Posts Tagged ‘Second Life’

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Linden Labs acquires social networking platform Avatars United

Monday, February 1st, 2010

This past Friday, Linden Labs, creators of the virtual world Second Life, announced that they’d successfully completed the acquisition of Swedish Firm Enemy Unknown. The Swede’s jewel-in-the-crown Avatars United is also now a part of Linden Labs, and is a social network for users of multiple virtual worlds.

avatars unitedCurrently, the site supports a number of virtual worlds, including popular online titles such as World of Warcraft and EVE Online, and according to Linden Labs CEO Mark Kingdon, they will continue to do so. “We’re committed to keeping this ideal of a place where avatars from multiple worlds and games can come together.”

So what does this have to do with Second Life you might ask? Well, first and foremost, Second Life is supported within Avatars United, as well as a number of other virtual worlds. However, over the past year, we’ve seen a number of advancements that point directly to Linden Labs’ entry to the social networking scene. They rolled out the web-based dashboard, which included some social networking (type) features, but didn’t really go the distance. A little bit down the line in 2009, recently hired “conversation manager” Wallace Linden posted an article relating to managing multiple Internet identities, yet another signal that Linden Labs have been keenly watching what’s going on around them. In other words, they’re keen on the power of content sharing that social networking platforms provide, but don’t really want to commit to a “real name” based platform; one that might compromise a virtual world resident’s “real world” privacy.

However, with this in mind, Linden Labs have found themselves in a bit of a bind. With so many online destinations integrating cross-login possibilities, Facebook Connect, Twitter, OpenID, etc., Linden would be foolish not to offer users the same functionality. This, in turn, then opens up the “real world – real name” privacy concerns. Addressing this issue, Linden Labs states, “We are not going to force anyone to reveal any private or personal information. But for those who want to connect their various online identities, we do want to offer that option.”

Real names or not, Avatars Unlimited is an interesting, although perhaps a bit late to the party, platform. With the rise of other social networking sites that Second Life users general flock to, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc., can Linden Labs really provide a platform enticing enough to draw these users away from already established giants? Avatars Unlimited is also nothing new in concept or premise, as I’ve been testing Raptr.com since Christmas. Noting the strong similarities between the two, I put Avatars Unlimited through minor functions (account creation, login, application installation, etc.). and my personal experience in a word was: meh. Not only did the site move along at a snail’s pace, but I was unable to find any areas where I might enter my character and realm info, a necessary component for a number of applications (WoW Armory, for example), a definite sign of “Needs Improvement”.

Screen shot 2010-02-01 at 11.16.55 AM

What IS quite interesting about Avatars Unlimited in it’s current state is that it features a built in virtual currency system. Their own virtual currency system. Not Linden Dollars. This virtual currency may be used to present other users with virtual items via gifting (again, another tip o’ the hat to Facebook). If Linden Labs wants to maintain the support of other virtual worlds, it should be interesting to see what they do with the virtual currency platform. Do they keep it as it is, and use it only across the platform? Will the convert it all to Linden Dollars? Or…and my money is riding on this option – will they maintain the current currency and build it out, while still incentivizing users from other platforms to join the Second Life party, i.e. offer matching Linden Dollars credited to their Second Life account, or discount purchases, or special items exclusively available to Second Life players?

All in all, the acquisition makes sense for Second Life, but as the platform stands right now, Linden Labs is going to have to put a whole lot of time and effort into the project if they hope to provide a platform that can not only stand head and shoulders with current market competitors, but draw current users of alternate platforms over to the other side.

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$1 Billion of user-to-user transactions taking place in Second Life

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Building on their information released at last week’s GDC Austin, Linden Lab has recently revealed some truly staggering numbers with regards to their secondary market transactions platform. The company stated that Second Life residents have transacted the real world equivalency of over $1 billion in player-to-player transactions, while spending over 1 billion hours inhabiting the virtual space.

Second_Life_LogoAgain, adding to their statements at the GDC focused on retaining current users, the company revealed that Second Life’s economy has grown 94 percent year-over-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009. “Now at nearly USD50 million each month in user-to-user transactions, the Second Life economy is on an annual run rate of more than a half billion US dollars, making Second Life the largest virtual economy in the industry,” the company stated. With an economy like that, it’s no wonder Linden Labs is focusing on keeping current players happy, and staying right where they are. Perhaps a larger challenge than originally thought, as Linden Lab received an F from the better business bureau back in February of this year.

