events

Most of the events I attend in Second Life, including Metaversed events, are not targeted in any way other than implicitly through the content of the event itself. There are no qualifications necessary for entry. We seem content with quantity over quality, which is perfectly natural in a new medium I think. There are surely exceptions to this observation, and I'd love to hear about them.

On the web, provided your content is free of course, there's little need to pre-qualify visitors. Bandwidth is cheap(ish) and hardware costs negligible for many businesses. In Second Life, and other virtual worlds though, there is a limit on how many people can participate in your live event, or visit your server at any one time. There is also a limit on a company's human resources. We talk about engagement a lot when we speak of virtual worlds. About how it's better to engage meaningfully with 10 people than broadcast at 100, or 1000. So why are we not doing that?

Barriers

A good argument against trying to qualify visitors is that it puts a barrier between them and your content. Why would you want to make someone intent on visiting you jump through a hoop?

The other half of the problem may be that if you do decide that you need to pre-qualify, as far as I'm aware, the tools just don't exist. Right now, it would take considerable development to setup even an automated way of managing an islands access list. There are certainly no simple tools available for this. Do correct me if I'm wrong!

Hoop Jumpers

How much more likely are you to have a meaningful conversation with someone that's shown intent, and has been pre-qualitied over someone who wandered in randomly? If you're focused on learning in Second Life, and don't have a clear financial goal it may not make any sense to do any of this stuff. On the other hand, if you do have a clear goal for your presence, and a clear target group to aim at, wouldn't it make sense to spend less time on "everybody", and more time on the hoop jumpers?

In sales, it's preferable to be talking with somebody who wants to buy your product, rather than trying to persuade somebody that doesn't. Isn't it the same here?

Second Life has a limit on the number of groups you can join. Many people find they always have to bunk one group off the list to join a new one. That's a pain, right? With Metaversed's events about to go into overdrive, new groups are being formed for them, but we don't want you to miss out if you'd prefer to receive reminders in email, or by RSS subscription. So with that in mind, there are now two new ways you can keep up with Metaversed events in Second Life, and shortly other virtual worlds:

1. Join our Google Groups Annoucement List
2. Subscribe to the Google Calendar via XML or ICAL

The email list is announcement only. You won't get a ton of email from joining. We'll send you an email a week before the event so you can put it in your calendar, or make a note, then once more on the morning of the event to remind you.

Please let me know if you have any difficulty signing up or subscribing, or if you can figure out the public address for that damn calendar :)

Thanks everyone.

In virtual worlds, all businesses are remarkable in some way. There are those that are remarkable even among the incredible though. People are creating virtual goods and services that break all the rules, and even goods and services that try to emulate real world rules in virtual environments. Virtual worlds are a melting pot of extraordinary ideas and creative, clever people putting them into action. Everything from land development to integrated web services, to clothing, accessories and toys are being sold inworld, and many of these businesses could teach us all a thing or two about marketing in virtual worlds.

Virtual Business Innovators Event Series

With that learning experience in mind, Metaversed.com will shortly start it's Virtual Business Innovators event series in Second Life, and hopefully other worlds. We're not the experts here. We're here to learn, and I hope we can encourage companies with an interest in working in virtual worlds to do likewise, and learn with us. We'll be putting together a small team of advisers to help us choose content, (we already have a great monthly entrepreneurial class lined up with Hydra Shaftoe in Second Life) and kick off with our first event within the next week or so.

Join the Group, or Watch this Space

Here are a few ways you can keep track of these events and other Metaversed Business events:

• By Second Life Group: Join our Second Life groups
• By Site Feed: Grab the feed here.
• By Email: Join the Metaversed Events Google Group
• By Calendar Subscription:

Also see the the Virtual Business Innovators page for more information and ways to get in contact with us and become involved.

Suggestions are most welcome as always, we'll

Yesterday's Metanomics event was part of Metaversed's experiment in working with Event Partners to syndicate live content in Second Life. While we locked Metaversed Island down to a 40 avatar limit, around 140 people were able to participate in the event as it happened. Let's get into detail here about how we're doing this, what we've found that works, and invite feedback on how to make the whole process even better for partners. It's our hope that we can help establish some "best practices" by picking up this conversation and hearing other groups experiences. Scaling events in Second Life is not easy, but we're finding that it's not as hard as we thought either.

