immersive Internet for Businesses in a very unique way. While the video might be a bit long for the web (9mins) it’s really inspiring!

I’ve been a pretty big fan of Second Life since its release. Have had a sim that we used at WaveStorm for demo purposes, vr-wear developed mods to the SL viewer with unique head facial analysis abilities and I am an active contributor to Erica Driver’s Thinkbalm focus group on the professional use of immersive Internet.
Although I’m obviously a virtual worlds enthusiast, I feel the change of management and objectives at Linden Labs destroyed the dynamism of the community surrounding the project.
Indeed, SL is definitely a work in progress, we all know that, and the full virtual world thing is only at its premises, as such the community has alway been very supportive on the efforts made by LL in delivering the vision and developing the use cases. Nevertheless, since LL changed management, the whole system has been stalling pretty badly, and when a system stops evolving its defects start being really annoying. For instance the clumsiness of the viewer, the lack of shaders, the poorness of the environment, the lack of goals and the little life in there just cream out loud “I’m a useless proof of concept”. And while I’ve been quite a lot in touch with active developers and builders, most of them are leaving the arena as time goes because the whole world is just not going forward anymore.

Linden Labs, it’s time to react fast and give a new pulse to this initiative or it will get buried and dead for the end users…