Notes from Virtual Worlds London: Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon's Keynote

Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon opened Virtual Worlds London with a brief overview of Second Life, including the fact that the virtual world has seen 600 million user hours of activity and is projected to hit the billion-hour mark next year. Significantly, the world is changing. The 18-24 bracket makes up 45% of total registrations now, which Kingdon describes as "the platform getting younger as we get older." The application of the world is changing as well.

"In the first wave, there was all kinds of very dynamic experimentation. We're entering a second wave as the platform expands and matures with what people can do. In the first wave there was a great deal of early adoption. [...] It was very much about enjoyment. It was very much about escape. But it was also very much about unconnected virtual worlds," said Kingdon. "In the second wave, we see enterprises thinking about virtual worlds in a very different way. Instead of experimentation, we're seeing businesses ask for solutions that work. We're starting to see that the virtual world is not a substitute for the 2D Web experience. It's what I guess you could say is the assimilation of the virtual world into the 2D Web space. And it's a change I very much welcome."

Driving the innovation, said Kingdon, are global workforce needs, economic pressures, and carbon and cash concerns. Those drive users to stay home instead of travel for work, which promotes the use of innovative collaboration tools.

It's not all business, though. Social computing is going mainstream, broadband and more advanced hardware are pervasive, and sub-par substitutes for interaction, like video conferencing, are driving the need for alternative solutions.

At Linden Lab, 20% of the staff work offsite, spending their time in-world as a tool for collaboration

“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.

Kingdon expects further innovation to continue along those lines, but not, he said, at the expense of spaces for creativity where users can experiment and develop from the ground up.

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, said Kingdon.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

This is all interesting, but we need to know if this "45 percent bracket" has better retention and longer user hours than other age brackets to understand the real impact.

I also fail to see the need to create such harsh divisions between the "socializers" and "escapism" and this brand-new shiny "enterprise" use of prototyping and training. What is a Powerpoint presentation if not a kind of escapism from the reality of trying to implement a plan in real life?! The same acts of imagination are involved in "escapism" as "prototyping" or "training" -- trying to think up ways to convey information and teach people creatively.

I also don't see what is "interoperative" about lots of enterprises having programs like Immersive Workspaces in their individual silos behind firewalls. They aren't interoperable *with each other* -- at least, the vision of One World that Philip Linden once articulated, and the Linden mission "to connect us all to an online world that advances the human condition" -- implying that it was *one* world or at least one connection.

Re: "not, he said, at the expense of spaces for creativity where users can experiment and develop from the ground up."

It's good that there is some remnant of consideration for "mainland experimentation" but...in fact what a lot of people want from the mainland is stability and order, a total end to unregulated ad-farming, more tools to manage groups and land, and IP protection with secure, inworld implementation (not "call your lawyer). Thus, the needs of the socializers and small businesses of inworld SL are not that different than the outworld companies using the software for teleconferencing.

As for LL "not wanting to get in the content business," I wish they'd keep to that mantra when it comes to inworld mainland. Here, the Lindens compete directly with their customers, putting up huge, complex builds now and selling the developed space in direct competition with resident landlords, i.e. on the Bay City and Nautilus City sims.

More thoughts here:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/10/you-can-step-in.html#more

[Chuck Baggett]

Mark mentions "to learn another language".

Are any language teaching companies such as Berlitz or Rosetta Stone using virtual worlds as part of their learning system?