Tag: Ebbe Altberg

Posted on

Identity and Name Issues Raise Their Head After Ebbe Altberg Q&A

As part of Second Life’s 13th birthday celebrations an inworld Q&A session called Meet The Lindens takes place. Last night it was the turn of Linden Lab CEO to sit on the couch and answer questions.

SL Newser reporter Bixyl Shuftan reported on the event yesterday and as part of his report he wrote :

Ebbe was then asked if users of Sansar would have the option to chose their own names for their avatars, or would they be having to use real-life identities. Ebbe answered he was leaning to the latter, “I think what’s best for Sansar is real names. … anonymous identities makes things confusing.”

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes picked up on this and blogged : Project Sansar May Require RL Names, Suggests CEO. The comments on Hamlet’s post suggested that many people were not exactly enamoured by this news. Fortunately, Ebbe didn’t say that real names would be required for Project Sansar and this simply seems to have been a matter of crossed wires.

Inara Pey has the posted the full transcript and audio : SL13B: Ebbe on the Lab, Second Life, Sansar and more. Here we can see that Ebbe mentions that Linden Lab have been discussing issues of identity for Project Sansar and that real names are being discussed :

I have a preference, some other team players have slightly different preferences, so we’ll see where it ends up. But I think what would be best for Sansar would be real names, and then the ability to have personas underneath that.

This should not be taken in isolation, reading the full transcript we can see that Ebbe isn’t saying that everyone should have to display real names, but he feels it might be ideal if Linden Lab know your real name and that in certain circumstances you may well be in a setting where real names are a better option :

So I could go into a role-playing, or into an experience as an anonymous user in that context. But to the platform, I am not anonymous. And so, without making that too complicated and confusing, is that the right answer? We’ll see. But I think to, it would certainly help with griefing and other things. And it also supports a lot of interesting use-cases where anonymity is actually just really confusing, and actually gets in the way.

You can think of a lot of professional use-cases where there are teachers and students and professionals having meetings where these anonymous identities makes things really confusing; “I know Bob, I want to talk to Bob. Who the hell is this Jumping Jack guy?”

So we’re still debating this, and I’m pushing in one way, and people are pushing in different ways, and we’ll see where we end up. I mean, unfortunately, to implement real names is also really complicated. Do you hitch a ride with Facebook, or do you have to somehow build your own real name system.

There’s more, a lot more and I urge people to read it in full. If you want to go straight to this part of the transcript go here. The important things to note are that Linden Lab have not yet made a decision but it looks as if they are talking about the possibility of using your real name or a pseudonym depending upon the experience you’re visiting. This is not a new discussion at Linden Lab and has been going on since well before Ebbe Altberg joined the company.

Continue reading “Identity and Name Issues Raise Their Head After Ebbe Altberg Q&A”

Posted on

Ebbe Altberg And Other Lindens Brave The Second Life Forum For Q&A Session

Meet Ebbe Altberg

At SL12B Ebbe Altberg was interviewed live on stage by Saffia Widdershins and Jo Yardley. The fact that it was live inworld was emphasised when gremlins struck and delayed the interview, but Ebbe stayed past his allocated time to answer questions. The video of the interview was recorded by Chakat Northspring and can be found here. Inara Pey, posted a transcript of the meeting, which can be found here.  I posted a hot off the press summary of the meeting, which can be found here.

However there were some unanswered questions and it seems a feeling that there may be some follow up questions. Linden Lab have now blogged that further questions are welcome in a blog post entitled An Interview and Q&A with the CEO :

The interview ended with some audience Q&A, but there wasn’t time to get to all of the audience questions, and of course not everyone was able to watch the interview live in the auditorium and ask their questions.

So, today we’re opening up a new Forum thread to address some of the questions we didn’t get to and to give everyone an opportunity to ask their own. We’ll answer some of the frequently-asked questions we spotted in local chat at the “Meet the Lindens” interview at the top of the thread, but feel free to add your own questions to the forum thread and Ebbe and other Lindens will endeavor to answer as many as we can. Join us in the Forums, here.

The forum thread, which I’ll link to again, is entitled Ask The CEO. Whereas it’s not quite a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, it does give Second Life residents the opportunity to ask question of the CEO, with other Lindens likely to answer some questions too.

Continue reading “Ebbe Altberg And Other Lindens Brave The Second Life Forum For Q&A Session”

Posted on

SL12B Meet The Lindens With Ebbe Altberg, No Scoops, No Bears, But Plenty Of Chatter

Auditorium

Meet The Lindens with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg took place this evening and after a delay for technical issues, burst into life with a very enjoyable Q&A session. Jo Yardley and Saffia Widdershins posed the questions, Ebbe Altberg provided the answers, but he brought no super scoops with him and he also admitted that he was not bearing bears either!

