Second Life's Linden Lab sells virtual realities to businesses - San Francisco Business Times:

nadezhdaqedyxos.blogspot.com
The courting of companiee comes at a time of renewed growthfor 6-year-old Seconrd Life that began with the appointmengt of Mark Kingdon as CEO of Linden Lab in May 2008. “Enterprised is a really important growth vector for usbecauser (Second Life is) a really compelling platform for learningy and collaboration. Especially today in large enterprisez that aredistributed (around the Kingdon said. Over the last six months, Lindenb Lab has put together a team of 25 people to market and develop Second Life productd forenterprise customers.
Linden Lab, which does not disclose revenue but says itis profitable, hired more than 100 people in 2008 and has more than 300 employee s in eight offices around the world. The company hired closr to 30 people this year and is currently hiring for 19 Basic accountsare free. The company makes money by selling and renting virtua lreal estate, with premium memberships and by charging a fee on sales of Linden dollars, the currency used The company does not track the number of companies using its services and does not charge them differentl from individual users, but estimates that 15 to 20 percenf of its revenue comes from enterprises and educational And since April, the compant has been testing a “behind-the-firewall” version of Second Life with , IBM, , the and othe r organizations.
The so-called “Nebraska” versio n of Second Life, which is run on an institution’as own servers, will get wider testinyg this summer and is scheduled for generalk releaseby year’s end. The pricing for the privatr version has notbeen announced. “Based on the levell of the interest we’re seeing, we are poisef for explosive growth,” said Amanda Van who joined Linden Lab six months ago as executivew director ofenterprise marketing. “This is not a We’re ready for business. My role is to get that messagd out,” she said.
Van Nuys said a numberd of factors are helpingher cause, includinvg general efforts to cut travekl and meeting costs and reduce carbom footprints. IBM in particular has been an early adopter. In late IBM’s Academy of Technology held a Virtual Worldr Conference on Second Life for 200 top engineers from around the with three keynote speeches and 37 breakout With an initial investment ofroughlh $80,000, IBM estimates that it saved nearluy $350,000 in travel and venue coste and lost productivity. A couple of monthsx later, IBM used the virtual spaces it createe for an annual meeting of the Academy aftef the cancellation of a scheduled real life eventgin Florida.
Some portions of the event also used webcastinb andvideo conferencing. Participants particularly liked the opportunith to socialize with one another in various and the company scheduleda two-hour networkingf event on the last day at picnic tables on a virtual beach. Academy members gatheredc around drinking virtual beers and chatting while others took virtualo hang gliding or jetskiing lessons. “Igt was really cool in terms of the experienceepeople had,” said Karen Keeter, an IBM marketiny executive for digital “People walked away saying they felt like they were at the The thing people liked most was that they really had the abilitg to meet with people.
” Since then, numerous othed groups within IBM have used Seconcd Life dozens of times for meetings smalpl and large, adhoc and planned, Keeter said. IBM now has nearly 100 people working on virtual worldc tools for commercial sale in Second Life and on other she said. The company says its in-world economu is thriving, and that in the last user-to-user transactions totalled morethan $120 millionm in U.S. dollars, up 65 percent from the same period theyear before. Wagner James Au, the author of the book “Th Making Of Second Life: Notes From the New estimated in a blog posting in May 2008 that Lindenh Lab hadbetween $40 million and $50 milliom in annual revenue.
Au credited Kingdon with renewint the brand created by Philip who stepped down as CEO last year and remainsas chairman. “AA lot of Silicon Valley has written SecondLife off,” he said. “Thed tech world will have to revisirt Second Life as a phenomenon in the next six monthseor so.”