Virtual Worlds – Page 163

February 6, 2014

Ebbe Altberg – What We’ve Learnt So Far

Ebbe Altberg has arrived with a bang in some circles, before he has even officially started work as the new CEO. His start date, I’m unreliably informed, is Monday February 10th 2014. I’m writing this for reference for future blog posts.

Inara Holmes has once again donned her deerstalker, puffed on her pipe and investigated the man to come up with a rather deep short profile on Mr Altberg. This time Inara has been able to demonstrate her science of deduction without having to call upon the assistance of Gray Of The Lab from San Francisco.

Ebbe was born in Sweden, the country that invented Blocksworld and the country next to the country that invented Lego. Unforunately Ebbe has so far been unable to convince Swedish super group Abba that they should perform inside Second Life for tips only. However give it time, Linden Lab has opened the door to a Viking invasion and those guys like to party.

Mr Altberg has previously worked for Microsoft (hooray), Yahoo! (boo) Ingenio (?) and BranchOut (??) who were linked to Facebook (Boooooooooo!). For full details, please read Inara’s informed post, carry on reading here for an uninformed post.

So far Mr Altberg seems to have been enjoying himself as the new found leader of the virtual revolution and other products and has been particularly active on Twitter, where you can find him under @ebbealtberg.

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February 5, 2014February 5, 2014

Ebbe Altberg Named As Linden Lab CEO

As people await a blog post, some with baited breath, I can non-exclusively reveal that Ebbe Altberg has been named as the new CEO of Linden Lab. The news was brought to my attention by a post over at SLUniverse by Ashur Constantine, who joined SLUniverse in February 2014 ….. and was making his first ever post ….. hmmm.

The news is however confirmed by reading Linden Lab’s press release on the matter. Rumours that Ebbe has been appointed CEO purely because he has Alt in his surname have been strenuously denied by unnamed officials.

The press release informs us:

Most recently prior to joining Linden Lab, Altberg was COO of BranchOut. Prior to that, he was part of the executive team at Yahoo!, most recently as SVP of Media Products. His more than 25 years of experience managing teams that create world-class products and services also includes leadership roles at Ingenio (acquired by at&t Interactive) and Microsoft.

There are more details about Ebbe on his bio on the Linden Lab website:

Ebbe Altberg comes to Linden Lab with more than 25 years of experience leading teams and creating software used by hundreds of millions of users. After graduating from Middlebury College he went on to work at Microsoft, where he spent most of his 12 years leading teams that created the world’s most popular productivity products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Office.

In 2000, Ebbe moved to Ingenio, Inc., where he headed up product and had a stint as interim CEO. As Chief Product Officer, he lead Ingenio to become an innovative telephony and marketplace company, which was ultimately acquired by at&t Interactive in 2007.

Ebbe then joined Yahoo! in Europe as VP Head of Audience, with responsibility for all consumer-facing products and affairs. After a couple of years he was promoted to SVP Media Products, a group of about 800 engineering and product people that created the Yahoo! homepage, news, sports, finance, and entertainment products and platforms.

Most recently, Ebbe went back to a small startup, BranchOut, where he was the COO and managed the teams building products for professionals such as BranchOut and Talk.co.

Alas Ebbe hasn’t yet made anything funky to put next to his name like the other senior executives have, but give it time.

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February 4, 2014

Second Life Has Orcs And Much Much More

There are some interesting comments on Mitch Wagner’s article about High Fidelity, which I blogged about yesterday. The comments demonstrate that some people don’t realise how vast Second Life is in terms of range of content and they also demonstrate that some people simply do not like the idea of an open ended platform.

The first comment I’ll highlight is this one:

Second Life would have fared better if it had appealed to MMORPG fans, the primary proven market for such activities. Philip Rosedale, you need orcs.

The thing is Second Life has Orcs! Second Life also has Elves, Wizards, Dragons, Halflings … whom you should be really careful around and all sorts of other weird and wonderful characters. Indeed my favourite Second Life event of the year is Fantasy Faire.

Kaylewuffel has a nice video from the Lumenaria Sim at Fantasy Faire 2013.

etheriaparrott has a video of The Atomic Kitties of Rynn Verwood and Lauren Thibaud on stage at the event:

Draxtor Despres covered the event in The Drax Files episode 4 and highlighted via his interview with Zander Greene how Second Life can be an excellent platform for charity fundraising.

I could go on and on … no really, I could, I love Fantasy Faire!

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February 3, 2014

High Fidelity Aiming For Eye To Avatar Eye Contact

Eye to eye contact, we made, eye to eye contact, you and me, contact! You were looking at me, I was looking at you, you were looking at me.

Mitch Wagner knows a thing or two about Second Life and used to run a podcast called Copper Robot, where he would sometimes interview people inworld. At one stage this was a fortnightly event and I think Crap Mariner was involved, but unfortunately I didn’t get to hear too many of the podcasts myself.

I’m mentioning Mitch’s virtual world experience because he has published an article in Information Week : Second Life Founder Pursues Second Chance. This isn’t the first time Mitch has published an article in Information Week by the way! Anyway, the article itself has quotes from Philip Rosedale regarding his hopes for High Fidelity. The article touches upon some issues that frustrate users of Second Life, namely usability, scalability, latency and the lack of eye to eye contact!

There are some bizarre quotes in this article, for example Philip seems to think people don’t talk on the telephone anymore. I can’t be the only person on the planet who talks happily on the telephone! However Philip’s point is to do with latency.

However there are some very interesting points to this article, one of which is the lack of eye contact in virtual worlds, which makes conversations difficult in real time. In the article Philip tells Mitch that avatars in High Fidelity will make eye contact with the human being on the other side of the conversation. I would imagine this may feel quite odd at first.

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