A video will appear in a few days time and there were Lindens in the audience transcribing the meeting so if you want the full, 100% real McCoy version you will have to wait for that to appear. However if you want my version, which did not include short hand and was created in the midst of several crashes, read on. I will do my best to make a fair and accurate representation of some of what was said. I hope I haven’t made any blunders as once again, I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours.

Ebbe admitted that he is proud that the relationship between Linden Lab and residents is much better than it was when he first started working as CEO for Linden Lab. He was talking about communication here and I wholeheartedly agree with him. I complained quite a lot about the Lab’s poor communications in the years before Ebbe became CEO. Ebbe felt that the relationship was a bit tense, I just felt the relationship needed a lot of counselling sessions, but things have undoubtedly improved.

Ebbe is also proud of performance and quality improvements. I do think Rod Humble’s reign also saw performance and quality improvements but Ebbe has certainly been CEO during a period when Second Life has seen some impressive improvements and developments. I’m thinking of things such as the content delivery network here.

Ebbe also talked about how when he arrived the focus on products was a bit scattered, now there is more focus on four core products. The products being Second Life, Blocksworld, Project Sansar and Compliance. I was disappointed that Linden Lab let Versu go and I was happy when they allowed new life to be breathed into it but hearing Ebbe speak like this explains why Linden Lab took those decisions over some of their products.

Now if you’re wondering if Compliance is a top secret virtual world that you’ve never heard of, it isn’t. Compliance is Linden Lab ensuring everything is above board, that they can convince the banks they are working in a responsible manner and that they are working to prevent fraud and identity problems. This explains why Linden Lab have been pushing for people to identify for tax and account purposes and whereas some of the communications regarding that weren’t conveyed as well as they should have been in the early days, it’s clear to see there was a purpose behind the moves Linden Lab made. This also means that when Linden Lab launch Project Sansar, they will be well ahead of a lot of other ventures who want to deal with real money transactions.

Ebbe also touched upon trust, more than once. One area where he talked of trust was with regards to faster cash outs. Linden Lab are looking at ways to make it possible for people to cash out within 24 hours for people who pass a trust threshold.

Another area where trust got mentioned was with regards to Project Sansar. People wondered whether people would need payment info on file to sell in Project Sansar. Ebbe suggested that no final decision had been made but they are looking at a system whereby the more Linden Lab trust you, the more you’ll be able to do in Project Sansar. However in another area of trust Ebbe was brutally honest. Whereas Linden Lab can do a lot to stop content theft, they simply can’t stop it full stop. Ebbe pointed out that DRM on films and video games doesn’t stop content theft and that people always seem to find a way. However don’t take this to mean that Linden Lab won’t take measures to try and stop content theft in Project Sansar, it’s just that the cold harsh issue is that they can’t guarantee they can stop it.

Continue reading “SL12B Meet The Lindens With Ebbe Altberg, No Scoops, No Bears, But Plenty Of Chatter”

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Ebbe Altberg Off To The Big Apple To Speak At Engadget Expand NY”

Posted on

Ebbe Linden Needs To ….

One of the things about being a blogger is finding something to write. A lot of the time a blogger finds the material to base their post on elsewhere, … actually this happens a lot. This post will unashamedly use material from someone else. The reasons for this are because the material is cutting, funny and relevant. I’m heading off to Twitter for this.

There’s a lot of advice going around on what Ebbe Linden needs to do to make Second Life awesome. Both SLUniverse and the official Second Life forums have threads full of advice. However one brave soul has been collecting this advice from Twitter users, adding their own, putting their tongue firmly in their cheek and creating a Twitter account of @EbbeNeedsTo.

Now some of these are funny, some of them may not tickle your fancy, you may found the whole thing a bit silly. The first thing to say is that you should ensure that you have your sense of humour turned on if you read that Twitter feed because some of the posts may be about one of your important issues or pet favourites.

For example:

I mean come on, Versu is a brilliant project … that Linden Lab decided to ditch because they don’t think it’s so brilliant and they have a lot more information about it than me! Pah, but hey I can take it, healthy disagreement is good. I mean it could be worse, the account could be poking fun at SLUniverse, which is a site I think has a lot of good information on … oh wait …

Noooooo! However this poking fun at suggestions and ideas is actually quite brilliant in so much as it brings issues to light and also brings to light the fact that we don’t all agree. Healthy disagreement is good. There are many more issues raised, far too many for me to post about here, but I will cover some more.

Continue reading “Ebbe Linden Needs To ….”

Proudly powered by WordPress
Follow

Get the latest posts delivered to your mailbox: