Metaverse

Our previous episodes  described a new player the table, Onlive. 

• Future of SL is beyond e-tech. Now on to s-tech
• Future of SL Beyond e-tech (continued)

Onlive offers the prospect of a major change in the infrastructure used to deliver online games and the virtual reality that they live in.    In this episode, we examine the prospects for this change and some of the futures it may offer.

Recon Report

According to the Onlive website here is how you will use virtual reality (VR) environments in the future:   

S-tech is the social sciences: Economics, Sociology:  Electronics don't buy things.  People buy things.  Start with 2 key concepts:

Community:  "The word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values and social cohesion within a shared geographical location."    Or, we might add, shared virtual location.

Network effect:  "In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people.

The classic example is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner."

And the more people on a given network, the harder it is for a competitor to survive.  Here, the phone system is not a great example anymore, because there are now legal requirements to support interconnection across networks. 

We are moving our King Tut Virtual special preview completely over to our Heritage Key grid today. We want to sincerely thank all the people that made it to the SL grid to see area and give us feedback. While the King Tut SL area is now closed, you can see even a more advanced preview on our OpenSim-based grid here. Come check it out and try to break it! (gently..that is).

If you go to the site and register an account, you will also notice that we are using the Imprudence viewer as the standard Heritage Key viewer.

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.