Event Partners In Practice

Becoming an event partner is an open-enrollment proposition. If you want to become one, you just join the "Metaversed Event Partners" Second Life group and you're in. We've been able to use this group to update everyone on what media URL to use, send out care packages with paraphernalia, and make sure that detailed instructions are handed out to everyone. A special notice is usually sent out a few days ahead of time as well to remind everyone of an upcoming event.

Separately we have the "Metanomics" group which we encourage all audience members to join at all locations. When the event begins, everyone watches the same streaming video at the various locations around Second Life, and a unified discussion takes place in the Metanomics group chat.

What Works

Event partners who treat the event at their venue as their event do really well. They keep an eye on the Metanomics Event Calendar, post to the Second Life Events Listings, and send out several group notices to their respective group lists in-world. Greeting visitors and helping them with media controls when they arrive makes a difference too.

Many are running pre and post-events as well, engaging people in further discussions, workshops and presentations. This helps the audience engage with the venue's brand better, and encourages return visits. One location is even taking the direct links to the Quicktime videos and running separate events for people whose timezones didn't work for the live events.

Website promotion has been a powerful tool for some, so starting this week we've made a number of graphics available for event partners to use outside of Second Life. We're very mindful of suggestions event partners make and expect to have a number of new tools available to them in the future.

Taking The Next Step

Competition is healthy, so to cultivate a positive and competitive environment among event partners we'll be rewarding those who were able to draw the biggest crowds. This means that the top few venues will have their SLurls and logos appear in the event posting on Metaversed the day of the event, and we'll be rolling out a number of other rewards as well.

This works for a lot of reasons. It encourages people to put more effort into their events and find something to give themselves a unique edge. It also helps us with statistics gathering, as our open-enrollment process makes it a bit difficult to track where all the venues are in the first place. Overall it just encourages people to tell us more about themselves so that we might learn more about them, and stimulates positive discussion about how we can make the Event Partner process work better for everyone.

Our next event will be on Monday, November 5th at 11am where our guest will be Gene Yoon (aka. Ginsu Linden), Linden Lab's Vice President of Business Affairs. He was previously the company's general counsel and provided leadership for finance. He'll be talking about the economic policies that influence Second Life and hopefully will provide us with projections on the virtual world's financial future. We'll be announcing the top 3 venues for this event on Monday and you can usually find others on Second Life Events Listings.

If you'd like to be an event partner this Monday, join the "Metaversed Event Partners" group in Second Life and stay tuned for upcoming notices!

One way to scale events in Second Life, which is always a subject of note when you're responsible for running large events on a regular basis, is to use video to syndicate the event to partner islands. Friends, acquaintances and ultimately, partners to the events themselves.

With that in mind, we've been perfecting the technique a little over the last few weeks with help from SAP and the Corecon center in Second Life, and feel we have it down to a pretty fine art now. We'd like to formalize and automate the process somewhat with select partners, adding those additional locations to notices, event listings, postings on sites etc etc.

If you're interested in working with us to scale up our business events, please email me at nick@metaversed.com or IM '57 Miles' in Second Life.

Luckily we get more than just a peek at what the latest amazing technologists have to show off when Metaversed holds what amounts to a "show and tell" for geek stars. This month, the event slated for this week, Friday September 7 at Noon SLT at Metaversed Island will be no exception.

Navillus Batra of i3D is bringing the vHud to show us a new way to stream media in Second Life. Navilus known for innovation in everything from basic video and image displays to interactive multimedia products for collaboration and conferencing in Second Life.

Temporal Mitra and Bopete Yossarian will demonstrate a breakthrough new technology in their new streaming TV device for use in Second Life - without adjustment to the media url on the owners land. Plus it can stream separate and different streams to different users at the same time. Sweet.

