On my way to the states

So I am sitting here in an airport hotel, listening to the great sound of starting airplanes, having a crappy internet connection for a high price and soon leaving to the airport to go to the US.

First stop will be Seattle (Oct 23-Oct 29) for the Plone Conference, which we will stream into Second Life and then I will head over to San Francisco to meet some Second Lifer’s and see that cool city.

So if you happen to be in SF or in Seattle and want to meetup just send me a note either via IM or email.

I am very much looking forward to this 🙂

(but it also means that I am sort of unresponsive when it comes to worldofsl.com or other stuff. But it will not be forgotten).

The Duran Duran party with Nick Rhodes

So the Duran Duran party, I talked about in a previous post is still going on. Nowadays you can find a lot of avatars dancing and partying on the avalon sim still waiting for the concert and the Duran Duran island/world to come. Rivers Run Red, who are responsible for this event, now transformed their Duran Duran pavillon into some sort of club area with dance balls and Duran Duran music.

But that’s not all. Additionally there’s an answering machine standing nearby where you can listen to Nick Rhodes who is leaving message for the waiting crowd and additionally hints on the build to come. And it is a real ansaphone. Nick Rhodes leaves messages via the phone which get processed on a server and uploaded as AIFF to the parcel where you can listen to it then.

“we’re really trying to make the Duran Duran island a kinda new immersive environment, one that will tease and create game play”, Fizik Baskerville of Rivers Run Red tells me.

So check it out yourself. I met lot of nice people there and apparently they are all big Duran Duran fans. Here is the SLUrl to Avalon.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, media, riversrunred, duran duran, avalon, immersion, virtualworld, taotakashi

Open Source CMS Plone enters Second Life with virtual Plone Conference

In less than  one week the 4th annual Plone Conference will start in Seattle and I will go there (yay!) 🙂 I am very much looking forward to it as there will be over 300 people from the community there and it’s always fun to meet and discuss with them (and listen to the talks and tutorials of course). More information about the conference here. One highlight of the conference will be definitely the keynote of Eben Moglen who is among other things working right now on the GPL v3, an important Open Source license. What is not so known is the fact that he was also involved in founding the Plone Foundation.

So what is Plone? Plone is an open source Content Management System written in Python. It tries to be user-friendly and flexible at once. I am personally using it for my company as we do Plone consulting and additionally we take part in the development process via sprints etc.

And now we are trying to bring this conference to Second Life (at least partly as I cannot stream every of the 4 rooms). We checked the bandwidth and I happen to have some free server bandwidth around. So a location was build on my new plot in Theta (photos below). And now it’s hopefully all ready to go.

if you want to join, feel free to do so from in the time of Oct 25-27 approx. 10am to 6pm SLT and check out the complete agenda here (I hope to get all keynotes streamed and I will choose one of the rooms in the meantime). We will also try to get a back channel for questions working. Dues to the lack of time we don’t have SL projected on the wall though.

Click here for the location.

About the location

The conference location will probably convert to some information/educational place in the future. Already on there are 4 video booths which play videos about how to use Plone and an interview between me and one of the Zope developers (on which Plone is based) back from the EuroPython conference in Geneva. So in the future I want to add more such videos and video blogs and more information material on the open source projects Plone, Python and Zope.

I am very excited about my trip to the US and the conference in SL and RL and if you are interested in it I hope to see you there!

PS: After Seattle I will fly down to San Francisco. So if you are either in Seattle or SF, please contact me so we eventually can meetup 🙂

Technorati Tags: secondlife, plone, open source, conference, floss, virtualworld, taotakashi

Over 1 million Second Life residents now!

So we passed the magical part of 1 million users  just recently. Also according to Linden Lab the website is slow because Yahoo featured Second Life on main portal page so maybe this was giving the final rush of new signups to get over this mark.

So what does this mean now for Second Life? Will it attract more businesses? Will it break down Second Life in the long run? Will it mean more attacks? Will it mean more fun as more people are to meet from all over the world?

Feel free to discuss!

