Hope everyone out there has been having a great holiday season! I can’t forget to thank Neville Hobson for inviting me to attend my first ever virtual world holiday party last week at the Crayon headquarters. It was a bit chaotic with all the conversations going at once, but once the music started streaming and everyone discovered the dance orb, it felt just like a real world office party (minus any embarrassing copy machine incidents).
Now as we draw even nearer the end of 2006, there are the inevitable looks back at what has happened. Wagner James Au provides a great recap for the momentus year Second Life had. I’ve been amazed at the growth of and excitement around this virtual world myself, and agree with several others that the proprietary world of Second Life itself is probably less important than the experiments taking place there for business and education in a 3D virtual platform. That was one of the goals we had with our creation of Dell Island—to not only participate in this fast-growing world, but also to learn and lead in the potential 3D Web.
So, we built a place where we can interact with customers, and stretch our eCommerce skills. Speaking of which . . . If Santa didn’t bring you the new XPS gaming system you asked for, there are now even more options for purchasing one at the Dell factory in Second Life. As you can see from this snapshot below, we’ve added another color option for the XPS 1710 notebook, and now the desktop gaming system, XPS 710 is available in both the black and the red chassis.
Yes, 2006 has been exciting in Second Life and 2007 shows just as much promise in my humble opinion. In the short time I’ve been a resident the number of accounts has gone from about 200,000 to more than two million. It may not be for everyone, as Steve Crescenzo notes in the we only he can articulate. But for the more than 800,000 of us who Linden Lab reports have frequented the world in the past 60 days, it’s an exciting adventure.