Second Life Roundup – itsReal

Publicity from Traditional Media and the Blogosphere continues to pump out, To jump onto the juggernaut just add “Second Life” to your press releases or posts and the world gets to see what you are doing…if you want a serious virtual worlds strategy…speak to me

Click-Image-to-Call APLINK from Big-Bit

Google News Alert for: “Second Life”

Second Life: Clicks and mortar
Telegraph.co.uk – United Kingdom
Adam Edwards enters the lucrative world of Second Life This summer,

a part-time administrator at Oxford University, with no publishing experience and a …

Criminals in Virtual Worlds – itsReal

By Dean Takahashi Tracking criminals in virtual worlds

I’ve been wondering what would happen if there were drug dealers or terrorists lurking in virtual worlds such as Second Life. If the FBI or National Security Agency wanted to place wiretaps on conversations in those worlds, would they be able to do it? And if they did record conversations in virtual worlds, could the people spied upon escape prosecution by saying that they were only pretending to be terrorists or drug dealers?

 

My interest is theoretical at the moment. Interpol has said there are criminal elements operating in virtual worlds, but let’s not panic. There is enough fear-mongering out there about all the trouble we can get into online.But this topic is a persistent one at conferences such as Virtual Worlds, which drew more than a thousand people to San Jose last week.

Under current laws, the authorities can’t conduct fishing expeditions. They can’t order companies to incur huge expenses building eavesdropping systems in the virtual worlds that would make it easy to reclaim conversations from a long time ago, said Jim Dempsey, policy director of the civil liberties group Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C.

In other words, the government can’t ransack an entire virtual town just to find one possible drug dealer. The Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizures hold true in cyberspace as they do in the real world.

more here

Second Life emerging competitors – itsReal

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Virtual worlds at UTR: social networks, or experiments?

By Josh Lowensohn – June 28, 2007, 4:12 PM PDT

Wrapping up the group presentations at Under the Radar’s Entertainment & Media conference is the virtual worlds group. Only two of these companies (Doppleganger and Kaneva) offer what most would consider “virtual worlds” or a replacement for real life interaction with others. The other two consist of user avatars, and a video gaming platform.

Doppleganger is a 3-D world similar to Second Life. It survives through a mix of micropayments, and partnerships with various companies who want branded areas and appearances for celebrities, movies, and music. We checked it out a few weeks ago and came away impressed, albeit a little bewildered.

The service currently has 150,000 users, and CEO Tim Stevens says it’s growing by 10% weekly.

Kaneva is part social network and part 3-D virtual world. I looked at the service in early February, shortly before the site went public beta in April. Despite the fact it’s incredibly similar to social networks like MySpace, Kaneva’s creators view its competition as movies and television programs. Like Doppelganger, Kaneva makes its money on the sale of virtual goods and sponsorship from content creators.

Meez is one of the more interesting virtual worlds services due to its specialization. Instead of trying to re-create real life, Meez focuses on user avatars. They recently partnered with Photobucket, and provides user avatars for several other services. The site has 2 million registered users, and is now getting 425,000 new users a month.

The site makes its money off partnerships and micropayments, where users use their virtual currently on clothing items. One of their competitors Gizmoz recently launched a face mapping tool that will take a digital photo and stick it on a 3-D avatar.

Multiverse is a development platform for anyone who wants to make their own massive multiplayer online game (MMOG). They’ve built the system to work with a “world browser” which co-founder Corey Bridges compares to a Web browser since users can visit a network of different games built on the platform.