These are some of the key messages from yesterday’s keynote speech by Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon at the Virtual Worlds London conference.
The virtual world has seen 600 million user hours of activity and is projected to hit the billion-hour mark next year.
The current wave are enterprises thinking about virtual worlds as a different way to do business as 3d starts to extend 2d web.
Driving the business innovation are
• global workforce needs
• economic pressures
• carbon pressures
• cash concerns
“When you put it all together, you can see for enterprise, not at the expense of the consumer side, which is still very vibrant, the virtual world offers exciting opportunities to prototype, to demo new products, to attend a global event without leaving your home, to simulate and practice disaster preparations, and to learn another language. The possibilities for the enterprise, really, are endless.”
Since Kingdon took the reins of Linden Lab five months ago, the company has been refining its strategy and extending its platform in new directions.
“First of all, we’ve listened to our customers. We’ve done a fair amount of consumer research. We’ve talked to enterprise, educators, government. Everyone wants a robust platform for development. In the consumer side, the want a speedier orientation, and they want to be able to find things more easily. We’re hard at work on all of those things. In enterprise and education, people are asking for easy sign-up to sign people up in bulk, a safe and secure hosted solution. Despite the many urban myths, it’s possible to hold a secure meeting in our hosted Second Life. But people want a solution behind the firewall. We’re working on the alpha now. We have alpha customers signed up. And we’ll have a beta in the first quarter.”
Likewise, customers are looking for out-of-the-box solutions. Linden doesn’t want to get into the content development business, which is why it’s partnering with providers like Rivers Run Red for products aimed at specific use cases, like RRR’s Immersive Workspaces, which announced version 2.0 today.
Down the road, Kingdon expects more integration between the 2D and 3D environments. While some early development around virtual worlds looked at them as substitutions or replacements for the Web and real-world practices, he sees them as complementary, with seamless movement across the environment and Web 1.0 and 2.0 tools and business apps.
Alongside that development, he expects more growth in the use of avatars for identity, a crucial component for interoperability.
