November 2013 – Page 3

November 21, 2013November 21, 2013

Forget PIOF, New Marketplace Merchants Should Provide Tax documentation

Over the last few weeks Linden Lab have announced some changes for account holders. The first, back on November 11th was that new marketplace merchants would be required to put payment info on file before being able to open a store.

The second was more recently, on November 19th Linden Lab blogged about required tax documentation. These issues aren’t linked but I feel they should be and in doing so, Linden Lab would be killing two birds with one stone.

Wait wait wait, the tax documentation is only for those who have gross income of USD$20,000 and make 200 transactions in a calendar year, right? Well not quite, the tax documentation is certainly required if people meet that threshold, but at that point Linden Lab will file a 1099-K with the IRS, the documentation is required for Linden Lab to be able to file a 1099-K, but Linden Lab can ask for this information anyway.

Amazon do this with Kindle Direct Publishing. I haven’t yet published my international best seller and award winning novel, but if I wanted to do that via KDP, I have to fill out a W8-BEN for Amazon to file. The W8-BEN is the non US Citizen equivalent of a W9 form. When I logged into KDP today I saw this:

An Image Should Be Here — Tax Information Incomplete

The missing account information was soon revealed to me after I clicked Update Now:

You may need to squint to read that so I’ll type it:

“Amazon is required by US tax regulations to request information regarding your tax status under US law. Required US tax identification and information has not yet been submitted. Complete your tax information to begin selling on Amazon.”

Let’s just bold that last sentence to emphasise the point: “Complete your tax information to begin selling on Amazon.” So that’s before I’ve sold a single book, before I’m anywhere near 200 transactions, indeed it prevents me from making 1 transaction.

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November 20, 2013

Linden Lab Launch Fitted Mesh Project Viewer

Linden Lab, whom have recently rediscovered the beauty of blogging about developments have unveiled a gem of a post today:

Making Mesh Garments Fit Better

This could be pretty damn epic, although the proof will be in the pudding. In unveiling this project viewer Linden Lab have decided to go beyond the controversial Liquid Mesh solution and Qarl’s Mesh Deformer Project and release their own solution. The blog post explains that there are problems with getting Mesh clothing to fit the various shapes of Second Life avatars, as opposed to system clothing which just simply fits. In the blog post LL discuss how users have so far been addressing the issue :

“Users have developed two approaches to address these problems:

Rigging garments to the “collision bones” of the avatar skeleton (often marketed as “Liquid Mesh”). This works in current Viewers for some body parts, but there are some avatar shape parameters that do not have corresponding collision bones, so garments do not adapt to fit everywhere on the body.

The “Mesh Deformer” project added code to the Viewer to dynamically compute how to modify each garment shape by looking at how the vertices of the avatar were changed from that of the female and male base shapes.

The Linden Lab development team has studied both approaches, and compared their effectiveness, maintainability, and performance. Neither approach completely eliminates the occasional need for an alpha clothing layer to prevent small parts of the avatar skin from appearing through garments, but both work quite well at resizing garments so that they fit the avatar and move naturally with it. While the collision bones method requires the creator to do some additional rigging, we have decided that because it leverages more of the existing avatar shape system it is likely to be the more maintainable solution and to perform better for a wider range of users.”

However don’t get too excited just yet, this project is far from complete and things could change that make your efforts creating a ton of clothing here, pretty redundant.

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November 19, 2013

Linden Lab Blog To Clarify Tax Information Requirement

Having previously reported that Second Life merchants had been reporting they’d been sent forms related to tax information by Linden Lab, I’m pleased to see that Linden Lab have now issued a blog post regarding the situation. There are still some remaining questions regarding this, some Linden Lab may have the answers to and others the IRS will be the only people with the answers.

The post says:

“The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requires Linden Lab to collect and retain Form W-9 (for U.S. residents) and Form W-8BEN (for non-U.S. residents) at certain transaction volumes. If you reach the transaction threshold and we do not have your completed and signed W-9 or W-8BEN on file, we are required to withhold funds from your account (at the current rate of 28% of your gross amounts received). Additionally, for U.S. residents with 200 or more transactions with a total amount in excess of $20,000 in a calendar year, we are required to file a Form 1099-K with the IRS reporting those transactions for that year.

If you are required to submit a W-9 or W-8BEN form to us, we will email you before the end of the year with instructions on how to do so. Please follow the instructions to complete and submit the required Form W-9 or W-8BEN within thirty (30) days of receipt. You will only need to complete this paperwork once unless your information changes from year-to-year. If you do not receive an email from Linden Lab, we do not need you to complete these forms.”

One would hope that there will be an accompanying knowledgebase article or wiki reference regarding this. As I stated in my previous post on the subject, the likes of Steam and Paypal have information regarding this on their websites.

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November 19, 2013

Why Don’t Amazon, Paypal or Linden Lab offer Virtual Currency Exchanges To Other Business?

One of the issues regarding Cloud Party is the inability to cash out. This is understandable as content creators are more likely to be tempted to engage if they can find financial reward. Cloud Party do allow you to pay for services such as island rentals using Cloud Party coins, so there is a degree of economic movement but it stays firmly within Cloud Party.

Kitely on the other hand allow people to list items on their marketplace with the option of a Paypal payment as well as Kitely credits. There’s no cashing out from Kitely but paypal payments are a way of a merchant getting cold hard cash. Again, like Cloud Party, the inworld currency can be used to pay for services.

However what people would really like to be able to do is to sell Cloud Party coins or Kitely credits in the same manner as Linden Dollars can be bought and sold. The beauty of this solution is that it adds an added level of consumer confidence, because when they make a purchase, they are doing so with an inworld currency, they aren’t handing over details to a stranger in a virtual land. That’s the beauty of the virtual currency.

Recent legislation in the USA has given platform providers the heebie jeebies about users selling virtual currencies, hence why they aren’t that widely available. However you would think that someone would seize the opportunity to tap into this market, be that Paypal, Amazon or even Linden Lab.

Now I’m sure plenty of companies would like the idea of selling virtual currencies to consumers, the part they aren’t so keen on is allowing users to sell that virtual currency. Linden Lab of course do this with the Lindex, so why can’t they expand this to offering a service to other companies?

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November 18, 2013

Dwarfins Continued Evolvement Is Good For Second Life

The Dwarfins team have been busy evolving the Dwarfin experience, back in October they announced the release of achivements to compliment the breedable experience. More achievements were announced shortly after with more in the pipeline.

Achievements add a new dimension to the Dwarfin experience, rather than just concentrating on traits you can now pick up bonuses along the way. Most of the achievements are birth related, for example if you manage to birth a Dwarfin with 7 miner traits, you wll earn the 7T miner achievement. This gives a lease of life to miner traits. However there are a couple of traits that aren’t birth related, for example if you mine up 8 special items then you earn the Dirt Master award …..

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