The Equity Kicker

Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life yesterday announced the acquisition of two inworld businesses – reported here in the LA Times.

These businesses broker the sales of virtual goods – kind of like Amazon market place, but restricted to virtual goods for use inside Second Life.  It seems Linden has a strategy to [...]

Techcrunch yesterday reported rumours that Google is building a Second Life competitor.

I have a couple of observations/thoughts about that :

Is it me or are virtual worlds suddenly more fashionable than toga parties in freshers week? To my knowledge just about all the major tech companies have a play in this area now [...]

From Techcrunch:

IAC’s Zwinky has been carefully growing their pre-teen social networking service. It started out as an online avatar creation tool. They later created a virtual world where those avatars could socialize. Usage of the service has been growing, under heavy advertising, as well. They currently have over 9.5 [...]

I wrote back in July that Second Life is riding the Gartner hype curve, and is now rapidly coming off it’s first peak and down into the trough of disillusionment. This article from Nicola Mattina adds a bit to that idea, explaining how the corporations that went into Second Life got it wrong, and [...]

Club Penguin – cuddly 3D virtual playground for 6 to 14 year olds has just been bought by Disney for $350m plus a further $350m earn out.

According to Techcrunch the company is flying with expected revenues of $65m this year and profits of $35m.  Awesome margins.

Club Penguin apparently gives a [...]

LindenLabs have done a great job of building a buzz round SecondLife that has made it seem bigger than it really is and the whole SL hype machine has also had a huge boost from the interest that traditional media has taken in the worlds favourite virtual world. These two things have combined in [...]