Linden Lab was also quick to point out that the total in-world hours, approximately 1 billion, has the real world equivalent of 115,000 years. But what exactly are these users doing? “Everything from meeting and socializing with friends; to attending live concerts; to creating, selling, and shopping for virtual goods; to learning a foreign language; to attending business meetings; and much more. User hours grew 33% year-over-year to an all-time high of 126 million in Q2 2009,” stated Linden representatives. On average, Second Life residents spend approximately 100 minutes in-world per visit, which the company is proud to point out is, “significantly greater than those seen with popular social networking Web sites and reveals the uniquely high level of engagement Residents have with Second Life.”

Specifically speaking to the in-world virtual items trading and sales, Linden Lab reports that residents are creating over a quarter of a million new good each day. These items may range from clothing to vehicles to buildings to automatic language translators, and just about everything else imaginable under the sun. At the time of the statement, Linden Lab reported that more than 270 terabytes of content is available within Second Life, with a growth rate of around 100 percent each and every year. Speaking from a primary marketplace point of view, since Linden Lab is the creator and vendor of virtual land, the company is not only the worlds largest platform for user-generated virtual goods, but also an industry leader in the sales of virtual goods. Perhaps the virtual world equivalent to Donald Trump?

Other statistics from Linden Lab include:

  • More than 18 billion minutes of voice chat have been used in Second Life since voice was introduced in 2007. Voice minutes grew 44% year-over-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009, and more than 6 billion minutes of voice have been delivered in 2009 alone, making Linden Lab a major VoIP provider.
  • Approximately 1,250 text-based messages are sent every second in Second Life, and more than 600 million words are typed on an average day. Roughly 60% of active Second Life Residents are based outside of the US, representing more than 200 countries, and the Second Life Viewer is available in 10 languages.
  • The total land area of Second Life is now equivalent to approximately 2 billion square meters — roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. Land in Second Life has grown roughly 18% since Q1 2009 and approximately 75% since Q1 2008.

“These metrics give a sense of some key aspects of Second Life — the deeply engaging nature of the 3D world, the immense use of Second Life as a communications platform and the scale and strength of the economy based on the huge number of unique virtual goods users are creating,” commented Mark Kingdon, CEO, Linden Lab. “These numbers are a snapshot of the success of Second Life and its Residents today, and a validation of Linden Lab’s leadership in the virtual worlds space, but there’s much more to come. This is a year of renovation for Second Life, and we are well positioned for reinvigorating our growth in 2010 with a range of strategic initiatives that will enhance the experience for existing Residents and propel our expansion with new users.”

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KZero clocks 579m registered virtual world accounts

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Virtual Worlds consultants and analysts KZero recently pumped out two mid-summer virtual world statistics that should get you to sit up and pay attention. They’ve provided not only a breakdown of where people are headed, but what age groups are predominant in these virtual worlds.

kzero_full_circle

Admittedly, the first set up stats is slightly complex at first glance, but upon further inspection, these charts are nothing short of eye opening.

This chart visualizes ages breakdowns and the associated virtual worlds that these ages are taking part in, along with each individual world’s launch data and timeline.

If pretty circular chats with fancy blue and red dots don’t really do it for you, KZero has gone the extra mile and broken things down even more. According to their research, the Q2 2009 virtual worlds sector inhabitant count now stands at 579 million. This number represents a 38.6 percent increase over Q1, where inhabitant totals stood at 417 million.

q2-2009-reg-accs-chart5

Taking data-points of the average age of users within each world, and then allocating this data to all accounts, KZero affirms that predominant age in these worlds is 14. The majority of these VW inhabitants come from big players including Weeworld, Habbo, and Stardoll.

Having a different look at the same data, the graph below represents cumulative registered accounts by age.

q2-2009-reg-accs-chart3

There’s obviously a plethora of activity in the 5-14 age group, a moderate increase from 15-20, but after that, a relatively flat curve. For the purposes of this study, Second Life was excluded.