How do we keep track of where we’ve been, whom we’ve been in touch with and how to communicate with others while in a virtual world? Ksso Yamauba tackles the issue of coupling the Web to the Metaverse with SL-Messenger

Jimjimjim Allen will show off a web auctioning system, similar to eBay, for Second Life. And in 3-d no less.

Not content with this stellar line-up, and Interested in new menuing systems and streaming media technologies? Tue Torok and Arnout Sequent of SL Internet will be showing off their latest innovations.

There will be time for demonstrations, questions and answer session with our Metaversed host Nick Wilson, 57 Miles in Second Life, as well as questions from the audience.

You'll want to make sure to arrive early to get a seat. Venues fill up early for Metaversed events, and this First Friday in September will be no excepting. Plan on being in the area at least 30 minutes early to assure yourself of a spot.

Though we'll do our best to get press in, there are a limited numuber of seats so be wise and be at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Metaversed/174/129/669
well ahead of our planned start time of Noon SLT (pacific time)

Hope to see you there.

For more information about attending or participating contact Metaversed evangelist Susan Reynolds at susan@metaversed.com or in Second Life IM her via Tynan Clary. You'll always be able to check times, venues and other details at http://metaversed.com/friday

The Metaversed group met to discuss the science and art of hosting large events in Second Life on Friday. We came away with a lot of cool ideas, some of which will have been done, are are being done, and some of which may be unique. As we discussed it, a few overriding themes kept cropping up in the conversation:

• That this stuff should be made available and easy for everyone, not just the geeks and the 'media' plays in Second Life
• A certain amount of mooning and gesticulating would be acceptable in the general direction of anyone jealously guarding the tech to do this stuff

We came up with a number of ideas, all centered around scaling the Metaversed events without breaking the bank, but they can be applied to anything, and indeed one of the big takeaways of the meet was general desire to give a little back to the community and share what we work out.

Barriers

One of the major barriers is the capacity of a sim of course, an 'island' or server in Second Life. The easy answer is to string 4 sims together and hold the events at the center, but that's limited, and it has this whole 'proprietory' feel we're trying hard to avoid about it. What might work better is a system that allows anyone to host a simulcast (a replica of the original event), with the incentive of erm... helping out.. but also of hosting a crowd puller on your own land, complete with your own promotions, pre gig talks etc.

The easiest (we think) way to do this would be to have a Metaversed avatar taking a movie of the original event, and uploading/streaming that video to a Quicktime server and then giving people an easily rezzible (drag from inventory to where you want) object and a media url to set on the parcel.

For voice events this would also work for the web I think, so a page on our site here, but also an embeddable piece of code anyone could use would be awesome. I've yet to work out which service we could use for this, but I think Kyte might do it..

Bottom Line

So in summary, we want to host massive events, using 3D syndication, which would be a mixture of server tech, and object distribution whilst teaching anyone that doesn't already have a grip on this stuff how to do it themselves.

In an ideal world, those that wanted to syndicate Metaversed events would gain an audience, and get to show/present their own advertising and promotional stuff and be able to use the group chat to talk to the live presenters.

Phew..

Thought?

There's been a lot of negativity in the press of late over the marketing failures of corporations in the virtual world of Second Life. Analyst firm Gartner have even warned companies away from public worlds recently. With all of that in mind, Metaversed has put together a panel of active real life firms in Second Life to discuss their experiences, and lessons learned from being part of the community. The debate will no doubt prove useful to others and be of great interest to anyone involved in the business side of virtual worlds.

12pm SLT/PST, 8pm GMT - Venue to be arranged

We're still waiting on a venue, but you can find the Talkshoe details at the bottom of this page so whether you're inworld or not, you can be part of the debate.

