A winning business plan for 'Second Life'

Search engines, jukeboxes and business meetings

Published: February 19, 2007, 3:00 PM PST

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The second-place finisher, a team of three from the Seattle area called Metaverse Technology, has created a suite of communications and collaboration tools intended to give enterprise users a way to use Second Life for business meetings and other important gatherings.

Jacob Sullivan, a Metaverse co-founder and an electrical engineer, said that his team would provide clients with tools along the lines of PowerPoint, interactive whiteboards and other presentation tools that could be used in Second Life.

The team imagines that businesses as well as educators would find the most use from the tools, but individual users might also want to buy pieces of the suite.

The third-place finalist was a team of three from Turkey that created a system for distributing music throughout Second Life in something of an iTunes model.

The idea, said team member Ozgur Alaz, a trend scouter and ad planner from Istanbul, is to provide owners of Second Life venues--clubs, stores, theaters and the like--with jukeboxes through which visitors could play digital music that anyone listening could then buy.

The business model for the idea, said Alaz, is to share revenue with the venue hosts as an incentive to place the jukeboxes in their locations. The team said it would try to find partners among the major recording labels to gain access to their catalogs of music. Songs would cost roughly the same as a song from the iTunes Music Store.

The fourth-place finalist was the Italian team of architect Laura Cassara and journalist Mario Gerosa.

The two have created a concept for a search engine to allow the virtual world's users to more easily locate the kinds of places, stores, clubs and other things that interest them.

The idea is based on the reality that the built-in Second Life search functionality is fairly rudimentary and has little or no contextual utility. Instead, it searches purely on keywords.

But Gerosa and Cassara have come up with a system that would allow users to find things based on their preferences and on quality.

That means that as users discover new objects and places in Second Life, they would be able to rate them and in the process create a "quality atlas."

The result would be something akin to Amazon.com's recommendation engine: as users find things, the engine would suggest other places or objects in Second Life or even, potentially, outside the virtual world.

Wu said she thinks the system would make a potentially profitable business but is not as well-developed or unique as that of Market Truths.

"Unless you're Linden Lab or you have experience doing search," Wu said, "you probably don't have a very defensible strategy if others enter the market."

Wu added that significant competition will inevitably emerge in the Second Life search market in the near future.

For Goldstein, the four teams represented the idea that Second Life can and will be a useful medium for those looking for new ways to build businesses and make money. And as a result, he said, the future of Second Life as an entrepreneurial environment is rosy.

"I think the competition is a great idea," said Goldstein, "and I think it's further validation for what's going on in Second Life, which is a platform to enable creativity and entrepreneurship."