At the State of Play V conference now being held in Singapore some announcements were made regarding the global strategy of HiPiHi. The plan comes in three parts: create standards, make HiPiHi interact with other virtual worlds, and bring on third party developers. In their words:
First, HiPiHi will cooperate with global leaders in the Internet and communication industry to establish a set of relevant hardware and software standards for the development of the 3D platform. Second, HiPiHi will cooperate with other major 3D virtual worlds to finalize these standards, and bring the possibility for users to interact and transact between different virtual worlds. Lastly, HiPiHi will actively build its “Global Market Partnership Project”, “Third Party Developer Project” and “Community Partnership Project”, to establish a HiPiHi virtual world global value chain.
These goals all come with varying degrees of difficulty. While there is certainly a lot of interest in the industry in creating hardware and software standards, deciding what those standards should be may be a struggle considering the number of patents being filed in this area. Everybody will want what brings them the most personal profit. Hopefully an open standard will be found here.
The second goal of cross-platform interaction is exciting, but one has to wonder what oddities might develop when a virtual economy intersects directly with another. What would happen if I could buy Linden Dollars with Therebux, which are available at various degrees of discount?
The last point coins various project names all loosely connotating a more agressive stance on recruiting third-party developers for content and expansion of HiPiHi. There's no point in really speculating on something this vague, but considering Linden Lab's colorful history in this area, it will be really interesting to see what HiPiHi's unique take will be on encouraging community growth.
What I find most astonishing with this annoucement is the focus on cooperation and standards. Not, that I would consider standards unimportant - I think they will be most important in the long run. But a relatively young company (especially if funded by a VC) usually has more pressing worries, like user base, revenue streams etc.
I wonder if the focus on standards and "building the global metaverse" is just a PR stunt or an unusually long term oriented strategy with them.
Probably a little of both. The new players always want open standards, and the japanese are more long term thinkers than western nations, but for right now I think it's weighted frimly in the 'pr stunt' side :)
I hope they are serious about open Standards, it is a chance to start a Revolution like the Internet itself. Maybe ond Day the Protocols are as common as HTTP,FTP,POP or SMTP and the virtual World is Bulletproof, Bankruptproof and Nuclear-Blast-Proof like the World Wide Web (the Internet is Nukeproof by Design but if Linden Labs don`t make enough Money the Second Life will just disappear).
Well, it`s a Dream and even big Companies (like Adobe or Microsoft) are unable to create REAL open Standards but there is always Hope.
Are thet serious about open standards?
Looking at their software carefully, my answer would be yes.
As for asking if their long term aims are 'real' or simply a 'PR stunt'. I think you should remember that this is NOT Linden Lab telling you this... 'nuff said?