As KZero points out, the majority of activity, and associated monetization scramble, is happening in the 10-15 year old age group. Totaling 334 million registered accounts, over 57 percent of the entire segment, this age segment represents the largest potential for growth. Holding 19 percent of the entire segment is the 5-10 year old age group. Clearly, youth oriented virtual worlds such as CampFu are smack dab right in the middle of the majority of virtual worlds citizens’ radar.

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eRepublik lands a cool $2.8 million for new type of Virtual World

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

In a further show of support for blossoming virtual worlds, Madrid, Spain based eRepublik has recently announced that they’ve secured €2 million (approx. $2.8 million) in Series A funding from AGF Private Equity.  Coining a new term, and dubbing themselves a MOSS (massive online social strategy game), eRepublik had previously secured just over $1 million from the VC firm as well as multiple angel investors.  This new injection brings the total up to $3.8 million.  Not bad for a small company for only about a year and a half and staffs just 30 employees.

erepubliklogoThe MOSS is a browser based virtual world that closely mimics today’s real world.  Additionally, this virtual world contains no A.I., and relies solely on the participation of players (called appropriately, citizens).  Somewhat like, but also different from Second Life, eRepublik allows citizens to participate in politics, the economy, set up businesses (currently at 17,502), interact socially with other citizens, and just to spice things up a bit: engage in wars with other countries (citizens live in eUSA, or eCanada, for example).

Live for only 576 days, eRepublik reports that the MOSS has over 350,000 citizen accounts, with 120,000 of them regularly logging in and participating in the active community.  Taking a look at the traffic numbers, eRepublik is reporting that they’ve received over 3.7 million visits in the month of May alone, generating 95 million page views.  Citizens have arrived from over 200 countries worldwide, and spent over 55 million minutes within the world.

eRepublik’s co-founder and CEO Alexis Bonte says that this new injection of fresh funds will be put towards fleshing out the existing world, as he says the current eRepublik is only 25% of what’s planned.  They’ll also continue to expand eRepublik’s language offerings, as they just released a Spanish speaking version earlier this month, and move ahead with launching a host of new games.

eRepublik is free to play, and monetizes via sales of their in-game currency, eRepublik Gold.  While no mentions were made about expanding out virtual goods offerings, something tells me that a bit of the $2.8 m has already been earmarked to ramp things up in the in-game store.

Hear what eRepublik is all about directly from Alexis Bonte in his TechCrunch pitch from last summer.

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Fail: Worlds.com – Patents FTW!

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

In what may very well go down as the WTF of 2009, Worlds.com CEO Thom Kidrin has put the entire Virtual Worlds industry on notice.  He claims that his company patented and owns the IP rights to scalable virtual worlds.  Let’s let that soak in for a moment. ….and we’re back.  In essence, what Kidrin and Worlds.com are doing is threatening the livelihood of an entire industry.  And yes, this lawsuit and IP infringement applies to the big boys as well, including Second Life and World of Warcraft.

It's a Whole New Worlds - of LawsuitsAnd while I thought Atari and Codmasters legal assault on gamers was pretty up there on the ‘say what now?’ scale, Kidrin and Co. may have just taken the number one spot.  Worlds.com is already taking action against NCSoft, creators of City of Heroes and Guild Wars, filing in East Texas, an area know for it’s plaintiff friendly rulings in intellectual property cases.

Speaking to Eric Krangel from The Business Insider, Kidrin said that he “absolutely” intends to pursue follow up suits against Second Life and WoW.

But let’s take a step back and find out where all of this is coming from.  Back in December ’08, the then relatively unknown Worlds.com claimed to be holding a patent on virtual worlds ideas from 1997.  This patent originated from a developers work on a Steven Spielberg backed ‘Starbright World’, a part of the Starlight Starbright Foundation’s work with seriously ill children.  Wanting to protect the privacy and relative closed network feature of the virtual world, the Starbright folks, rightfully so, kept the project quiet.

Fast forward 10+ years, and a number of Starbright’s patents pass from the original creators to Worlds.com.  And while these patents do not cover ‘Virtual Worlds’ per se, and how we view them today, they do cover an architecture for enabling thousands of simultaneous users in a 3D virtual space.  Lawyers from General Patent Corporation pointed at this patent to the Worlds.com management, and encouraged them to pursue licensing deals.

Kindrin asserts that he’s not out to take any companies down and put them out of business, it’s just that he wants to get paid for what he and the Worlds.com management see as their lawful intellectual property.  Ummm, right.

