Second Life – Page 150

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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February 1, 2014

Site Stats For January

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes is researching Second Life related blogs for an upcoming project, he doesn’t go into details regarding the project but he has posted a couple of blog posts about statistics.

In one, entitled Second Life Website Still Strong in Traffic, Says SimilarWeb, he takes a look at traffic to the Second Life web properties and reports that the traffic looks extremely healthy. In another, which is entitled SL Universe: The Most Popular Site for Second Life Opinion?, Hamlet comes to the conclusion that SLUniverse gets a lot of visitors who talk about Second Life.

Those results are being debated over at New World Notes and statistics often generate questions regarding the data and whether we’re in lies, damned lies and statistics territory. However Hamlet’s project prompted me to investigate my own site statistics.

Search Terms

Search terms are a scary area, some bizarre ones turn up:

no wonder why the drugs and sex
strawberry singh has a testicle on her head
passion that won t let you quit

Poor old Strawberry Singh! Who even searches for that? Anyway the top 20 search terms are generally more sensible, although the odd one or two turn up.

second life
ciaran marley
social networking tool
ciaran laval
second life linden homes
mmo
secondlife decrease prim count
conversations
geeky
linden homes second life
can i use cloud party without facebook
w9 second life tax
casper vend sl
penny patton second life
convex hull second life
join aka
sex is fun not sin
virwox good
set a prim to convex
w-8ben second life

I have no idea who Ciaran Marley is! Numbers 16 and 17 have me scratching my head too, but generally that’s not a bad list, convex hull, tax and account issues etc.

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