Speaking at Metaversed Live This Week

Im still waiting on a couple of confirms, but we have a fantastic panel already. Confirmed for tonights discussion, in no particular order:

• Craig Cmehil - Community Evangelist, SAP
• Fiona Gallagher - SL Project Lead, Sun
• Jeff Barr - Web Services Evangelist, Amazon
• Jonas Karlsson - Research Team, Xerox

Call in Details

Hopefully you'll be able to join us inworld, but either way, if you can dial into a US telephone number with a regular phone, or something like SkypeOut, then you're good to go. The show will start at 12pm SLT/PST, 8pm GMT today, details follow:

• Signup for an account at TalkShoe
• You do NOT need to download/install the Talkshoe software, but it is useful as it allows you to txt us what you want to talk about (ie you're more likely to get on).
• Call i(724) 444-7444
• Talkcast ID: 40974
• Enter your PIN -- Created by you when you signed up at Talkshoe.com
• IMPORTANT: If you are at the Second Life location, turn your external speakers down on your PC, otherwise you'll cause echos on the stream.

Questions for the Panel

You can pose questions to the panel both inworld at the time, live on talkshoe, or drop a comment below. However you choose, we'd love to hear what you have to say and will try to get them answered for you!

See you all at 12pm SLT!

As we previously reported, the Virtual Goods Summit kicks off this week. One of the organizers, Susan Wu, offered up some interesting statistics about the current state of affairs:

• Neopets users have created over 206 million virtual pets
• Tencent has over 250 million active users in China and generated $100+ million in Q1 2007, 65% of their revenue comes from virtual goods and services
• Nexon generated $230 million in 2005, 85% of which came from virtual item sales
• Habbo Hotel has over 75 million registered avatars in 29 countries, 90% of their $60 million+ yearly revenue comes from virtual goods
• Gaia Online does over 50,000 person to person auctions a day - making them the 3rd largest auction site on the Internet. Their average user consumes 1200 page views a month.

Both Rand Leeb-du Toit of Yoick and Marc Wallace of 3pointD will be covering the Virtual Goods Summit, and we'll be sure to pass on any shining beacons of wisdom from them here on Metaversed.

Now in its third year, the BlogHer conference is considered one of the foremost events on the new media calendar. This year it comes to the virtual world of Second Life for the very first time, and will feature many of the things you'd expect to see at the real world conference this summer. Over July 27th and 28th, residents of Second Life will be able to attend inworld sessions, listen to audio feeds from the live conference and network at virtual parties.

If you'd like to attend, you'll need to register.

Though there appears to be no word on who may be speaking or exhibiting as of yet, a new virtual worlds conference focused on "brand and product excellence" is set to kick off on September 25th in London.

Thanks Aleister

Tomorrow's highly anticipated Geek Meet where IBM, Intel and Sun discuss networking and the grid isn't the only event you'll want to catch this week. Mark your calendars for the next few days, it's shaping up to be a busy week!

June 14-17 - iCommons Summit

Once a year, about 300 people from over 50 countries come together to celebrate and strategise around a free Internet for all.

Leaders of the Creative Commons, free software, open education and access to knowledge communities talk about their vision for the future and discuss strategies for building a free global culture that is rich - both in terms of economic viability and geographic diversity.

Expect streaming video of the keynote addresses, recorded video streams of keynote and parallel session addresses, live dj / live music concerts and mixers before and after key addresses, information displays, art exhibits, free tee-shirts and information note cards and greeters who will answer questions and hand out welcome packs.

There will be presentations from Magnatune - the music company with the tagline, "We are not evil"; Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons; Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia; Yochai Benkler, the author of The Wealth of Networks and Cory Ondrejka the chief technology officer of Linden Lab and developer of Second Life.

You can go to this event in-world at the USC Annenberg Public Diplomacy Island (click here for SLURL).

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June 15 - 11AM - Discussion on "The Next Killer App"

The Int. Council of The Paley Center for Media, formerly The Museum of Television and Radio, held in association with the Media and Entertainment and IT/TC Governors of the World Economic Forum, will be hosted at Sun Microsystems, Google and Yahoo. The event will bring together approximately 100 senior executives from across the worlds leading media, entertainment, and technology companies to discuss convergence and the new platforms that are shaping the future of the industry.

While this is traditionally a closed door event, Sun will be hosting the Whats Next? session led by Greg Papadopoulos, CTO and EVP of R&D, which will also be shown Second Life Pavilion. Greg will be joined by industry experts, including Vinton Cerf of Google, Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs, Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo, and Daniel Scheinman of Cisco. The group will discuss the next killer application and explore the innovative culture of Silicon Valley and how new technologies are nurtured and developed into new business ecosystems.