Given the amount prior art available, chances are that this patent lawsuit is already moot.  As WoW Insider deftly points out, the same case could be made around the term ‘Cyberspace’.

However, let’s take a look at the definition of Cyberspace. It was first used in William Gibson’s 1982 story “Burning Chrome” and again used in a few of his books, with “Neuromancer” being the most popular. Gibson’s definition for Cyberspace reads:

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.”

Now there are a few interesting parts there, in that the Gibson created a fictional representation of a world that was shared graphically with billions of legitimate operators. Sound familiar? It’s exactly what WoW is: a graphical world shared by millions of legitimate operators, abstract data that is unthinkably complex, arranging lines of light in the nonspace of the mind, and teaching children mathematical concepts (ie: threat, gear statistics, etc…)

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Second Life gets and “F” from the Better Business Bureau

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

The Better Business Bureau is a US based, non-governmental organization that networks local Better Business Bureau (BBB) organizations together and gathers and reports information on business reliability.  Founded in 1912, the organization alerts the public to frauds against consumers and businesses, provides information on ethical business practices, and act as mutually trusted intermediaries between consumers and businesses to resolve disputes.  In other words, they’re a trusted source many turn to when a businesses operational procedure(s) are called into question.

Linden Labs, creators of the virtual world ‘Second Life’ have recently been granted the distinction of being rated with an ‘F’ by the Better Business Bureau.  According to the BBB’s website:

“BBB assigns grades from A to F with pluses and minuses. A+ is the highest grade and F is the lowest. The grade represents BBB’s degree of confidence that the business is operating in a trustworthy manner and will make a good faith effort to resolve any customer concerns.”

Ouch.

According to the rating, the BBB cited the following reasons for its rating:

  • Number of complaints filed against business.
  • Failure to respond to complaints filed against business.
  • Length of time business has taken to resolve complaint(s).

Of the complaints filed, the two largest issues were ‘Billing or Collection Issues’ (13) and ‘Customer Service Issues’ (12).  Given the inherent nature of how business is conducted on Second Life, whereby Linden Labs actively encourages users to create their own virtual goods based business with real-money transactions happening on the back end (secondary marketplace), the in-game economy is ripe for a virtual fraudster’s picking if adequate and preventative measures are not securely in place.  Virtual economies place developers and publishers in a highly complex ecosystem of millions of virtual (and real) transactions occurring on a daily basis.  If the economic backend is not fully mapped out, including room for unlimited scalability, anti-fraud measures, and the ability to identify and limit known ‘trouble makers’, a myriad of potential virtual world problems can balloon over night.

To be fair, let’s look at this rating with a grain of salt.  The BBB “F” rating was initially reported by (the infamous) Tizzers via twitter.  If you’re not familiar with Tizzers’ story, he’s the guy so knee deep on Linen Lab’s s#*^ list that at one point Linden Labs banned every avatar that had the first name of Tizzers.  As a home for your alter ego, the likelihood of some serious draaaahma  going down on (and sometimes off) Second Life is quite high (love triangle murder, anyone?).  That said, it is entirely possible that some disgruntled Second Life residents may be artificially inflating the numbers by filing baseless claims with the BBB for fun.  And let’s be fair, when was the last time you heard a satisfied customer as or more vocal than the dissatisfied customer?

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UC Irvine lands $3M for further study of Virtual Worlds

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

Billed under the title ‘Can the same technologies you use to play hard also help you work hard’, The University of California at Irvine has recently been awarded a $3M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study emerging forms of communication.  The study will incorporate elements of MMO’s and Virtual Worlds including World of Warcraft and Second Life, and aims to help organizations collaborate and compete more effectively in a global marketplace.  This new grant ups the ante from previous UC Irvine studies, as they were granted a $100K grant from the NSF last year for an ethnographic study of World of Warcraft.

“Many technologies have come out of computer-based games, and their concepts appear to have real potential,” said Richard N. Taylor, director of UCI’s Institute for Software Research, which is conducting the three-year study. “This grant will determine how emerging technologies can be used or modified to support serious group work.”

