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Joi Ito gave a fun talk at SDForum about being a massively multiplayer online game player, rather than a venture capitalist, and how the player’s experience could lead the development of virtual worlds. “The whole concept of cyberspace is holding us back a little bit,” Ito said. It’s not the case that cyberspace starts when you log into an immersive virtual world like Second Life or World of Warcraft, Ito said. I couldn’t agree more. The virtual world is simply a seamless extension of the real world. “We need to rethink the idea of cyberspace,” Ito said. (more…)

Will Harvey, founder and CEO of IMVU and founder of There.com, gave an afternoon keynote talk here at SDForum titled “Virtual Worlds Meet Instant Messaging,” which is what IMVU is all about, Harvey said. Not only that, but IMVU is “the best 3D instant messenger,” he said — though he noted that the competition isn’t very stiff at the moment. The talk was, for the most part, a case study in how IMVU has developed up to now. (more…)

An interesting discussion broke out at the end of the pre-lunch panel here at SDForum. Daniel James of Three Rings (makers of Puzzle Pirates) took issue with Philip Rosedale’s earlier statement that “the time is now” to build the metaverse. The tools available now are “rickety,” at best, James said. He sees ten years from now as the time when there will the kind of ubiquitous adoption of metaverse technologies in the way that people use the Web today. Furthermore, he argued, the metaverse will move to an open-source model. Until then, we’ll see tooth-and-nail Darwinian evolution and eventually survival of the fittest. Will Harvey of IMVU disagreed. (more…)

An interesting pre-lunch panel at SDForum on the virtual world value chain was moderated by Sharon Wienbar of BA Venture Partners, a $400 million venture fund that invests in software, hardware and life sciences companies. BA has several investments in the game space, including in mobile games, though they don’t have any virtual-world investments yet. “A couple of people have suggested we should start doing VC for in-world businesses,” she said. Her initial reaction was negative, but she later realized that Second Life’s in-world market is bigger than some target markets of companies BA has invested in. “In a virtual world, there is a much longer, more complex value chain” than in the real world, Wienbar said.

The panel included Shital Mehta, founding partner of Shanth Interactive, an interactive communications agency that takes “an untraditional approach to what’s traditionally been PR and marketing”; Will Harvey, CEO of IMVU and founder of There.com; Sibley Verbeck, CEO of Electric Sheep Company (anchor sponsor of this blog); and Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings, makers of Puzzle Pirates. (more…)

Philip Rosedale’s presentation at SDForum was followed by an interesting panel on “in-world culture,” moderated by Dan Terdiman of CNet News.com. Panelists included Wagner James Au of New World Notes; danah boyd, a social media researcher at Yahoo! Research, and a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley doing research in teens’ use of technology; Susan Choe, CEO, StrayFish, who’s been following metaverse technologies since 2000, at first for Yahoo! and now for her own firm, which is currently in the process of launching; and Nicole Lazzaro, president of XEODesign, who says, “I make games more fun.” Her firm works with game-makers like Sony, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft to “create more emotion.” XEO “defines the emotional mechanisms that drive play,” and “heightens the emotional profile in play experiences.” (more…)

I managed to snap a picture of Philip Linden’s slide on how many users in Second Life make a profit (or a loss) on the businesses they run there. Not sure if you can see it very well, but here it is, for what it’s worth:

Philiip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab (makers of Second Life), keynoted the SDForum event on virtual worlds this morning at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The theme of Philip’s talk was imagination, and how the metaverse help harness the power of imagination to improve our experience of the real world. Philip described the metaverse as “a place where you can reinvent the world to work better for you. We can imagine things with our minds that are impossible to create in the real world, or can only be created with great difficulty.” The point of a place like SL is that those things can be created more easily there. He also released some interesting figures, some of which I don’t believe I’ve seen before. (more…)

The New Globe Theatre in Second Life

It’s just one launch, actually, but it’s happening later today: It’s called Millions of Us, a new 3D net services company, and it’s headed up by Reuben Steiger, former evangelist at Linden Lab (makers of Second Life). Millions of Us will help businesses “understand and harness the power of virtual worlds,” according to its Web site. Though Reuben’s currently working alone from a small office in San Francisco’s SoMa district, hiring developers as needed, Millions of Us has already completed two notable pilot projects, and has two more clients signed on for larger projects, including a major record label and a Hollywood effects company. (more…)