Recently, there’s been lots of media coverage on the growth of Second Life from outlets like Fortune, BusinessWeek and CNN. If you’re not familiar with it, Second Life is a virtual 3-D world inhabited by millions of residents. It’s current population of almost 1.4 million inhabitants makes it one of the fastest-growing online communities. In Second Life, people can create their own characters—called avatars—to do a variety of things they can do in the real world. Characters can participate in meetings and conferences, work, play and shop just as they do (or don’t) in their everyday lives. Why are we doing this? It provides us a new way to connect to our customers directly.
Just a few minutes ago, Ro Parra, our senior vice president for Dell’s Home and Small Business division hosted a virtual press conference along with Founder and CEO of Linden Labs, Phillip Rosedale to kick off our presence there. Dell Island consists of a 64-acre area of land that features a welcome area, a Dell factory, a conference facility, a museum and more.
Residents will have lots of ways to interact in world with Dell. In the factory, for example, residents can see 3-D interactive views of products, build their own systems in world, and even order real systems from Dell.com. Initially, we’ll offer the residents the option to order XPS M1710 notebook in world. The XPS 710 gaming desktop that we launched today will be available for order soon. This is only the starting point. As we start to build out more of Dell Island, I’ll share more details on the blog. For now, you can check out www.dell.com/sl for more information.
Where do folks go to see Dell Island? If you’ve already got a Second Life account, you can visit it here. If you’re new to Second Life, here’s what you need to do:
- Register within Second Life for free
- Download and install the Second Life software
- From there, you can link directly to Dell Island