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Speakers:
Cory Ondrejka,
CTO, Linden Lab
Moderator:
Chris Baker,
Senior Editor, WIRED
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Churchill Breakfast Club presents…
Second Life—the highly innovative virtual world—has been the recipient of a great number of words in both the mainstream media and in the blogosphere. As Businessweek said in its 2006 cover story, Second Life is “a place in cyberspace where thousands of people have imaginary lives. Some even make a good living. Big advertisers are taking notice.”
While there is debate about the number of returning users and the actual return on investment for companies creating a virtual presence in the Second Life world, there are a number of points that speak to the future of this user-created, digital world:
• eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos are investors as is Lotus founder Mitch Kapor who was a founding investor.
• IBM is investing $10 million to develop a technology lab within Second Life. NBC, Toyota, and Adidas are all building a presence in the Second Life world.
• For the past 24 months, Second Life user hours and the number of land owners, along with economic activity, have grown at geometric rates.
Cory Ondrejka, the CTO at Linden Lab, is the man responsible for leading the Second Life team. His team has created the technologies that were needed to make possible collaborative, atomistic creation including distributed physical simulation, 3D streaming, completely customizeable avatars and real-time, in-world editors.
Cory will sit down for an in-depth interview to discuss Second Life and the future of virtual worlds and the impact of collapsing geography. He will consider the effects of virtual worlds on the creation of remote markets, cultural sharing, and collaborative consumption of content and what it means for business, the Internet, and users.
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