3pointD.com

A while back, I blogged about a shopping site that let a community of individual makers of craft products put their stuff up for sale. My interest in it was in some of the geocentric search functions, and the fact that the community was using an avatarized Town Hall to take the pulse of its vendors and make decisions. Now Om Malik reports that Etsy has raised a round of seed funding from some pretty impressive investors. (Go, Etsy! Which is based in Brooklyn, like me.) Om also has a nice piece in Business 2.0 about eCommerce sites and other businesses that are increasingly run by their customers. What I’ll be interested to follow is how many of these communities make use of 3D and other virtual spaces to do their work in. All very promising developments in any case.

3D tech co. Media Machines has a press release announcing the release of its new KML-to-X3D translator for creating 3D browsable content that can be linked from Google Earth. The tool essentially takes KML models, like those found in Google’s 3D Warehouse full of SketchUp models, and translates it to the X3D open standard for 3D browsing. I’m not terribly impressed by what I’ve seen of X3D so far; the Google Earth-X3D mashup that Media Machines flags on its site “takes you to the Statue of Liberty, where a link launches FLUX Player running inside Google Earth’s embedded web browser!” Only it doesn’t, since my default browser is Firefox, and this needs IE. And in any case, when I did download the FLUX player and finally got the page to load, I found myself orbiting the Statue of Liberty in a Web browser (not in Google Earth’s browser, for some reason) while fireworks bloomed behind her and some music played. Seems like something you could do more easily in Flash. So I’m skeptical, but I’m willing to be convinced. It seems like there must be more impressive demonstrations than this. This disaster response app seems like it might take better advantage of the format, but it’s hard to tell. I’d love to see it in action.

Is a Southern Takeover of Second Life on the way? Hot on the heels of Warner Bros. launching Regina Spektor’s latest album in the virtual world of Second Life comes a press release from the Universal Motown Records Group promising “two first-ever virtual artist meet and greets which fans from all over the world can experience in real time.” The artists are hip-hop bad boy Chamillionaire, who will appear in SL on June 25, and frat-rockers Hinder, who will make their in-world appearance the next day. Given that Chamillionaire is a platinum-selling recording artist, this could be Second Life’s most attention-grabbing event to date. It also seems to mark the first ongoing commitment to a Second Life presence by a big real-world media company. But it raises some critical questions about the capacity of Linden Lab’s technology to handle the attention. (more…)