Month: November 2006

Anshe Chung, SL tycoon

Anshe Chung Studios is a company that emerged from inside a virtual world. Driven by curiosity, our founder Anshe Chung decided to test in early 2004 if working in the economy of Second Life could sustain the real life of a person – a young boy in a developing country. She supported him by selling Linden dollars earned by providing services for other residents. In 2006 Anshe Chung became the first avatar with a net worth exceeding 1M US$. She has lead a new wave of virtual reality entrepreneurs who have demonstrated to the world the very real profit-making opportunities that exist within virtual world economies. Today Anshe Chung Studios maintains offices in the real world where it employs more than 80 people full time, and is extended by a huge network of virtual reality freelancers worldwide. It hosts 1000s of residents on more than 40 square kilometers of gated communities in virtual worlds, and in terms of sheer magnitude Anshe Chung Studios has developed more virtual property than any other Metaverse development company.

signpost: anshe is now a millionaire from her SL speculation.

Walmart consumer surplus

By exercising its bargaining power, it squeezed profit margins among the major brands, offering them higher volumes in return. It also engaged the most efficient small-scale local producers as suppliers of store brands, thereby creating for itself a residual source of SDS products that could be used in bargaining with the major (multinational) branded suppliers. Those local firms that were not efficient enough to meet Walmex’s terms lost market share, and many failed. At the same time, the limited set of producers that survived grew, and with prodding from Walmex they became more efficient and innovative, adopting innovations first introduced into the market by their multinational competitors. A similar transformation took place among retailers themselves in reaction to the new business practices that Walmex brought to the country. This means an improvement in welfare for Mexican and American consumers, who now have more, and cheaper, soaps to choose from.

Walmart as a schumpeterian force. I love it.

London Wreck-diving

talk about ‘long now’: london is sinking into the soft clay as a result of the disappearance of the ice age glaciers on england.

Short of capping the Highlands in new glaciers of lead, however, or attaching gigantic hot air balloons to the spires of churches to pull the city skyward, London will eventually flood: its undersea fate is geologically inevitable. Whether this occurs in a 100 years or a 100 centuries, London will become a city of canals – before it is lost to the sea entirely. It is a new Atlantis, sinking deeper each day into the oceanic embrace of hydrology.

Out of Office

In a way my month off has already started – prompted by visiting family, time off in the Japanese Alps and coastal ryokan. There’s nothing like the clarity that comes from watching the sun rise over the Pacific (in Izu above) or waking up above the clouds to put life, the universe and (more humbly) my research into perspective. That these mornings yield a disproportionate share of big ideas is merely a bonus.

jan has the coolest job in the world. and he is moving on. WTF?

Microsoft Branching Strategy

We decided that each team would get its own feature branch, each feature area (multiple teams) would go up to an aggregation branch, and those would lead up to the final main branch. (As such there’s now north of 100 branches in tiers, leading up to 6 aggregation branches.) Teams were free to choose how many sub-feature branches they wanted, if any, and they were free to choose how often they wanted to push up their changes to the aggregation branch. As part of the reverse-integration process, various quality gates had to pass, including performance tests. Due to how comprehensive those gates ended up being, this would take at least 1 day to run, plus perhaps 1-2 days to triage issues if any cropped up; so there was a possibly considerable cost to doing an RI in the first place. However, these gates were essential in upholding the quality of the main branch, and had they not existed, the OS would have never shipped.

the challlenges of the windows scm have always intrigued me. years ago, a paper by markl was leaked – nothing since. so it’s good to hear what is going on in current windows builds.

Autodesk Enters Second Life

So 15 years later and with a new leader at the helm, rather than go it alone Autodesk is now poised to tap into the pioneering work of Linden Lab, the power of its community, and the spirit of all things 3pointD. Having used AutoCAD myself for over 10 years it will be most interesting to see where this goes. It could also be suggested that one of the reasons Second Life has been so widely accepted is because of its built in creation tools, lowering the barrier to entry for non-professionals (with the exception of Photoshop or the GIMP). Autodesk’s initiative seems to be about lowering the barrier for professionals who arrive with specialized knowledge and expensive tools

Autodesk bet on VR once before, in 1988. nice to have them back 🙂

Solar/Kinetic Weapons

I talked about rods earlier… also, I’m starting to get worried about trends in the direction of solar weapons, i.e., weapons that use the sun’s power to incinerate things. These have a lot of potential, and are potentially much stronger than nuclear weapons. It’s one of 3 super weapons that should be banned forever – nuclear (ICBMs), solar (beams), and kinetic weapons (meteors), with ascending severity.