After championing e-commerce during the dot com boom IBM, now wants to champion v-commerce (virtual commerce) and investing roughly $10 million over the next 12 months reports Reuters. Sam Palmissano is set to visit Second Life on Tuesday, following a “town hall” meeting with some 7,000 employees in China, and speak with the more than 250 IBM employees on one of the company’s virtual islands. IBM is already holding meetings and conducting development inside virtual worlds with about 20 major clients.IBM is also looking to build a private 3D intranet where it will be able to discuss sensitive business information What is Secondlife?? Second Life, is a rapidly growing 3D virtual reality, developed by the San Francisco based company “Linden Labs Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.
Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 1,364,786 people from around the globe( a 41% increase).Second Life,” a program where people create a second identity to interact with a million people. It’s a role-playing video game in which players create characters (“avatars”) for themselves, then go about living lives in a 3-D digital world that allows them to create, do, build or be anything they can imagine. They can construct mansions and furnish them, recruit an army and go to war, have relationships and bizarre group sex, attend AA meetings or sit in a coffeehouse There are virtual restaurants, complete with servers,places to eat, and sometimes music. You can teleport yourself somewhere else if you don’t like the food.
Until now 7000 profitable businesses have been set up. The ten most successful residents have approximately earned 200.000 $ each in 2005 Secondlife has a wel lestablished currency( Linden Dollars) and economy, more than half a million U.S. Dollars exchange hands per day at secondlife.Second Life residents do a total of about $6 million worth of business a month, up from about $2 million a few months ago. People are creating office space with actual business hours for the residents, as they’re called, to buy or sell services. A group of librarians built a public library where your person can sit down and read books, or sit in on a lecture.
Some more intresting facts about secondlife:
News agency Reuters has opened an in-world Second Life news bureau. Amazon.com’s product database is available to book merchants operating within Second Life. Toyota offering virtual edition of Scion xb at secondlife. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL)has created an island in Second Life where they demonstrate fluid dynamics. Germany’s top-selling Bild newspaper,launched a weekly paper to the virtual population. W Hotels has built a prototype of its new Aloft hotel brand inside Second Life. Rivers Run Red is bringing TV to Second Life
