November 2014 – Page 7

November 5, 2014November 5, 2014

Bad Juju Games Acquire Desura From Linden Lab

Desura has changed hands again with a press release from Linden Lab stating :

As has just been announced, Bad Juju Games has acquired Desura from Linden Lab.

Bad Juju has taken over all day-to-day support, maintenance, and ongoing enhancements to the Desura website and service platform. The Bad Juju team will be reaching out directly to developers with games on Desura and are happy to respond to any questions they may have.

Transitioning Desura to a new owner is great for Linden Lab and our customers, as it allows us to further enhance our focus on creating the ambitious next-generation virtual world, while continuing to improve Second Life and growing Blocksworld.

Desura is a fantastic platform for game developers and players, and we look forward to seeing it continue to evolve and grow, now as part of Bad Juju Games.

The post on the Bad Juju games website explains that this is not a suddent process :

Indie Game and Middleware Tools Developer Bad Juju Games®, today announced that it has officially acquired Desura™, a comprehensive digital distribution service for PC, Mac and Linux gamers from its former owner and operator Linden Lab®. The move comes after several months of coordinated planning by the companies to ensure uninterrupted operation of the Desura service as well as a comprehensive roadmap of new features that will significantly benefit both its users and game developers during the upcoming months and beyond.

Linden Lab has begun an ambitious project to create the next generation of virtual worlds, while continuing to improve Second Life®, and grow Blocksworld®. Transitioning Desura to Bad Juju Game ship enables the company to enhance the focus of its resources on these priorities, while ensuring that spirit of Desura’s original vision lives on and game developers and players on the platform continue to be well served.

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November 4, 2014

OpenSimulator Community Conference November 8th – 9th

If EndgagetExpand doesn’t tickle your fancy then there’s another conference taking place this weekend that is well worth keeping an eye on, it’s the OpenSimulator Community Conference, which takes place on November 8th-9th. Unfortunately inworld tickets are already sold out for the conference but you can register for a free streaming ticket.

The basics of the conference can be found on the about page of the conference website, but I’ll give you a brief snippet :

The OpenSimulator Community Conference is an annual conference that focuses on the developer and user community creating the OpenSimulator software. Organized as a joint production by the Overte Foundation and AvaCon, Inc., the conference features two days of presentations, workshops, keynote sessions, and social events across diverse sectors of the OpenSimulator user base.

The OpenSimulator Community Conference 2014 features four themed tracks and a Learning Lab for hands on hackerspaces, speedbuilds, and more:

Business & Enterprise
Content & Community
Developers & Open Source
Research & Education
Learning Lab

This conference features a lot of speakers whom followers of Second Life and virtual worlds will be familiar with. They include :

Philip Rosedale – High Fidelity
Nara Malone – Greyville Writer’s Colony
Steve LaValle – Oculus VR
John “Pathfinder” Lester – Reaction Grid
Maria Korolov – Hypergrid Business
Ilan Tochner – Kitely
Caledonia Skytower – Seanchai Library
Tranquillity Dexler – Inworldz
Latif Khalifa – Radegast, Singularity
Jessica Lyon – Phoenix Firestorm
Kim Anubis – The Magicians

There are many more speakers whom some of you will be familiar with, it’s a jam packed schedule full of interesting looking discussions.

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November 4, 2014November 4, 2014

Ebbe Altberg Off To The Big Apple To Speak At Engadget Expand NY

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg will be one of the speakers at Endgadget Expand NY this weekend. The website also paints a nice profile of Ebbe and Linden Lab :

Ebbe Altberg is the CEO of Linden Lab, the company best known for Second Life, the most successful user-created virtual world, and Blocksworld, the free build-and-play iPad game for kids and adults. Under Ebbe’s leadership, Linden Lab has now also begun work on the next-generation virtual world, which will be in the spirit of Second Life while empowering creators to go far beyond what’s possible today.Most recently prior to joining Linden Lab in early 2014, 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.

Ebbe is scheduled to take part in a discussion on Saturday November 8th at 1:10pm, entitled; Back To Reality : VR Beyond Gaming and will be joined by

Matt Bell, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Matterport
Ben Gilbert, Senior Editor, EndGadget
Marte Roel, Co-Founder, BeAnotherLab

The blurb for the discussion states :

Rapid 3D visualization of physical spaces, social networking and gender swapping: This is what happens when virtual reality stops playing games and starts getting real.

I’m not sure what to make of that at all.

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November 4, 2014

Ebay Founder Pierre Omidyar’s Second Life Alter Ego

New York Magazine has published an article on Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar : The Pierre Omidyay Insurgency. The article is long and interesting, it deals largely with how the Snowden leaks gave him a cause, as the tag line for the article points out :

The eBay founder was a mild-mannered Obama supporter looking for a way to spend his time and fortune. The Snowden leaks gave him a cause — and an enemy.

Andrew Rice’s article paints a picture of Pierre that took me by surprise, I didn’t realise he was such a philanthropist, I also didn’t realise he had immersed himself with Second Life so much and it’s that information that drew me to the article :

Though he continued to be eBay’s board chairman and largest shareholder, Omidyar receded from view in Silicon Valley. “Pierre has been such a reclusive guy for the past few years,” says Philip Rosedale, who founded the technology firm Linden Lab, developer of the animated interactive world Second Life. During the mid-2000s, Omidyar immersed himself in the Second Life community, adopting a secret identity: a tattooed black man named Kitto Mandala. Even after Omidyar became a Linden Lab investor, Rosedale primarily interacted with his animated avatar. Mandala rode a Segway and wore a T-shirt that said KISS ME I’M LAWFUL EVIL. He could fly, and hardly anyone knew he was really a billionaire.

I’m not really sure why I’m surprised that someone who invested in Second Life was also immersed with the platform. Gawker point to a Flickr profile which appears to be that of Kitto, although the last picture is from 2007, it is actually of a discussion about eBay in Second Life.

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November 3, 2014

The Meauxle Bureaux – Home Of The Moles

In her regular update on the number of sims on the grid, Tyche Shepherd pointed out that Linden Lab had added a couple of sims this week, one of which is named Meauxle Bureaux, home of the Moles, the busy bees of the Linden Department Of Public Works. Now if you’re wondering who the Moles are or what the LDPW is, let’s just take a quote from the wiki page :

The Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW) is a program focused on improvements related to the experience of living on, or visiting the Linden Mainland. The LDPW will organize teams of Resident builders, artists, and scripters (the Moles!) to create new content on Linden Lab’s behalf and to the benefit of all. Rather than divert company resources from areas of development that contribute to important issues like stability and usability, Linden Lab is choosing to go to the experts…

The experts being residents. So I set off to explore this brave new world and found it’s an oldie but a goodie.

The sim may look familiar, indeed it will look very familiar to anyone who roamed the Lumenaria sim at Fantasy Faire 2013 because that’s where most of the build is from. However that was an impressive build and I’m pleased to see it given a second life by the Moles… second life, get it? Haha ok ok I’ll stop.

On the sim itself you will find buildings with a sign indicating which mole occupies the building. They may be moles, but they don’t seem to live in holes. Michael Linden also has a place there as well as a central building which has posters for attractions in Second Life such as portal park.

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