Archive for 'Virtual Business, Finance and Economics'

Teleplace/QWAQ Liquidated By Financial Singularity?

But transhumanists rejoice as open source software immortality saves Turing Church Online The assets of Teleplace are being liquidated after the business-oriented 3D virtual meeting place hit a financial singularity which prevents the venture’s continued operation, according to a mailing sent to potential creditors – including the Alphaville Herald’s own part time typist/technical advisor Mark [...]

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Second Life SexBed Industry Thrown Into Chaos

Stroker Serpentine’s SexGen 600 animation bed now full permission – and free the end of an era This was without question an historic day. If there was any question about Stroker Serpentine leaving Second Life, it was erased Wednesday morning when he made the flagship of his SexGen business available with copy/transfer/modify permissions. The bed [...]

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Cosbycoin Hack Pops Bitcoin Forum Bubble

CosbyCoin “zing” takes Bitcointalk.org offline Bitcoin - a peer-to-peer virtual currency – has reached the point in the media hype cycle were the inevitable backlash takes hold, and the Bitcoin ecosystem becomes a target for high visibility hacks. The latest incident took place yesterday, when the bitcointalk.org forums were converted into a Cosbycoin ad site, complete with pictures [...]

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One Man’s Story: The Second Life Economy

Selling virtual drugs, guns, clothes, and wheels while camping for L$s by Frankie Antonioni. Since early 2008 I have been in business in Second Life, and by March of 2008 I had two stores running. In August of 2008, I had about 19,000 L$. Both of my stores sold drugs and other goods: clothes, cars, [...]

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MPAA’s Copyprotected.com p0wned by Anonymous

Hactivists use MPAA web site to spread anti-copyright message The cyberwar between the Anonymous hactivists and recording and motion picture industry interests heated up earlier today when the www.copyprotected.com site was hijacked to display an anti-MPAA message in support of the embattled Pirate Bay bittorrent tracker site, then redirected viewers to the piratebay.org site. As [...]

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GameCrush – Hawt Online PlayDates for Basement Dwellers

Gamers have been frequently stereotyped as having poor social skills. Consider, for example, Felicia Day’s Web series The Guild that relates the stories of a group of dysfunctional World of Warcrafters who are good at looting and farming, but not at interacting with one another or maintaining a relationship. But help is on the way [...]

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Linden Lab: We Don’t Need No Education

Discounted Second Life virtual land will be phased out for non-profit organizations and the education sector as of January 1, 2011 according to this announcement by Nelson Linden. Reaction was predictably negative from those whose budget cycles do easily accommodate costs doubling with three months notice – in other words, essentially all non-profits and education. [...]

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Metaverse Meetup – Long Beach July 30 – 31

  Future of Metaverse be decided around a hookah on Queen Mary?   The decks of the Queen Mary will echo at the end of July with the sound of open source techno-communists in jackboots, academics in clogs, birkenstock and flip-flop clad developers, and more than a few virtual world entrepreneurs sporting the sort of [...]

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Op/Ed: How Supply Linden Games The L$ Currency Exchange

by IntLibber Brautigan Under a normal market, where there is a healthy flow of cash in and out of a given economy, those operating currency exchanges make significant profits in ways most people do not realize. With the LindeX, for example, the spread, i.e. the distance between the lowest sell price vs the highest buy [...]

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It Has to Be Said: Time Beats Money?

I have been taking a break from Second Life lately by playing the MMO Allods Online.  Its a free to play MMO similar to World of Warcraft developed by Russians.  Seeing how their players respond to a situation is very telling on how MMO’s and virtual worlds might be paid for in the future.  World [...]

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