This event is being held at the Sun Pavilion (167, 157).

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NCI Classes:
June 16 - 5PM - Starting a Business in Second Life

You've developed some Second Life content creation skills and are ready to test your metal in the metaverse marketplace. How do you begin?

This class will teach you the basics of starting and running a business in Second Life. What's already out there? How do you find your niche? How do you attract potential customers? How, exactly, do you sell stuff in Second Life anyway?

Learn all this and more as you get started on the path to Second Life Business success.

Time: 5:00 to 6:30 pm
Location: NCI Disturbing World Classroom (Disturbing World)

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June 17 - 7PM - Advanced Land Ownership
Learn how to buy and sell land with Shippou Oud, an experienced SL land dealer. This class covers pricing, terraforming, mainland versus islands, land auctions, "rare" land, and how to maximize the value of a plot of land for sale. Learn what to look for and what to avoid!

It is strongly suggested you attend NCI's Basic Land Ownership class (or equivalent) before taking this class.

Time: 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Duration: 1 hour
Location: NCI Disturbing World Classroom (Disturbing World)

Metaversed readers may remember my previous article about the upcoming Virtual Goods Summit on June 22nd where the business and economics of virtual worlds will be addressed. As it turns out, at the same time in the same city a second conference is being held.

The Supernova Conference will run from June 20-22 in San Francisco, CA. The focus of the conference:

At Supernova, we bring together business, government, and technology thought leaders to understand how decentralization and pervasive connectivity are changing our world.

While not directly related to virtual worlds, Raph Koster's panel discussion is sure to attract some attention:

Virtual Life or Virtual Hype? (Supernova)

(Moderator Sandra Kearney, Clay Shirky, Raph Koster, Reuben Steiger)

Do most people really want to be immersed in 3D virtual worlds? And what are the real business benefits of these massively multiplayer environments? This session will examine which activities will migrate to virtual environments, and when physical forms will continue to dominate.

So many conferences, so little time. Here's hoping it gets recorded and fed to the rest of us.

At the first of a series of planned events at the new Intel island in the virtual world of Second Life, outlandish Avatars of all kinds gathered to meet Intel's bloggers, and talk geek for an hour or so. Among the topics discussed were Intel's concerns regarding security in the Metaverse. Second Life simply wasn't built for the enterprise, and it seems that despite appointing internal evangelists for the virtual world, Intel still has qualms about its use for the company. Among the Intel folks present were Peretz Stine, who heads up the firms inworld efforts, Nanook Taurog, pictured sporting the Dalek Avatar above who in real life works on parallel programming and Gadget Mandrelbot, Intel's resident web2.0 disrupter aka Josh Bancroft.

Though outnumbered by the Intel guys, there was reasonable interest from outside as well, with myself, Savannah Glimmer of the Orientation Station project and Soft Linden, a new developer at Linden Lab's, makers of Second Life, pictured here in attendance. Isn't that the cutest Avatar you ever saw? As conversation turned to science in 3D worlds I had to bow out and leave the group to it, as it was near 2am in Denmark, but I'd judge their first event a success, and I'd recommend checking in with Peretz Stine for a full schedule if you fancy popping along one evening.

On thursday, at around 3pm PST Second Life's Second Convention will kick off on Artificial Isle. Hundreds of residents are expected to visit during the three day event to see fashion shows, discussion panels on SIM security and open discussion of free speech issues on the broader Internet. According to ZATZAi Asturius, who works in sales in real life, getting sponsors for the virtual show is the hardest part of such a project. Not because it's hard to find interested parties, at 15,000$L for a prime sponsorship spot it's hardly expensive (about $60), but between arranging all the building work, organizing discussion panels and promoting the event, there simply isn't that much time left over.

That's startups for you. Too much to do, and not enough time to do it in. Even so though, Second Convention has a bunch of interesting panels and exhibitions going on from Thursday to Saturday this week so be sure to stop by and check it out. One thing's for sure, if Second Convention generates as much buzz as the last one did back in March, they'll be beating sponsors back next time round....

