Anshe Chung Takes Flight
by Pixeleen Mistral on 02/03/07 at 8:21 pm
SL’s business girl has a business life on British Air
by Onder Skall
Wonderland’s world-travelling gaming guru Alice reports that “business life”, an in-flight magazine for British Airways, carries a cover story featuring our own Anshe Chung. Unfortunately, as she puts it: “no mention of flying willies.” I guess you can’t have everything.
That cover art is really something, though. Anybody know how to get my avatar to look that smooth?
Speaking of Wonderland, Raph Koster (of Areae Inc.) ran an interesting comparison based off of Alice’s ponderings of NCSoft’s claims. A figure of 67 million was given as the number of NCSoft’s customers, although later comments clarified that this was a figure for total registrations. Sound like a familiar story?
Meanwhile, Raph says, Habbo Hotel claims 70 million. That’s a 7 with one-two-three-four-five-six-seven zeroes after it. After a wild claim like that, is it even humanly possible to feign shock at Linden Labs’ population claims?
Nacon
Mar 2nd, 2007
“Anybody know how to get my avatar to look that smooth?”
I believe that was done on a shitty Poser.
…and that’s one fugly cover.
Maria LaVeaux
Mar 2nd, 2007
Considering it’s British Airways, wouldn’t it be “Flying Todgers”?
As for the Cover Avatar, It looks as though it was produced in Poser, and had a Little Post Work done in PS.
Anshe’s activities are Really attracting attention to SL, this is, I think the Fourth article i’ve seen on her this last Fortnight.
Maria.
Onder Skall
Mar 3rd, 2007
Guys… the cover avatar comment was tongue-in-cheek. Damn the medium of text! Damn it all to hell!
Yeah Anshe is the avatar of the moment. It’s a compelling story: make millions in worlds most people aren’t even aware of. Still, sooner or later it will seem like old news.
Comment Tard
Mar 3rd, 2007
The next story of the moment is already happening… the media is starting to pay attention to hol LL’s fast-and-loose registration policies are opening the door for kids to come in… and making it easy for evil doers to hide.
Bring back CC verification you Linden Tards.
You are only going to feed the media cycle of 1) tell people about this great new thing (for SL, the Anshe era) 2) tear down the great new thing by pointing out how much of a threat to society it is and 3) allow the no longer new thing to ‘redeem’ itself. 4) ignore the thing completely.
Wayfinder Wishbringer
Mar 3rd, 2007
>The next story of the moment is already happening… the media is starting to pay attention to hol LL’s fast-and-loose registration policies are opening the door for kids to come in… and making it easy for evil doers to hide. — Comment Tard<
That one was forseeable. The moment they opened up registration to bogus email addresses, the board seriously went downhill. They shoulda forseen they would receive flack from the angry-parent community. Serves ‘em right.
As for Ansche, a lot of people have a lot to say about her. But the woman is sharp, I’ll give her that. Not always popular, has a lot of enemies, but it’s not all that hard to make enemies on SL, considering the abnormal percentage of antisocials who are drawn to the anonymity of the board.
There have been several articles on Ansche, and understandably so. She went from noob to millionaire, pretty much on her own from what I understand. But what these articles never mention are the vast majority of people who DON’T succeed on SL. Yeah, people fail in business in RL too, but in most cases it’s due to their own failures: bad management, lack of foresight, poor capitalization, etc.
On SL, people lose businesses because the system suddenly changes permissions out of nowhere and their hard work overnight becomes copyable and public domain. Or the system crashes and suddenly half their inventory is missing. Or LL makes another arbitrary decision and suddenly they can’t log on to the system any more. Or a partner steals from them and Linden Lab takes an oh-well attitude or because someone hacks their inventory and Linden Lab does nothing about it, or a club moves in next door and drags their before-vibrant business to zero-movement lag. Or any one of a dozen other reasons, all out of the investor’s control.
Those articles point to Ansche as a success story– but we never see them mention that she’s a very, very rare exception to the rule.
Yeah, there are people who have proven to be successful on Second Life. There are people that operate full-time businesses on Second Life. There are far more that have lost their shirts on Second Life. The articles paint Second Life as a vibrant business environment, when the truth is– it’s likely one of the shakiest, most unstable investments a person could possibly make.
Congratulations to Ansche. Hard work and brains paid off. If her case were more common, SL might have something to brag about.
Brace
Mar 4th, 2007
Amen Wayfinder
Hit the nail on the head