As a flailing economy sees more and more companies opening the doors to worldwide collaboration, Virtual Worlds are looking more and more attractive to these businesses.  To grow and promote efficiency and productivity, these companies are turning to virtual worlds as a place where workers can collaborate thousands of miles apart from each other, while still being in the same ‘virtual’ room.  The UC Irvine study aims to help in this area, applying lessons learned, and yet to be learned in large-scale multiplayer online gaming, social networking, and file and media sharing.

In order to keep feet and minds grounded here on planet Earth, UC Irvine researchers will gain ‘real world’ perspectives by collaborating with five organizations from aerospace, telecom, transportation and electronics sectors, along with the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana.  Some of this real world perspective could make it’s way into virtual world testing, as Irvine scientists are already speculating about plugging real world engineering specifications into virtual worlds like Second Life to test and develop personal rapid transit systems.

“Advanced information and communication technologies can lead to breakthroughs in productivity and boost morale, but they can also be problematic and unsuccessful, leading to wasted investments,” said Walt Scacchi, senior research scientist and project leader. “One goal of this research is to understand the conditions that lead to failure or success.”

UC Irvine scientists Walt Scacchi, senior research scientist and project leader, and Richard Taylor will be joined by Alfred Kobsa, Cristina V. Lopes, Gloria Mark, Bonnie Nardi and David Redmiles in their studies.

Ed. Note: This announcement couldn’t have come at a better time, as PC World’s Darren Gladstone recently published a piece regarding including your game playing skills as a resume builder.  Give it a read here.

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Vivaty to bring Virtual Worlds to your browser sans client

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Picture this…a world where dashing off to your favorite virtual world is no more than a few clicks away, all the while having several other tabs open.  Tabs you say?  Isn’t that browser based?  What about that pesky IT department restriction of not being an admin, and not having sufficient rights to install said client?  If San Francisco based Vivaty has it’s way, clients are a thing of the past.  And to be honest, after the last 1.5 GB WoW patch update, I say….good riddance.

Former EA VP, CEO and co-founder of Vivaty Keith McCurdy and co. have been working on such a solution for over a year now.  They’ve steadily been gaining tracking since their summer ’08 release of Vivaty Scenes application.  Scenes is a personal profile page where the user can control who has access to this area, the objects within the area, flickr photos, youtube videos, etc.  OK, nothing new you say?  Agreed, it’s not a new concept…but since Wednesday, the application, titled Vivaty Everywhere, is available in a rich 3D environment right in your favorite browser, thereby making it a ‘take it with you where ever you go’ virtual world.  The feature allows users to embed a scene on any website and/or blog.

“Our vision is to make virtual experiences as accessible, engaging and easy to use as a Web page,” said Keith McCurdy, Vivaty CEO and co-founder. “Vivaty Everywhere gives brands, fan sites and bloggers a rich, engaging way to inject their sites with social experiences that reflect their media and style choices.”

In a recent Forbes.com interview, McCurdy states:

The idea is to create a solution for brands that want to advertise in the virtual world.

“The old model was to take a branded experience and bring it into an application virtual world [like Second Life],” he says. “Now, [we] can bring it to the customers on social networks or a branded site.”

It tackles the problem of “Second Life’s” “big empty” world by finding and engaging folks where they happen to be.

If Vivaty’s main goal is to attract brands to further Virtual advertising and engagement spaces, they’ve been given a big thumbs up with their recent deal with Universal Music Group.  Vivaty has landed a deal to create a Queen and Paul Rodgers themed scene to promote the new The Cosmos Rocks album.  The goal is to attract Queen and Paul Rodgers fans to these virtual spaces, scattered across the web, to listen to the new tracks, watch videos, and discuss the band.  They’ve also recently inked a deal and developed a scene for Barely Political, a leading political satire firm.

“We are pleased to invite Queen and Paul Rodgers fans to a 24/7 listening party in this visually rich, social experience around a highly anticipated album,” said Andie D’Avino, director of online marketing at Universal Music Group. “Making Queen’s Vivaty scene embeddable means it’s extremely accessible to fans, no matter where they are online.”

If some of this in-browser gaming sounds familiar, idSoftware’s recent placement of Quake Live, a free-to-play, browser based first person shooter, might ring some bells.  Unity and Flash are currently working on web publishing tools, Triton World Network is working on it’s own cloud computing gaming platform, and one of our favorite, Acclaim games has been working on server technology and server side game development tools for over a year now. Vivaty is perfectly positioned, and leading the charge of ‘lose that junk in your trunk’ via browser based technology.