Technorati Tags: secondlife, statistics, yahoo, taotakashi, 1million

Photos of the Reuters sim

The news is old already that Reuters entered Second Life. So after one week of events by Millions of Us it seems that we will now have a week with events by The Electric Sheep Company if we also take the upcoming concert of Ben Folds in the aloft island sim as well as the entrance of Sony BMG into Second Life.

So find below some of the photos I made today at the Reuters sim. Quite some people have been around (and still are), so take a look yourself!

Technorati Tags: secondlife, media, virtualworld, taotakashi, reuters, electricsheepcompany, ecs, photos

And another Live Without Boundaries video

Just realized it. This time it’s from Aren Mandala (aka real life famous blogger Michael Verdi) and you should check it out here.

For more informations look at my other posts here, here and here.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, intel, machinima, nyc, art, campaign, taotakashi

SUN Microsystems Press Conference Video

Back on last tuesday the SUN press conference was happening. See here my video summary of it (done for Millions of Us who ran the event in Second Life).

Technorati Tags: secondlife, sun, virtualworld, millionsofus, press conference, machinima, taotakashi

Video of the 72 hours build-a-thon now online!

The video I made about the second part of the 72 hour build-athon by
Versu Richelieu (see here, here and here for other posts by me) is now
online. Check it out below.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, machinima, taotakashi, millionsofus, nyclivewindow, versurichelieu, campaign, art, mixedreality

Stand up and be counted!

Today and tomorrow are the day to be counted. Get your wrist band immediately (e.g. on Pi).

So here’s the README about what it’s about:

Against Poverty, STAND UP for the Millennium Development Goals.
————————————————————————

SECOND LIFERS CAN PARTICIPATE!
If you want to participate, wear the enclosed white wrist band on October 15-16. Anytime during those days, CLICK YOUR WRIST BAND and you will automatically be registered as a particpant!

About The Program
——————–
Launched by the United Nations Millennium Campaign, STAND UP is an exciting challenge to set an official Guinness World Record for the greatest number of people ever to Stand Up Against Poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals.

On October 15&16, the world will come together and Stand Up and remind their governments that promises to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and help the billions living in extreme poverty, must be kept. The purpose of the action is to raise awareness of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to publicly demonstrate to policy makers the growing global support for the eradication of poverty.

STAND UP is an initiative designed to coincide with Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) month of global mobilizations (www.whiteband.org) around the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty We need everyone to take part to ensure governments listen and take action.

SECOND LIFE RESIDENTS CAN BE COUNTED!

Stand Up because:

– Every day 24,000 people die from hunger
– Every day more than 100 million children are denied the chance to go to school
– Every day 1.1 billion people have to drink polluted water
– Every day 8,200 people die due to HIV/AIDS

http://www.standagainstpoverty.org/action/sl

http://www.standagainstpoverty.org/
http://www.whiteband.org
http://www.millenniumcampaign.org/site/pp.asp?c=grKVL2NLE&b=172249

For more information about this event and it’s Second Life history either read Second Life Insider or listen to Second Cast #36.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, poverty, united nations, stand up, campaign, taotakashi

Some more (and final photos) of the 72 hour build-a-thon

This morning the event came to an end and Versu and all the people involved finally got to rest. Congratulations to everybody, it was a cool event. Of course it was mainly a marketing event it seems but I think it’s a push in more mixed reality events and it’s differently at least from just streaming video back and forth as it’s usually has been done with former events. And this event was actually completely build around Second Life and mostly happening in there (or to the same parts maybe).
Too bad just that the Real Life video could not be streamed in-world. This might be a problem due to the actually commercial nature of this event so wishes of the company come first and this meant to use the Windows Media format.

So let’s hope for some more aristic event utilizing mixed reality even better and maybe without the handicap of being a marketing effort (not said that companies might be sponsors of that of course).

Ok, so here’s some final photos of the event and some video footage will come shortly, too.

UPDATE: The sim is now open I think , so visit Live Without Boundaries (now really 😉

Technorati Tags: secondlife, nyclivewindow, virtual world, mixed reality, taotakashi, millionsofus, building, art