Play Money No More: Non-Virtual Goods to Sell for Linden Bux
by walkerspaight on 10/01/06 at 8:30 am
Cutting out the middleman, SLBoutique founder FlipperPA Peregrine announced at Saturday’s Democracy Island event that his virtual commerce site would soon begin accepting Linden dollars in exchange for tangible real-world goods. Read more at the Second Life Future Salon blog where we heard the news. Then call your accountant.
Raymond Polonsky
Jan 11th, 2006
My company as well will be accepting Lindens for real world services/goods as of February. It’s something I have been speaking to the Lindens about as well.
Raymond Polonsky
2L Hosting – Opening February 2006
http://www.2lhosting.com
Real World Website Design and Hosting for Virtual World Current.
TrannyPet Barmy
Jan 12th, 2006
Although i won’t be accepting L$ for payment, i can pretty much guarentee the accounts i will be offering will be some of the lowest priced you’ll find(outside of shoddy free accounts) for unlimited bandwidth and diskspace MySQL/PHP high quality webhosting.
Perfect for running your SL web presence and SL server applications from.
If any one’s interested drop me a line, tranny@secondcentral.com
Cheers
TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE
Prokofy Neva
Jan 12th, 2006
Why would anybody go through these third-party SL sites to buy RL stuff they could get in RL? It’s like an Amway or possibly a Sam’s Price Club or something where you can get a used Radeon video card for a good price from somebody who knows somebody…or a glorified shoppper for a town…But it’s not a huge-volume industry site that has the staff and knowledge and trucking and capacity to really deal with RL sales, shipping, billing. I’m not buying this one bit.
Many people forget this really basic thing about buying stuff online: after you buy it, somebody has to box it, ship it, and move it in trucks on America’s highways. I can tell you as a former Teamster’s family that this is not light work, and not for the faint-hearted to take up and do successfully and well every day.
What, Jennyfur is going to sit in their living room packing boxes with her resume? Hell, no. But can such a scrappy business generate the overhead to not have to sit and pack boxes?
If you use the Amazon.com model where you make the buyers and sellers do their own shipping and even pay them part of the cost, that might work, but I’m just not getting this…other than of course “swag” related to the “game”.
Papa Doctorow
Jan 12th, 2006
Regarding web hosting…
Any plans to support streaming content (specificly, Darwin Streaming Server)?
Prok: From reading the transcript, sounds more like an E-bay “Buy It Now” model to me, unless they also plan on using auctions. I’d imagine the 3rd party sites would just take a percentage. I couldnt see any of these guys moving into a wholesale market based on the Linden, the value just isnt stable enough. I could see this working becasue I’d imagine there are at least SOME SL users interested in pawning their old stuff in exchange for Lindens, bypassing the various exchanges completely (if I was an instigator, I might suggest that they’re users that are in SL illegally and don’t want Linden purchases showing up on Mommy and Daddy’s Credit Card).
My point being, I see a market for this. The exact economics of it (how much of a discount you’ll have to give on your used goods over the “ebay” value to convince people its worth it to use Lindens directly, and how much you really desire the Lindens) is another topic entirely. One I’d rather let FlipperPA figure out.
I’d also like to point out that I feel as if the people who have used goods that are worth more than the effort to sell them and are willing to accept Linden, and the people who have enough Linden and want to buy other peoples used goods, aren’t exactly going to be a dime a dozen. It’s going to be a buisness based on fees for the sites services, and it’ll rely on it’s volume, not it’s margins if it’s going to be succesful, of that, I’m fairly certain.
Raymond Polonsky
Jan 13th, 2006
Guaranteed won’t be able to beat our services or prices. This is not my first web hosting/design company. We also accept real life money in addition to Lindens. Choice is yours. Anyway, our services are functioning currently, just not open for sign ups until February. We have several in-game and real world businesses hosting right now while we work out the kinks of our control panel which should be done within the next week or two at most.
Yes Prok, we support streaming. Basically anything you can imagine you want supported we most likely support now or can easily get support for. If your interested in our services drop me a message in the game and I can set you up with a trial account until we open our doors to the general public in February.
Sub-domains, SQL, SSI, Perl/CGI, ASP, PHP, ASP, FrontPage (not that you would use it lol), working on supporting Cold Fusion, SSL, you name it. Our backbone/colocation is with a VERY well known worldwide company that I have worked with in the past.
I also feature 24×7 network monitoring, 24×7 physical security, Best-of-breed routers and servers, Red Hat Fedora Core 2 OS, World-class networking including multiple OC-48, OC-12 and OC-3 connections and a fast gigabit Ethernet backbone. Also, Connected to multiple diverse upstream providers totaling 4 Gbps of Tier-1 Internet Bandwidth.
On another note, Tranny if I was you I wouldn’t allow unlimited bandwidth. Just a friendly tip from one host to another (remember I have been doing this for many years), drop the unlimited bandwidth or have very strict rules in place. All it takes is 1 mp3, movie or something like that to suck up all your bandwidth very quickly (I once went through 100GB in 1 weekend due to a 1.2MB file). This will cost you a LOT of money if you go over your bandwidth.
Also unlimited disk space while it sounds good is just a marketing ploy. Most sites will never use more than 50-100MB of disk space unless they are a file download type of site.
Raymond Polonsky
Co-Founder, 2L Hosting
http://www.2lhosting.com
Raymond Polonsky
Jan 13th, 2006
Sorry Papa, misread who had the question about hosting.. I said Prok instead of you. My bad. =)
Raymond