sigmund leominster

Following our contacting the company late yesterday, the Metaverse Tribune did get a response from the company, reinforcing their claim that was a test site. See http://metaversetribune.com/2009/10/07/virtualget-responds-to-phishing-allegations/ for the actual response.

Setting up in Europe can have tax advantages for a US company. Folks like Sun Microsystems, Nike, and Coca Cola have shell companies there for tax purposes. Royalties on earnings that go through a holding corp are tax exempt. Of course, if you want to bring that into the US, the Treasury then wants a slice, but so long as you use the capital for European investments, it's a neat way of leveraging earnings.

Having overseas holdings also spreads the risk. For example, my current UK pension plans are doing much better than my US because of differences in allocations and the relative values of dollars and sterling.

When Mark Linden took over last year, he was explicit about the notion of growth, and taking advantage of a global economy is par for the course if you are in expansion mode.

You do well to remind folks that from the legal perspective, there is no "virtual law" just regular law as applied to different manifestations of property. In fact, the phrase "virtual law" is misleading as it seems to reinforce the notion that there is something special and different. In truth, a more accurate rendition of the phrase would be "law as applied to virtual environments," but even that could be debated.

We do ourselves no favors in trying to force "new" laws to be made to handle things that can already be dealt with using what we already have. If someone has a Second Life brand name and logo that they use in the world, it is a much protected by trademark law as Nike(R) or Microsoft(R) - there's no need to special "virtual courts" to handle infringements.

Of course, I suppose folk would rather pay their IP attorney in same-figure Lindens - a bill for L$3000 is less painful than $3000 US!

Curious that the Vollee site is now down (12:02 pm - Eastern Standard Time). Anyone know how long it's been down?

I'm curious about how "patent infringement" comes into this. Taser International have every right to protect their trademark ("Taser(R)") but do they in fact hold a patent on the electronic stun gun? Even if they have, how can they show parallels between that and a virtual electronic stun gun that is (a) not electronic (b) not stunning and (c) not a real gun!

I think someone should be talking to the estate holders of Tom Swift novels and explaining how they could sue Taser International for stealing their plan for an electronic stun gun. Not only that, they used an acronym of the title of the novel to name their company!

I think reparations are in order - as are reprints of the original Tom Swift novel.

At the real life conferences I attend, seeing people turn into giant rabbits usually only happens at the "apres-meet" in the bar, following the imbibing of large quantities of alcohol. However, on page 2 of the report, I see that the picture at the top of the page includes a large rabbit, paws on hips, seemingly chatting to someone holding a Bucks Fizz.

If Fotherington from Accounts in Zurich starts turning up to the virtual Strategic Planning Meeting as a small gerbil on a unicycle, and Miss Willingly, the temp from Hong Kong, insists on the dominatrix outfit complete with spanker, I for one will be lobbying for the return of the real world conference. My sanity is worth at least the $320K saved by IBM.

We should expect a period of time whereby new OpenSims pop up and disappear. As it becomes possible to "roll your own," everyone and their dog will think "hey, I can do better than Linden Lab" and promptly set up a virtual space. But as the number of "alternatives" increases, the number of residents may not. If Second Life can only get around 70,000 folks online concurrently, how would 100 OpenSims do this?

Of course, the natural way of things in business is for a plethora of "hopeful monsters" to be spawned and some may well offer a challenge to the beast at the top of the food chain. Meanwhile there will be new options for consumers and fun times ahead.

So why is there a need for "more data" to support claims of business success in Second Life? The recent departure of ONE business - Reuters - has been done to death as "proof" that Linden Lab is and Second Life is about to collapse. And ONE article by Eric Krangel, the dearly departed, has been touted as the new gospel for what is wrong with Second Life, when in fact, it's just the opinion of a single disaffected individual who has changed jobs.

Seems to me that there is only a need for "data" if the story doesn't fit the already decided outcome. The received myth is that SL is doomed and anything that supports this premise is "data" and anything else "needs to be supported."

Bad news sells better than good. People love to read about other people in trouble, hence the tendency to focus on failure. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised that businesses fail in the Second Life environment. As I reported in "SLentrepreneur Magazine (http://www.slentre.com/second-life-business-only-10-of-real-life-businesses-succeed-in-second-life/) back in May, only 10% of businesses actually succeed, so failure is the norm! Furthermore, the death of Linden Lab continues to be predicted on a weekly basis (http://sigmundleominster.blogspot.com/2008/12/more-on-impending-doom-or-end-of-world.html) yet the company is still running.

No-one is pretending everything is rosy, nor that LL get it right all the time. However, there are certainly more Jeremiahs out there than Dr. Panglosses and doom and decay still thrills us all.

Call me cynical - because I am - but I sense the first step in seeing Premium Account Fees changing. And that change is unlikely to be downward. Any company wanting to increase its fees for a service starts by looking at the current benefits and then adding more. But they want to have "value added" benefits, because giving customers more for the same price is, for want of a better word, unprofitable.

My guess is that by April 2009 we'll see a new set of prices, one of which may be the current Premium, but with others that include benefits relative to the price you pay. You want the "no-frills? It's $80 per year. You want first 1028m land tier free? That's $90 per year. No, I'm not going to guess the structures, I'm just speculating that this is where it will go: Tiered Premiums based of fee-per-service.