Second Life – Page 291

December 23, 2010January 12, 2014

Humble New Beginnings

Ok first of all the name is comedy gold, come on, Rod Humble, as Laetizia Coronet pointed out on Twitter:

“There is an odd contradiction in the name Rod Humble. Like Biggie Smalls.”

However it’s not fair to judge a book by the cover….and when I stop giggling like a schoolboy I’ll compose myself to write a proper entry ….nearly there….ok ok.

Rod Humble has been appointed the new CEO of Linden Lab, as announced here as a press release and here on the blogrum. Mr Humble arrives from Electronic Arts, as did Kim The New Marketing Linden, which makes one wonder if there’s a special website for EA employees to seek out new positions at Linden Lab….moving on. Continue reading “Humble New Beginnings”

December 16, 2010January 12, 2014

Jack Bows Out

Jack Linden has announced on the blog, that he is indeed leaving Linden Lab, he also briefly popped to his scheduled office hour to say goodbye.

Continue reading “Jack Bows Out”

December 4, 2010January 12, 2014

Enter The Dragon ….. Fish

A year or so ago Linden Lab entered into a business relationship with Dragonfish, the payment processing arm of 888.com, as reported here. Err when did Massively become linked to Joystiq.com? Anyway, I digress, the deal was designed to expand payment options, allow people to pay in local currencies if they’re outside the USA yadda yadda yadda.

This news was then swiftly forgotten as nothing seemed to happen, nothing that is until recently, as observed in a comment on my last blog post where someone points out payment via Paypal is going to be problematic in the future as the payment wiki states that payment via American Express and Paypal is not currently an option.

Concerns about this are raised on this thread on the blogrums and this thread at SLUniverse. The first thing to note here is that the payment wiki I linked to earlier gives an email support address of @888.com, this is why I believe Dragonfish are processing these payments, rather than Linden Lab. Why Dragonfish, or whomever is the payment processing arm of 888.com these days, have a problem with Paypal and American Express I don’t know, I do know that many people have stated that American Express impose high merchant fees for their payments, but give discounts for bulk deals, so maybe that’s the case or maybe it’s the link to online gambling that’s the problem for American Express and Paypal. I don’t know, I do know that the Paypal issue is a problem that is likely to fester though. The really odd thing is that PayPal is a payment option for 888’s online casino sites, so why is not acceptable for Second Life? Continue reading “Enter The Dragon ….. Fish”

December 2, 2010January 12, 2014

What Are Linden Lab playing at with Classifieds?

I don’t know if it’s my mood that has added to my annoyance with the latest blog and emails about classifieds, I have the cough from hell and I’m currently doing an extremely impressive impression of Grumpy, but the events have certainly rubbed me up the wrong way. First of all I awake from a nap to check my emails and find emails from LL telling me how they’ve nerfed inworld classifieds, and of course they go with the tired old BS of telling me this nerf is an imporvement and then I read Nelson’s blog post about a new classified beta, this right after reading how they are nerfing inworld classifieds.

They should be treated as separate issues, although one can’t help but wonder if the deliberate and destructive nature of LL’s approach to inworld classifieds is to encourage the big players to move to the new system as well as giving them advantages inworld that their classifieds wouldn’t previously have had, again we seem to be back to LL being hostile to medium to small business owners, I have no idea why they do this. Continue reading “What Are Linden Lab playing at with Classifieds?”

November 29, 2010January 12, 2014

Apez Hits The Buffers

In a surprising incident, Apez has ran out of Linden dollar reserves after a what is described as a “Run on the bank”, the surprising part being, Apez wasn’t a bank in the first place.

Rumours about the demise of Apez started a few weeks ago, with a concerned thread on SL Universe, which can be read here, posing uncomfortable questions about withdrawals and complaints.

However things ran into panic mode over a thread on the Apez forums from Cenji Neutra asking for interested parties to contact Apez regarding management and operational assistance, Cenji wanted to stay in the loop and still be involved, which makes the panic a little surprising but possibly following on from the earlier issues, people decided to withdraw now, this is an unfortunate consequence of previous failed ventures from fomrer inworld businesses that longer term residents will be aware of. Continue reading “Apez Hits The Buffers”