Tuesday, 24 April 2007

Wednesday, 18 April 2007

SL Country Stats

Second Life | Economic Statistics

Interesting to see the Top 20 countries in SL:

Country Percentage
United States 31.19%
France 12.73%
Germany 10.45%
United Kingdom 8.08%
Netherlands 6.55%
Spain 3.83%
Brazil 3.77%
Canada 3.30%
Belgium 2.63%
Italy 1.93%
Australia 1.48%
Switzerland 1.29%
Japan 1.29%
Sweden 0.95%
Denmark 0.88%
China 0.61%
Austria 0.56%
Greece 0.55%
Turkey 0.51%
Mexico 0.48%

The UK used to be 2 or 3 behind USA and Canada. Interesting how much Canada has dropped and France risen. Certainly see a lot of French visitors on Daden Prime.


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Created in Birmingham

Created in Birmingham

Nice Brum based blog with an arts focus, and links on to several other Brum blogs.


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Real Life Architects in Second Life

Second Life architect plans artist retreat - Building

Real Life Architects in Second Life (the RLASL Group in SL) is opening an Architecture Island in SL.


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Ernst Adams

Ernest W. Adams

Thuis guy is speaking on the future of computer entertainment to 2050 at a BECTA event in Birmingham next week.


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Monday, 16 April 2007

Friday, 13 April 2007

Nice use of SL for public consultation/pressure

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Second Life ploy for Paris garden

But local residents' association Accomplir (Accomplish) says residents have not been consulted over the gardens which they say are at the heart of local life.

Virtual reward

The association is urging locals to come up with their own ideas for the area's gardens and post them in the online world of Second Life, where people create virtual doubles of themselves called avatars.

Accomplir will shortlist five of the best projects, which will then be displayed on an island in Second Life.

The winner will be announced at the end of June and receive a reward of 275,000 linden dollars (785 euros, £530), the currency used in Second Life.

Accomplir will then go to the town hall with the winning idea, aiming to put pressure on officials to speed up the redevelopment process.


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ComBOTS

ComBOTS

combot

Quite nice take on the desktop avatar idea. Now if only one of those was an AI....


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Micro-UAVs

Float like a robot butterfly - tech - 11 April 2007 - New Scientist Tech

Great article (with video links) on state-of-the-art with mechanical flying insects.


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Tuesday, 10 April 2007

Knowledge Represenation

How To Tell Stuff To A Computer - The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation

Nice simple intro to the topic.


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aLife Ants

YouTube - Ants in Second Life

Nice aLife ants in SL. Now if only they would eat those pesky Cannon Flower seeds.


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Second Life Speedbuild


Click To Play

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MMO market worth $1bn

BBC NEWS | Technology | Virtual worlds are 'worth $1bn'

A Screen Digest report, quoted by the BBC, says that the "market for massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) in the West is now worth more than $1bn (£511m)".

"Revenues from subscriptions to MMOGs will hit $1.5bn by 2011, he said." although limited compared to "developing markets such as video on demand, which is expected to be worth $11.4bn from revenues in four years' time."

"Subscription MMOGs still dominate the market, accounting for 87% of all revenues, said the report, which examines the market only for North America and Europe."

TOP FIVE MMOGs*
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft (above)
RuneScape
Final Fantasy Online
Everquest
City of Heroes/Villains
*determined by subscription revenue
Source: Screen Digest

The report says a number of new MMOG genres were emerging, including:

# Virtual world building games, such as Second Life

# Virtual pet rearing games, such as Neo pets

# More casual MMO puzzle games

# Sports games in which you have to buy items and build up your character

"The inherent social and community-building aspects of MMOGs are widening the sector's influence on other social networking sectors and online games markets"

Earlier this month at the Game Developer's Conference, in San Francisco, the developers of MMOGs predicted that big media companies would be moving into the market.

The Screen Digest report agreed, predicting that "traditional media companies are seeking to bring their non-gaming brands into the 3D online environment.

"These companies aim to build online communities, increase brand awareness and gain access to key consumers that can be monetised to offset falling offline advertising revenue."

"More than 10 million people will subscribe to MMOGs by 2011 [Note: WoW already has 8m so with Runescape and Habbo and SL we must already be past this surely], and many millions more will play online games driven by other payment schemes, such as advertising and virtual purchases, the report predicted."


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Thursday, 5 April 2007

Monday, 2 April 2007

ACME GeoRSS Viewer

ACME GeoRSS Map Viewer

Great little quick and dirty Google Maps viewer for GeoRSS files.


***Imported from old blog***