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SECOND LIFE, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Computer services giant IBM has plunged into Second Life at the urging of its “metaverse evangelists” Roo Reynolds and Ian Hughes, using it as a location for meetings, training and recruitment. But the company is also eyeing revenue opportunities that could have it vying with Second Life design firms to bring real-world businesses into the virtual realm.
“E-business was a strategy for us, why not v-business?” said Reynolds, known in-world as Algernon Spackler, at the “My So-Called Second Life” conference in London on Tuesday. “I don’t mean to be competitive with Rivers Run Red or Electric Sheep, but just like we set up a bricks and mortar business online, we could integrate a company’s services in a virtual world.”"Integration with services, integration with data — exactly what we helped people do back in the days of e-business, that’s sort of what I envision us doing,” he said. “Mind you, I’m an evangelist, not a strategist, but if I had to guess that’s where we’re going.” IBM has embraced Second Life to an extent unmatched by any other major company — it has more than 230 employees spending time in-world, and it owns some half-dozen islands. Some are open to the public, but most are private, with restricted access for the public. The $7 billion a year video game industry, especially the fast-growing virtual world and massively multiplayer online game sector, may be too large for IBM to ignore, according to Reynolds, who blogs with several other IBM employees at Eightbar.
“Anywhere there’s a couple of billion involved, a company like IBM is going to have to be interested,” he said. “This isn’t just about some geeks in Hursley,” where IBM’s UK software R&D lab is located. So far in Second Life, IBM has set up a simulation of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, using data that tracks the position of the ball to re-enact points several seconds after they happen. It has also held virtual events such as an IBM alumni reunion. The company could do a lot more, except for concerns about discussing proprietary information on computer servers owned by another company. Topics are limited to what has already been made public. “We’re never comfortable talking about things like patents because we recognize they’re on Linden’s servers,” Reynolds said. “We can’t talk about anything confidential.” In the future, IBM may look to develop it’s own in-house virtual world for the use of employees and clients, he added. Jim Purbrick, aka Babbage Linden, a Linden Lab software engineer and the company’s sole UK-based employee, also spoke at the conference about the company’s plan to transform the Second Life software client and, eventually, its back-end server into open-source software. Such a move would allow anyone to mix their own Second Life-styled virtual world, or make it accessible through a Web browser. “We’re planning to open source Second Life as soon as possible,” Purbrick said. “In one or two years time, you’ll be able to download the Second Life source code and build a plugin for (Web browser) Firefox.”
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