Mark your calendars! Join a fun, friendly discussion on the weeks business and technology news in virtual worlds, social media and the intersection of the 2D and 3D web. The Metaversed Geek Meet is a great way to make new friends and network among like minded tech heads. New people are most welcome, if you're new to this stuff, we'll be happy to get you up to speed!

This weeks Geek Meet will be on Metaversed's new home at Second Mirage, whether I manage to get it looking pretty by then or not!

At 1pm SLT/PST today, the Second Life Business Bureau will launch Business Bureau Isle, its first purpose built Island housing SLBB approved member businesses. The idea behind the opening, says SLBB CEO OliveEue Sholokhov, is to provide Second Life residents with a place they can shop in the knowledge that the firm they're doing business with "upholding a standard of ethics".

The SLBB, which was founded by OliveEue just three months ago when the purchase of a pair of shoes went sour, but already has 129 members including the likes of Cisco systems, who's Christian Renaud actually has a seat on the board, is not without it's detractors. Discussions such as this one in the Second Life community forums demonstrate a certain amount of distrust of a group proclaiming to watch over business in the virtual world. After all, who will guard the guardians?

I asked OliveEue, whom I met in the company of her Second Life husband Tr0n Rich at their new offices in Business Bureau Isle, if she planned to stay in her role as CEO, or if there was some kind of democratic process in place to alternate leadership of the institution. There is not. Though she also tells me that there has been no opposition to her indefinite stewardship of the organization. She acknowledges that the present system will probably not last forever.

It's clear that OliveEue and Tr0n, who are both disabled and working in Second Life full time, are genuine, and earnest in their pursuit of better business standards and accountability in the virtual world. There is clearly a perceived need among virtual businesses to define what constitutes best practice, as well as protect themselves.

Is Metaversed a member? Yes. Am I entirely happy with it? No. Having said that, the SLBB is a young organization with much growing and defining to do in order to reach any kind of meaningful level of trust amongst the larger population in Second Life, and apart from issues of leadership, that I feel need to be addressed sooner rather than later, I'm more for than against. I can see that there are all kinds of potential for mismanagement, misrepresentation and abuse of power from such an organization, but that's the same in real life,and indeed with any group online or off that sets itself up as a watchdog for industry. What excites me, and compels me to work from within rather than throw rocks from without, is the honesty and candor I see in it's founders. The genuine desire to do something good, something right for both business and consumer, and the potential for us all to benefit from closer ties within the business community.

The opening of Business Bureau Isle is at 1pm SLT/PST today, and the whole day is full of activities. It will be today's Things To Do, so look out for meet up details being posted later in the day!

Metaversed will hold it's first "Geek Meet" today at 8am SLT/PST, in combination with the popular Twitter users bi weekly meet ups! If you've never been to one of these informal, friendly get togethers then you're in for a treat: They're fun, and very newcomer friendly, so do join us, as we'd love to see you!

Typical topics of discussion include web apps such as Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr and integration apps for web2.0 and Second Life. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of nice geeky folks meeting up to chat about tech!

How to Get There

Just teleport to this location at 8am SLT/PST today, or IM 57 Miles in Second Life for a Land Mark.

Hope to see you there!

NASA Ames Center Director Pete Worden will be speaking live from Second Life on open source collaboration and virtual worlds this Saturday, May 26th at 8am Pacific. Details were not readily available, though there is an event listing, courtesy of SpaceRef, so mark it in your Calendar! NASA have had a Second Life for some time now. As far as I'm aware though, this is their first live event.

Metaversed readers may remember our previous article about the job fair being held in Second Life. By all accounts it was a resounding success, giving recruiters a higher number of well-qualified prospects than expected with less hassle than a normal job fair.

What was fascinating was everybody's behavior. Applicants, most of whom were logging into Second Life for the first time, spent up to five hours perfecting their avatars before coming to the interview. The recruiters themselves dressed their avatars in business attire, which caused one applicant using a generic av to apologize for the way he was dressed.

I guess the way your avatar looks counts. I'm sure Second Life's fashionistas are pleased to see that "proven" in a public forum.