millionsofus

Millions Of Us, the content creation company responsible for some of the virtual world of Second Life's largest corporate constructions, is expanding its activities into Gaia Online. "A lot of the things we’ve learned over the last year about what makes people successful in Second Life are broadly applicable to these other environments," said founder Reuben Steiger.

The virtual world of Gaia is a favorite teen hangout and is becoming a preferred choice for advertisers. The website claims that more than three hundred thousand members log in to Gaia every day, and those members spend an average of two hours on the site daily. They also claim nearly two million unique visitors logging into Gaia every month to consume an average of 1200 page views.

With over 190 million "Gaia Gold" exchanged every day and over 50,000 person to person auctions a day, their economy represents a very engaged audience. Companies like Millions Of Us should feel right at home here generating content for what appears to be a truly voracious audience.

Coca Cola wants you to design a "virtual vending machine" in the 3D world of Second Life. Not just any vending machine though, despite a horrifying tendency for companies to mirror their real world marketing in the virtual, Coke actually want to do something interesting. They want you to design an "experience vendor" if you will. A machine that can dispense items that will enhance the Second Life experience and that residents can share with each other.

Its funny. Whenever I mention my belief that companies need to be thinking about viral, copyable, modifiable objects that residents can pass amongst each other rather than building replicas of their real world buildings and hoping people "just come", many of the folks I talk to in SL seem to vitually shrug their shoulders. It's no surprise that Coke is close to the mark though, they hired Crayon and Millions of us for this gig. Two companies that combine a lot of marketing and technical talent and are well suited to making a campaign like this work.

The winner of the design competition, whether they submit via SL, YouTube or MySpace (i've no idea on that last one..) will get to jet into California and work with the Millions of us team to build out their vision into a virtual reality.

If you're interested in learning more, Gideon from Crayon tells me there will be a press event held on Crayonville Island at 5pm SLT (PDT).

Thanks to Mark Wallace for the original tip.

At the Dr. Dobb's / InformationWeek coffee clutch this afternoon I was told that Second Life development firm Millions of US, would be unveiling a new project with Intel and OCC. That's Orange County Choppers, the annoying show they wont stop showing on Discovery and Intel's Embedded Systems Group to be precises.

Intel commissioned the OCC guys to build a bike that celebrated 30 years of Intel being in the embedded systems business. The TV episode that chronicles that build will air sometime in May on TLC. The OCC guys have kept the design under lock and key for the past several months and will today unveil it today at 3PM PST in San Jose at the Intel Embedded Systems Conference. We will open the Second Life Island at the same time.

I arrived dead on 3pm SLT and have to say it was NOT so easy to actually get one of the Bikes Intel were giving away. I had to get a bit of help from Millions of Us founder Bill Wrentmore to work out the complex system for actually getting and taking a bike out for a spin. The cool thing was that you actually got to "build" your bike though! Sure it was all scripted and you couldn't go wrong if you tried, but the fact that your Avatar was doing all the actions to put the bike together was a very nice touch, and when I finally did get it out of the garage, phew... they did a good job of translating a powerful, unwieldy, testosterone fueled gas guzzlig monster into a virtual experience.

Hats off.

Interestingly enough, when I questioned Bill, he said the whole project had only taken them a month. I'd have thought it a much more time consuming task, as apart from some usability issues it's a pretty cool project. Residents can take their choppers anywhere, they're free to all, but be warned, you need plenty of straight, open road to ride one!