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Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture blogs a strategic alliance between two of the most prominent actors in Second Life’s business community, Anshe Chung Studios and branding concern Rivers Run Red. The tie-up was announced about a week ago via an Anshe Chung press release, which says the agreement “will see both parties developing large scale builds, in particular bridging the divide between real world strategic marketing solutions and the logistical deployment of virtual world branded content solutions for the B2B/C sector.”

The deal seems to consist for the most part of a first-look arrangement that gives each company the option to take part in deals that the other brings in. As Tony notes, the alliance could present a challenge to emerging 3D Web services concerns like the Electric Sheep Company (a sponsor of this blog). No word yet on whether any deals are actually in the pipeline, but land baron Anshe Chung has one of the broadest customer bases in Second Life, and Rivers Run Red has handled some of the highest profile real-world projects in Second Life, including marketing development work for Disney, mentioned in the recent Business Week article on SL. Anshe, I know, has approached real-world companies in the past about bringing projects into the virtual world, but nothing has gotten off the ground that I know of. Perhaps this is just the mixed-reality anchor that’s needed.

If nothing else, the deal certainly bespeaks the mini-bubble that’s going on among virtual-world companies at the moment. Part of the challenge, though, will be to convince real-world firms that Second Life’s security problems are not insurmountable. Already, one promising undertaking, in which Wells Fargo was to launch a project in SL that would educate young adults in money managment (and marry them early to the Wells Fargo brand, of course), has left Second Life for ActiveWorlds after encountering security and usability problems on the original platform. Such problems are probably not insurmountable, but they certainly exist, and could well get in the way of future ventures.