Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

just installed Second Life

I’ve never been much of a gamer. When I bought my PSP in January at Fry’s in Las Vegas, the sales clerk asked me what 2 games I wanted with it (maybe $10?). I said “what?”. “yeah”, he said, “we have a special promotion, you can buy 2 games with your new PSP for just xxx $”.

“Nah…” I said, as I really seldom play anything.

Actually I have a great desktop at home. Dual screen, bi-pro, lots of RAM (3 GB), dual pro. And I have NO GAME installed. Maybe I should find one that would suit my style: I don’t like shoot them ups, beat them up, kinda games. Nor the complicated ones where you have to spend hours of your time just trying to figure out how they work.

Every now and then I hooked my son’s Nintendo Game Cube to play with him. We have 6 games, but the only 2 I play with him (and he doesn’t play much either) are Super Mario Kart (I like the dirt track only), and Snowboard 1080° (or something like that). On my phone, I only play Sudoku. I tried “grand theft auto” on the PSP the other day when Smooth lended it to me. 20 min was all I could take on that one

So, unless you guys have an idea of what I should be experimenting with… And I know that the game market is larger than the cinema industry… Probably I should get into it at some point. I saw an Xbox 360 the other day. I’m interested for its windows MCE capabilities, not really for the games. Anything good in there ?

So back to the title of this post: Eric Rice at vloggercon showed me what he was doing on Second Life: trading goods, buying / selling land, hosting concerts in his conference center; he told me about what the BBC was doing there, how people were setting up virtual record labels, how the vloggercon conference was streamed live inside it (and Supernova will be streamed live as well), etc. Now this is REALLY getting me interested. 

I touched upon the economics of WoW in an old post, and more recently in the possibilities of a Habbo-hotel-like venture, called Taatu. I will explore this new business world more in the future. I’ve seen the many posts that Joi Ito has devoted to WoW. I can only guess he was also looking at the economics of the new world as well.

By the way, anyone else out there on SecondLife ? My character is called “Rodrigo Television.

update: interesting article on Trademark issues in second life.

Just discovered another 3D world: Taatu

While browsing for T-shirts on Lafraise.com…

And, they have registered about 30.000 Taatu users in only 4 weeks!

Their interface is ultra-slick (just created my avatar with a beard and orange trousers…). I’m online on taatu right now in the disco...

Aren’t VCs interested in companies / projects who can aggregate users at a very fast pace ?

Update: the site for the moment is only in French & Dutch. I see autopromotion links in the interface. Indeed, a great way to sell advertisements to a very captive audience. Another B-model would be to sell subscriptions, but I like the casual feeling on this world, with no combats, just a 3D way of IRC. Actually an interface to IRC would be an awesome idea! Hum... Just for the sake of it, I'm creating a new 3D category on this blog.

My previous post on lecentredumonde.com showed that those guys didn't get it. But this universe is great. Next issue is with multiple IDs on different worlds that will allow 3D chats. Is there a standard out there for interconnecting all these worlds? I don't want to repeat the horror of Instant Messenging where we all have 5-6 IM accounts. Oh!!! (and I'm typing while I'm thinking about this): who's going to be the first to interface this type of virtual worlds with IM systems ... !?

Update 2: Actually, all the locations here are like what we had yesteryear with the minitel and private chatrooms. You can even create your own "appartment", with specifics for DISCUSSION, DATING, GAMES...

I'm running around the bar now. You can buy their virtual money (TATs) by SMS or phone ! 1,50 euros for 20 TATs. Virtual money in this system allows you to buy stuff such as furniture for your appartments.

They are also trying to get viral: you get 5 free TATs if you invite a friend. That's a low customer acquisition cost...

Update3: just came back to this world, after letting my character sit in an appartment with other people to observe their behaviour. It's really like a chatroom, and people play games together (they all run to a wall at the same time, etc.) bringing visual interaction to a chat room. I suppose this can get very sticky and enable very regular visitors to quickly create communities. They only need to extend the tools so that users can start generating new environments, new appartments, stores, etc. 3D user generated content...

Also very interesting: they have a theater in which they show trailers. They can get paid for that, and starting adding e-commerce: sell tickets to shows, and even extend the whole model for e-commerce.

They have machines in this world distributing virual magazines (the Taatumag) that you can readonscreen, and sponsored by NRJ radio, Cinebel (a movie portal), Out soon (?), netevents (?à, and playerOne.be (a game portal). Great exposure (when the community grows) for these advertisers.

There's even airfield: the popup says that in the short future you'll be able to FLY to another island (so another part of the game) for a few TATs... Another use then of virtual money to access more levels.

This company operates out of Belgium. Good stuff.

Update 4: here's a little screencapture at the picnic section. I'm just sitting there, around 3am. There is indeed some activity...

Update: readers have pointed me to HabboHotel, whose existence I had never heard of. Indeed a heftly 3rd round of financing last year by Benchmark capital for $23.5m... I should have noticed. Taatu is clearly a copycat, although I prefer it's graphical design (slightly simpler, better). BY the way we made it to the alarm:clock this morning... Funny.
There's probably room for a second player in this space. Now someone's got to figure out how to interconnect them at some point, although I expect each platform to try to reach the largest audience on its own.