This guy is very good at blowing smoke up people's asses.

The way to the next Metaverse generation is a Browser based 3D Application.

And the Utherverse App is wide away from that.

Utherverse is no competition for open structured Grids like Opensim is.

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The comment’s server IP (209.68.2.92) doesn’t match the comment’s URL host IP (216.92.118.247) and so is spam.

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The comment’s server IP (213.251.189.204) doesn’t match the comment’s URL host IP (213.186.33.19) and so is spam.

That's possible in SL too where you might get thousands watching a Metanomics show or other event but from different sims. If you can only render so many avatars and only enable so much perception of chat and realistically interact only with the same 20, or even 100 people, in another world with this "10,000" then what is the point of bragging?! It's not as if you are meaningfully able to pick anyone in the crowd of 10,000 and interact with them, so don't be silly. If you don't render the 10,000 or even 100, stop making the claim. The 100 that might be a bit laggy in SL are all people I can really interact, talk to, give objects to, and show things to in real time. Thank you, that works for me, I don't need 9999 other grey avatars along with that.

I don't know why geeks make such a big fuss about downloads and imagine that consumers need web browsers. They don't. Millions are happy to download and play World of Warcraft for $15.95 a month with nary a whimper. Even Second Life has 1.5 million in 60 days willing to download a world. With browser worlds, you are merely encountering the nuisance later in the session, when it constantly loads and loads and loads to make the world visible or enable interaction or rez the next sim when you teleport to it. It's actually a worse experience. Those complaining about "walled gardens" invoke consumer convenience but what they really mean to say is "we need hook-in ability to sell our APIs and widgets off this platform" — and I'm sorry, the consumer is not here to help you with that, and might likely rather take the services from the original platform provider than endlessly resupply personal data and credit cards to widgeteers without track records.

What it sounds like to me that Shuster is doing here is cynically and nihilistically destroying the value of other worlds by undercutting their land market by offering free land, but then signing lucrative contracts with some larger enterprises or ad buyers. The same cynical model, essentially, as Craig's list, which gives ads for free, except for employers who have to pay $25 — but that undercuts newspaper ads and helped destroy classifieds for newspapers and helped kill off their ability to pay for good journalistic content — all in the name of Craig Newmark getting fairly wealthy and then funding only lefty causes he approves — sort of a latter day Robin Hood.

Then the "employers" that buy the ads are mainly escort services anyway, and eventually the states attorney generals crack down on these ads as creating a climate of criminality for illegal prostitution and a setting where even murders take place.

Those who cynically devalue property and use sex to lure in the masses to provide something for adsters to data scrape eventually find that if the law doesn't come for them first, users leave because they have no rights and no valued property, either.

I guess I will stick with Second Life and the Lindens which, like democracy, are the worst system — except for all the others. They have a TOS and a history of judicial decisions of sorts that more or less constitute something akin to the rule of law.

However, your reaction — that this may scare away business customers — is exactly the point of the story. How will Utherverse attract enterprise users if most of their marketing consists of selling virtual sex?

- Maria

http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/9823541.shtm

and I quote

" Adult Web Sites Settle FTC Charges

"Free" Site Operators To Provide Refunds To Consumers They Billed

Operators of "free" adult Web sites, who claimed they required a credit card number just to verify consumers' age, but then placed unauthorized charges on consumers' credit cards, have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that their scheme violated federal laws. The settlement will require the Web operators to provide refunds to consumers who were improperly billed, to post "clear and conspicuous"disclosures of their billing practices on their Web site, and will bar violations of the Truth in Lending Act and the FTC Act in the future.

The FTC alleged that Xpics Publishing, Inc., and its principals, Mario G. Carmona and Brian M. Shuster, hosted a variety of adult web sites offering "free" viewing, or "free 30-day" or 90-day trials. Consumers were required to provide credit card information to verify their age. But consumers who visited the sites soon discovered that their credit cards were billed, sometimes in a matter of hours, after they registered for the "free" trial, the agency alleged. Xpics advertised that consumers who canceled in a timely manner would not be charged any fees, but Xpics used a variety of tactics to make it impossible for consumers to cancel their registration."

would you deal with a company whose owner had such a track record and hand your credit card details to them?

If it looks like bull crap, and it smells like bull crap….. Guess what, there's a good chance that it is bull crap.

I personally am VERY excited about having a web-based viewer for the Second Life/OpenSim/Real Xtend worlds. It will make this technology much more accessible to the public at large.

Meanwhile, most OpenSim and SecondLife deployments these days seem to be oriented towards INTERNAL business applications, not retail-focused stuff. For example, the IBM Lotus Sametime 3D product is designed for internal collaboration. Schools and colleges are using OpenSim and Second Life to hold classes. Architects use this to do walk-throughs for clients. I personally am mostly interested in these small, cost-efffective, and bottom-line-oriented uses of virtual worlds. Technology hype comes and goes, often without any successful businesses uses to show for it. But the OpenSim-Second Life-Rex stack of applications seems to be steadily growing in actual enterprise users. — Maria

No consumer business is going to use that kind of technology or strategy to reach it's customers. They know they have to be on the web where everyone is. That is why since early 2008 consumer brands and products have been abandoning Second Life. It is about the user access experience and being on the web. Unfortunately for Second Life they have an additional issue beyond the technology and access challenges for consumers, which is that their content is too adult for any consumer brand to be near.

But the access and technology unfriendliness (compared to web sites, Flash, 3D web experiences like Vivaty, etc) for consumers are the real deal breaker issues. IMO.