QA Virtual Career Fair
When: Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Time:10:00am to 12:00pm PDT
Where: Linden Lab Recruiting Center
RSVP: http://lindenlab.hrmdirect.com/employment/view.php?req=44680

^{Or email resume to: 44680-CJB-0@lindenlab.hrmdirect.com}

DETAILS:

Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) is having our FIRST Virtual Recruiting Event on Wednesday, November 18th for the QA Team.  We are looking for SR. QA engineers, QA Managers and Automation Engineers for all of our locations!  So, if you like to break stuff and understand why it broke, enjoy taking a vague description of a bug and defining it as well as reproducing the problem, are passionate about improving the Second Life experience and are smart, creative and passionate, then you might be a Linden!

Ofcom's 2009 UK Market survey shows the growth of microblogging and communities sites like Twitter and LinkedIn growing dramatically over the 2008/2009 while pointing to a dramatic drop in user hours for Second Life down from 28 hours per month to 9.  Is this really useful info though? Well, for sure Twitter is the #hottopic these days, either for how twittered twitter is or by how no one knows how it will make money (actually twitter has already generated value for its stakeholders, so where is the problem?).

Anyway the stats seems to sorta be indicative of what Hamlet at New World Notes has been sniffing about inside the LL statistics here in that possibly the hard-core people are spending less time in-world for a variety of reasons. Check the comments on that post as well to get more flavour about some of the the whys etc.

Linden Lab has always had lots of interesting ideas about many things. Many of these have been only partially implemented, many not implemented at all. You can look at this situation as opportunities or broken promises--Cyn's post about Content Management offers a mixed bag of both. The whole topic of intellectual property and digital content is complex and deep.

In fact just by using SL you have already copied other people's content to your computer which you only have limited rights to use. The existing SL TOS muddles a lot of this by actually taking ownership of everything you put into SL (see TOS 3.3). So probably LL which is a licence holder to your content and owner of the data would also have a claim on any outside SL usage of content (whether or not it is yours).  Linden probably could argue that while the textures you import are yours, the prims are in fact theirs and you are only modifying them.

I was on the Designing World inworld  Treet tv interview show last night talking about BuildberBot and IP and some other stuff. (I don't think I said anything too useless, but it was sorta late here in the UK, so probably I did. I did react a bit unkindly to what seemed like a snarky jab from Angelica--but I think I got that wrongly and we kinda virtually shook hands after the show.  No need to make debates personal. )  As the show ended, we noticed that LL posted a detailed err, roadmap/wishlist for what copying is about in their view. It is quite a long piece and raises lots of issues and opens doors to discussion with them, which is a good thing in general--but also a little late since so many sims have been wiped and content lost forever.

How does Linden Lab see itself--or would like others to see it: "the virtual world leader—owning 90 percent of the market—with a profitable, stable, and growing business. Eighteen million people have registered in Second Life from over 150 countries and this virtual world work solution has already been chosen by hundreds of enterprises, governments, and educational institutions." And bigger than Houston, Texas.

There is of course a lot left out about what SL is and might be for business.  And no discussion about how their offerings really compare with other options like OpenSIm, Forterra, IBM Sametime, Catia.

Paid Content reports today that Stratim Capital has "bought almost the entire position of an existing shareholder" of Linden Lab, maker of Second Life (tm).  Further they advise that it is not a VC, but an individual investor. So what is interesting here would be the value of the sale and the rationale for the valuation. Of course none of the private parties want to share that information. And Linden hardly ever shares anything, so no expectation that they will divulge this.

But, in general, now would not be an ideal time to sell shares in anything unless 1) you had to for personal financial kinda reasons or 2) believe that even a depressed value is better than what might get worse. Certainly you wouldn't sell if you believed that Linden Lab would go public soon for a massive valuation.

Linden Lab is still marching along to deliver the inside the firewall Second LIfe with secret code name "Nebraska" Says the SF Chronicle: "The so-called “Nebraska” version of Second Life, which is run on an institution’s own servers, will get wider testing this summer and is scheduled for general release by year’s end. The pricing for the private version has not been announced." Hard to imagine an enterprise project price lower than $150,000USD though for licencing, set-up, installation etc. Then you would need servers, some people in charge of it, so probably the project cost fully loaded is $250,000 to $500,000 per year minimum?

We will be deleting 2 more sims shortly. Actually we were not doing much with these and want to reduce our expenses with Linden Lab. One of the sims Rezzable Imagine was actually our first sim ever on the SL grid. It was home for a long time to the Rezzable sandbox. Back when we used it as as sandbox it was often full of random prims and creative people cranking away on something. All you need is a prim and some imagination.

The worlds, virtual and real, are a lot different now. We are trying to figure out what to do with our other Second Life sims. We are experimenting seriously now with our own Opensim-based grids. We hear a lot about Blue Mars and some other interesting developments with new tools and viewers. But in a lot of ways it doesn't matter--because we take our Imagine -ation with us. ;)

Anyway, the sims are open now, so please take advantage of them as sandboxes until they get zapped.

Above: bikini party. Now Linden is the wet towel that will determine what is porno and what is good old fashion sexy fun.

Linden Lab is embarking down the water slide of censorship with their ghetto-ization of porno, narco and ultra-violence content. I am amused that this is called "adult content"--maybe better to call it something more accurate like "twisted crap you are embarassed to be seen doing content.  In their words: "The Adult designation applies to Second Life® Regions that host conduct or display content that is sexually explicit or intensely violent, or depicts illicit drug use." More spew info on their support center here.

Avatar walks into a disco in the Second Life virtual world. Scantily clad avatar riding a poie says: "Hi. Tipping is encouraged." Avatar responds slowly while scanning the other avatars on the sim, "Hi." Avatar on the pole types: "so, what do porno, students and nuclear war have in common?" Avatar is a bit lost still. Scantily clad avatar then answers for him, "yeah, I don't much care either."

These three topics would however appear to be very important to Linden Lab. The new guard of management seem to have take charge of the ship and headed it toward more revenues opportunities by doing more and more with the porno trade, universities and the military industrial complex in the United States specifiically.  So much for the idealism of Phil and Mitch. Now the game is all about making money where you can, while you can.

Recent info from Linden Labs: