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Second Life has rolled out some great features recently, such as media-on-a-prim, which are great for business. And chief product officer  Tom Hale’s promise of mesh imports in the second quarter of this year is also great news. As a business user, both of these features promise to be veryRead More →

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Virtual worlds have been offered up in recent weeks as alternatives to physical events because they are disaster-proof. No volcano or tsunami can take down the whole Internet. And virtual events are particularly budget-friendly during that other kind of recent disaster — a financial crisis. But virtual worlds are proneRead More →

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The owner of the Aesthetica sim — a rich and detailed artistic build created over the course of several months — learned on Monday that his region was gone for good. And five months of scheduled nightly backups? Never happened. What happened to his region could happen to other regionRead More →

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Virtual worlds run by non-profit organizations focus on providing a low-cost platform for other non-profits and individuals. To many in the non-profit sector, in-world economies belong on for-profit grids like Second Life and Blue Mars. However, some non-profits running grids on the OpenSim platform are beginning to embrace in-grid paymentsRead More →

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Early mainstream adoption of enterprise immersive software will most probably not take place in 2013 because of issues regarding the ease of use and the scalability of those immersive environments. That is what Erica Driver, a co-founder and principal at ThinkBalm, told me. I interviewed Erica about OpenSim and theRead More →

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Press Release: ProtonMedia Named “Cool Vendor in the High-Performance Workplace” by Leading Analyst Firm Vendors selected for the “Cool Vendor” report are Innovative, Impactful, and Intriguing LANSDALE, Pa. —ProtonMedia, the developer of the ProtoSphere virtual collaboration environment for the high-performance workplace, announced today that it has been included in theRead More →

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Press Release: UK Company wins U.S. Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge Birmingham, UK — UK Virtual Worlds solution provider Daden Limited has won first place and second place prize respectively in two categories of this years inaugural U.S. Federal Government’s Virtual World Challenge (FVWC). Birmingham-based Daden entered both its PIVOTE andRead More →

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Two more grids have switched to the recently-released hypergrid-enabled OMC (Open Metaverse Currency) from Virwox, FrancoGrid and Avatar Hangout, bringing the total number of grids using the currency to six. The other four grids supporting the currency are Grid4Us, GermanGrid, OpenNeuland, and WilderWesten. Between them, the six grids total overRead More →

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Press Release: Murrow Center 3D Newsroom Debuts in Second Life A Shared Media Experience and Citizen Journalist Training Center Sponsored by the McCormick Foundation PULLMAN, Wash. – The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University and the McCormick Foundation are partnering for the creation of the MurrowRead More →

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If you’re a business manager considering rolling out virtual workspaces, you may think that an avatar identity is nothing more than yet another user account, the login credentials for a particular piece of virtual world software. At second look, you might think that avatar identities are closer to email addresses.Read More →

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The world’s top 40 OpenSim-based grids gained 1,055 regions over the past month, from 9,533 to 10,588, an increase of more than 11 percent. By comparison, Second Life grew just 1.4 percent during the same time period, according to data from Grid Survey. As usual, OSGrid was the single biggestRead More →

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There are few things worse than making a large investment in technology only to find out a couple of years later that the rest of the world has decided to go in a different direction. Not only do you now have to put in the time and money to ripRead More →

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Press Release: Virtual Runway Helps Fashion Designers Accelerate Their Sales and Marketing Fashion Research Institute launches immersive, interactive runway show for apparel industry NEW YORK —  This month, fashion leaps forward at warp speed as Fashion Research Institute launches Virtual Runwayâ„¢, a 24/7 on-demand 3D runway show service for fashionRead More →

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Former Linden staffer Meadhbh Hamrick has vowed to continue her fight for virtual worlds interoperability. However, the commitment on the part of Linden Research is unclear, and the project is currently being overshadowed by the success of the hypergrid, an alternative method of bridging worlds. Hamrick — also known asRead More →

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Last week, I surveyed the state of OpenSim commerce, in the column Business in OpenSim. This included the beginnings of in-world retail shops, OpenSim hosting providers, and design and development services. These are new industries, only really born last year, when OpenSim became stable enough for deployment and hypergrid-enabled. ButRead More →

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Educators in primary schools, colleges, and other institutions looking for lower costs, better controls, and no age restrictions are considering switching from Second Life to its open source alternative, the OpenSim virtual world server platform. The OpenSim server software can be used to power an entire public grid, or aRead More →

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[Update: You can browse all hypergrid-enabled public OpenSim grids with Hyperica, the directory of hypergrid destinations. Directory indexes more than 100 shopping and freebie store locations.] Is it too early to start doing business in OpenSim? We are certainly not in an age of v-commerce, though we can see itRead More →

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Clever Zebra is about to roll out its Campus toolset for educators in OpenSim, company president Nick Wilson tells Hypergrid Business, with work already underway for the first beta customers. OpenSim is an open source platform for creating and serving virtual worlds, which uses the same viewers and interface asRead More →

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Press Release: The Hypergrid Worlds directory of hypergrid-enabled destinations indexes 100th regions yesterday The Hypergrid Worlds directory of hypergrid-enabled destinations has indexed its 100th regions yesterday. The directory, a service of Hypergrid Business, is a hierarchical, categorized listing of sites accessible via hypergrid teleport in more than 30 worlds runningRead More →

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The Internet is a wide, and anonymous place. For me, it’s always a slight shock when I comment on someone’s blog post — and they comment back, or send me a personal “thank you” email.  Except for these blogs, most Websites are run by anonymous Web administrators, and when I’mRead More →

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Press Release: Immersive Education 2010 Summit Attendees to Receive $2,500 in Permanent Virtual World Land BOSTON, Mass. – The Immersive Education Initiative today revealed that it will provide permanent virtual world land for one year to every school and non-profit organization that has at least one teacher, administrator, or studentRead More →

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Back in the early days of Internet technology it was feasible to have “security by obscurity” — putting up a document on the Internet, say, but making the address so complicated that nobody would be likely to stumble upon it by accident. That was in the days before decent searchRead More →

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One of the common complaints enterprises have about OpenSim is that if they set up a private grid, they’ll have to create all the content from scratch. Employees will have to create their own hair, fashionistas will have to make their own shoes, teachers will have to create their ownRead More →

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New Orleans law firm Jones Walker has been conducting meetings and training programs in Second Life, the company announced this month. “We created office space where we could conduct meetings, make presentations, provide training, and explore the applications of Second Life to the law firm environment,” said chief marketing officerRead More →

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Press Release: First On-Demand, Photo-realistic Virtual Meetings & Events Platform Launches at DEMO Spring 2010 March 22 /PRNewswire/ — [DEMO Spring 2010]  Today, VenueGen (www.venuegen.com) announced the official launch of its open beta at Demo 2010 in Palm Desert.  After successful pilots resulting in overwhelmingly positive reviews from beta customersRead More →

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Business media giant UBM will triple the number of its InXpo virtual conferences this year, the company said in a statement. According to an agreement the two companies signed earlier this month, UBM will hold 100 virtual conferences this year, up from 30 in 2009. Under the agreement, UBM’s UBMRead More →

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In the last couple of weeks we’ve been traveling all over the hypergrid, here at Hypergrid Business, as preparation for the launch of our Hypergrid Worlds directory of hypergrid destinations. And we’ve been shocked — shocked! — to find that many region owners aren’t following basic design principles. We’ve beenRead More →

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Press Release: Queen’s University Faculty of Law will host Canada’s first virtual law conference on March 18. Roughly 20 academics from Canada, the U.S. and around the world will gather at the Queen’s University Faculty of Education Island in the virtual world of Second Life to discuss the relationship betweenRead More →

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Coca-Cola’s virtual presence in There.com is now history, but few other enterprises will be affected by the loss of this virtual world, experts say. “Unfortunately, There.com ceased operations,” Coca-Cola said in a statement. “As CCMetro is part of the larger There.com environment, CCMetro closed as well.” The company said itRead More →

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One of the great things about the Internet is that it connects people who, in the past, have had a hard time keeping in touch. In researching the phenomena of medical amputees rehabilitating and re-integrating into their home communities, it has been shown that peer support is a real keyRead More →

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When business users get together for a virtual meeting, they’re not interested in showing off the latest dance moves or hairstyles – they want to share PowerPoint presentations, work together on spreadsheets, and collaborate on documents. At least, that’s the experience of virtual world vendor Teleplace, which counts over 100Read More →

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The world’s top 40 OpenSim-based grids gained over 900 regions over the past month, from 8,626 to 9,533, an increase of more than 10 percent. As usual, OSGrid was the single biggest gainer, with 609 new regions. The biggest growth was at OSGrid, which gained 847 regions. OSGrid allows anyoneRead More →

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Press Release: More than Half of Social Gamers Willing to Complete a Marketing Action to Earn Virtual Currency Data also shows strong incremental lift from new alternative payment methods San Francisco – March 10, 2010 – While most game developers struggle to monetize even three percent of their users throughRead More →

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Enterprises rolling out new OpenSim grids are often concerned about security issues of running OpenSim, and justifiably so. OpenSim is alpha software and still poses some security challenges. However, the security level of a particular OpenSim deployment depends quite a bit on how it is configured. Here are the mostRead More →

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Press Release: Open Wonderland Foundation Launch St. Paul, Minnesota, March 10, 2010 – Today Ken Miller, the CEO of Virtual Learning Labs, announced the formation of the Open Wonderland Foundation and the creation of the Open Wonderland virtual world platform. The Open Wonderland platform is a “fork” of the ProjectRead More →

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PRESS RELEASE: 3DXplorer Cloud-Based Full 3D Immersive Platform For Virtual Events Powers CloudSlam’s Virtual Expo Hall and The C-Level Networking Lounge Irvine, California & Toronto, Canada – CloudSlam’10, a virtual conference produced by Cloudcor Inc March 23 – March 25 2010 developed to promote collaborative analysis of the latest trendsRead More →

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PRESS RELEASE: Introducing the New COMDEX, the Next Generation in Virtual Events Creating a Global Connection for the Technology Sales Community Framingham, MA, March 4, 2010 – Everything Channel, a UBM company and the leader in technology sales channel media and services, today announced the re-launch of COMDEX as aRead More →

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OpenSim moved one step closer to full support for Second Life Viewer 2 media on in-world surfaces this week, with the completion of an extensive project to rearchitect the way the open-source software works. Last week, Linden Lab released a new viewer for Second Life — and compatible worlds likeRead More →

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Press Release: There.com is closing on March 9th, 2010 In 2003, There.com was launched as a 3D Immersive Virtual World for everyone. Unlike other products, There was designed from the beginning to be a welcoming and comfortable place for everyone – not just gamers, not just people over 18, notRead More →

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Germany’s Grid4Us and GermanGrid launched in-world money systems yesterday, using the VirWox virtual payment system. The virtual money — Open Metaverse Currency — is fully convertible with US Dollars, Euros and other real world currencies, as well as with Linden Dollars. Unlike previous attempts to set up currencies for in-worldRead More →

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In a move which may be followed by other current and future private world operators, the Italian Cyberlandia grid has switched from a centralized to a distributed architecture model. The result? Lower stress on central servers, and better scalability. With traditional grid architecture, a virtual world is composed of manyRead More →

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Anders Gronstedt, president of the Gronstedt Group, presents a case study about how high-level executives make some of their biggest decisions in Second Life today at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern time at a live taping of the Virtual Worlds Keynote program. Anders Gronstedt, someone with tremendous experience bothRead More →

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Can’t wait for Oscar night? I know I can’t. So here at Hypergrid Business we’re doling out our own awards. First, a little video introduction. This is a little sailboat trip that OpenSim’s own Bri Hasp took across a few virtual worlds. Yes, it is now possible to sail aRead More →

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Last week I attended two conferences simultaneously, one in Cancun, Mexico (MPI Meet Different) and the other in Santa Clara, Ca. (Virtual Edge Summit)  Such is the life of a virtual traveler!  While I certainly missed the face-to-face interaction at both events, the experience of navigating two conferences at theRead More →

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If you think that the virtual worlds are over hyped, and the metaverse of hyperlinked OpenSim grids will never amount to anything, you don’t have to think up an original blog post — just take a look at this prescient Newsweek article from 1995: The Internet? Bah! Here’s what CliffordRead More →

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Press Release: ThinkBalm’s “The Distillery” — an immersive technology selection experience Source: ThinkBalm What do whiskey and enterprise immersive software have in common? Not much, unless you’re on ThinkBalm Island in Second Life (or, shortly, the ThinkBalm region of ReactionGrid). We are excited to announce that construction on The DistilleryRead More →

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Two major things happened before the World Wide Web took off in a big way. One was the fact that individuals were able to create Web sites and link them to other Web sites. Once individuals did it — individual researchers, individual teachers, individual hobbists, individual company employees — theyRead More →

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Last summer I decided to open a virtual office for my company. I don’t just write for Hypergrid Business — I run a company with staff in China and India, among other locations, providing outsourced editorial services to U.S. business magazines. Basically, we run foreign news bureaus for our clients.Read More →