“The big trend is that the world of monolithic downloadable application worlds is going to go by the wayside in favor of browser-based worlds,” Reuben Steiger, chief executive of virtual worlds marketing firm Millions of US.

“Worlds plugging in to the browser are becoming the de facto interaction for real-time communication on the Web.”

Vivaty currently has browser based 3D Virtual Worlds apps developed for both facebook and AIM users.  While attracting brands to advertise in these browser based virtual worlds appears to be the main monetization module, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Vivaty investigating further monetization via a microtransaction model within these virtual worlds.

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Martin Herdina to speak at Virtual Worlds London Expo

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Along with being an official sponsor of the 2008 Virtual Worlds London Expo, fatfoogoo’s CEO Martin Herdina will be join by Rohan Freeman, CEO of Sine Wave Company, Andrew Schneider, Founder and President of LiveGamer, and Karl Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO of PlaySpan in a panel discussion regarding Virtual Goods.

Taking place today and tomorrow, the Virtual Worlds London Expo is the leading European event for businesses seeking to maximize and comprehend business strategies within virtual worlds.  The Expo seeks to bring all major players in the virtual world space together in one location to look at best practices, insights, and networking.  Fortune 1000 companies, investors, media, startups, consumer entertainment and youth brands, ad agencies, and of course virtual world platforms and their associated developers regularly attend the annual event.

Martin Herdina will be taking part in the Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model talk from 2:45 PM to 3:30 PM.  An outline of the discussion:

Virtual goods and currencies have become the driving economic force for a number of virtual world companies. What does it takes to build a successful company with a strong virtual goods business? What types of items do consumer want to buy and in what context are they motivated to continually buy or upgrade their virtual items? How do you grow a virtual goods business and what are the pitfalls? In what cases does a virtual goods business model triumph over advertising or subscription models?

fatfoogoo’s CEO is expected to analyze and elaborate on the different monetization use cases (subscriptions, primary market, secondary market), their differences, their shortcomings and outline the key factors to run a
successful virtual goods business.

Mr. Herdina is in good company at this year’s Virtual Worlds London Expo, as keynote speakers include Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Labs (Second Life), and Niniane Wang, Lively Engineering Lead, Google Inc.

The Virtual Worlds London Expo is made possible by Virtual Worlds Management, and includes The Virtual Worlds 2008 (New York, April 3-4, 2008), Virtual Worlds Expo (Los Angeles, September 3-4, 2008), Virtual Worlds London (October 20-21, 2008).

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Stevie Case to present on Metanomics.net

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

fatfoogoo’s Stevie Case will be joined by Jay Geesman of Xstreet to present ‘Monetizing the Metaverse’ – a talk about their business experiences in Second Life and other Virtual Worlds.  Professor Robert Bloomfield, Director of the Business Simulation Laboratory at Cornell University, will moderate the show.

Stevie will be going live this coming Monday, October 13th at 12 noon PST.  The show may be seen either within the Second Life virtual world in the Metanomicsregion at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Metanomics/129/174/40, or directly on metanomics site at http://www.metanomics.net/WatchNow.

Stevie is expected to discuss primary markets in which publishers sell directly to players, and secondary markets where players sell to other players.  She’ll also be talking about fatfoogoo’s unique white lable solution that can handle any type of microtransaction for publishers, including time to integration.  Stevie will also give viewers a rundown of fatfoogoo’s partnership program with Sun’s Project Darkstar, with a focus on Call of Kings.  Last but not least, a previous episode of Metanomics struck a chord with views, and Ms. Case will be addressing a “universal avatar” whereby users can more from virtual world to virtual world seamlessly without the need for separate registrations and release of personal information with each new virtual world the visit.

With over 50 one hour long programs dedicated to virtual world economies, metanomics is a storehouse of information coming directly from the industry experts.  Focusing mainly on economic and business situations and scenarios present in virtual worlds such as Second Life and There, Metanomics aims to understand and provide a better insight as to how residents of these virtual worlds establish, manage, and operate their virtual businesses.  Conversely, the show also looks at real world businesses and non-profits and how they interact with the growing virtual world and economy(ies).

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