We’ve been playing around in Second Life for over a year now and clearly remember when first talking about it to some clients and people in the industry, we got the “that’s interesting” response followed by a small shake of the head.
It’s funny how a mere 12 months can change things though. Now it’s hard to pick up a business mag, newspaper or visit a website without coming across an article, feature or reference to Second Life (SL to residents).
We think most of you will know about what it is, but a top line for the others:
“Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents”
You create your own avatar or virtual character to explore this 3D world. You can see and be seen by others and chat with them. What makes this more than a ‘game’ is that SL also has it’s own economic model. You can buy and sell virtual land, build houses and offices on it, and there are many people who’ve created businesses solely designing and making virtual items (from clothing to Helicopters!) for other avatars to buy. The Linden Dollar is the official ‘currency’ for transactions within SL, and you can buy this with genuine $US (exchange rate is approx L$270 / $US1. So, how do people make a living in there? Well, you can also convert your Linden Dollars back into real $US! Crazy? Well maybe, but here’s some interesting statistics:
Total residents: 1,653,274 as @ 28/11/06
(Australia / NZ residents: 33,000 as @ end Oct 2006)
$US spent in the previous 24 hours: US$653,402.00!
Total # of profitable ‘in-world’ business owners: 12,364 as @ end Oct 2006
Total # of ‘in-world’ business partners making US$1,000 – $2,000 profit per month: 160!
Where a community takes hold, the big brands will always follow. SL is no different. In the last 6 months, the following major organizations to establish a presence (offices / retail stores etc) on SL include:
Technology / publishing: Sun Microsystems, C-Net, Wired Magazine
Clothing / sportswear: Adidas, Reebok, American Apparel
Automotive: Toyota
Ad / Media Agencies: BBH, Leo Burnett, MediaCom
This is just the tip of iceberg, there are many more arriving daily, most of whom are buying their own islands – but that’s another story!
So, is SL as it stands, a ‘must do’ for all businesses?
Well in our view, and as it stands at the moment, probably not.
A decision to set up shop in SL needs to be thought through just like any other business decision.
SL is still quite ‘fringe’ in many ways, however only 10 years ago many businesses could see no useful commercial purpose behind forums and chat-rooms!
In our view though, the real inhibitor for explosive growth is the need to download an application to actually get into SL but that may well change, as there are rumours that the SL team are working on a version that will let everyone directly access this world from their browser.
Finally, do we have a presence in SL? Well of course we do, and have had for some months now.
In fact, between us we’ve brought land, built our first office (left), found a better site, sold our original land and then demolished those offices.
We’re now in the process of building a big TOUCH/CAST Next complex on nearly 5,000 sq meters of virtual land. Here’s the front of our new office (below) 
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Click here to check it out ‘virtually’. Just over the road we also have the TCN concept lab where we model up and test cool things for clients. Here’s a cropped pic of a section of the secret concept lab. 