SL gets $11 million dollars in funding!

11 million kewlness

Wow, how much Angel money have they got over the years? 30-50 million? I lost track. I think it is great they have more funding but I doubt this will be a real benefit for residents, it just seems like more debt and more pressure to become profitable in the future.


DOES THIS MEAN THE PERMISSIONS WILL BE FIXED?

I don't see this affecting SL on the surface what so ever. More than likely we will not hear how it was spent other than "administrative costs". Just like the last 8 mil. I suppose.

Cat

"Members' interesting social behavior"?

hahahahahaha

We are labrats all.

coco

Well, Flipper does have a point. At the other end of the spectrum lies EA, which can't do beans without first counting them.

Maybe what's needed is just a little LESS of the hippie stuff, not wiping it out altogether.

coco

Ummm, well, they've gone from 30,000 or so users to 170,000 or so users without imploding, and hired a TON of new staff. I'm pretty sure some of the eight million went towards that! Look at how many more Lindens there are today than 18 months ago. Just a guess, but I'm betting its 4 times as many.



Now THAT'S what I'm talking about. Its time to loose a little of the Haight/Ashbury and go a little more punk rock, but I don't think standard corporate development is the way to go either. The one time LL showed their teeth - after the grid crashes, when Ginsu announced reports would finally be made to the FBI - it worked. We haven't had a grid crash attempt since. Sometimes, you gotta lose a little of the hippie love and not play with kid gloves.

Giddyup!

Regards,

-Flip

So are you saying the 8 mil was used on advertizing and employee salaries Flip?

Firstly, congratulations to Linden Lab!

My initial questions are:

How much of the company do the original founders still own? And if they hardly own any of it now, do they still have a strong incentive to make Second Life great?

(This wasn't their first round of funding. Are they selling equity on each round, or are the investors getting something else (like joy) for their money?)

My next questions are:

Does this mean Second Life will *never* become open source, because too much has been invested in it now? Are the only options to IPO or to sell to a bigger company?

(The answer to this isn't obvious. Mitch Kapor, for example, is a strong supporter of open source.)



A user doesn't care (much) who invested in the software. If a competitor is "better" (whatever that means), then the user will go there instead.

If Jeff Bezos gives Linden Lab some good advice and they follow it, then that would be positive.



I also wondered about this. I know it is a huge decision to do a core rewrite, but some things are very difficult to change without it. For example, to have hierarchical objects, you need to change the data structure associated with objects. All existing objects would have to be translated.

One example of a current company that has managed to do this (while continuing to ship) is NewTek, the makers of LightWave. Here is a quote from their August 1, 2005 newsletter:



Linden Lab has been working on a rewrite in the background (Flipper mentioned this also), so who knows? Maybe this round of funding will give them what they need to get it done.

Another point: Linden Lab is apparently bursting at the seams. Here is a quote from Babbage Linden's blog on March 23:



Maybe this new funding will let them expand their office space.

Well, a fair portion of it probably was; they've hired an enormous amount of people since receiving the 8 million. Advertising for Second Life is probably accomplished mostly by word of mouth at this point. However, the amount of money needed for salary and equipment to scale sims, the asset server, the inventory server, customer service, and so on, when there are 170,000 users and beyond, probably took a fair chunk of this. You'll remember, for the past year and a while, since the catastrophic weekend where nobody could get into SL at all, that LL's primary focus has been staying ahead of the population growth curve. Have their been growing pains? Sure. But what LL has done already is quite impressive, especially with the size of the staff they have (still relatively small) and their growth rate.

Comparing things like WoW to SL is pointless; WoW's infrastructure requirements are miniscule compared to SL's, as all the content is stored on the user's hard drive. Little more than a trickle of data is actually passed back and forth with WoW's servers, compared the the terabytes of data stored at 365 Main in San Francisco.

Regards,

-Flip

Heh, mine too Siobhan. I had intended to quote it after I finished reading the thread. You beat me to it

Please, no Euro grid! One huge grid for all countries would be the way to go IMO. All those friggin real world borders and "we all stick to our country and culture and don't care about the rest" mentality is exactly what's f'king up our real world already. Let's not make the same mistake with the metaverse and all the opportunies that come along with it.

Euro (or Korean or Japanese or whatever) servers and sims, support hours, UI and help files in different languages..YES! But please, NO seperate grids that are independent from each other and can't be accessed by everybody! All power to diversity!

There's a tiny bit more information on this in today's issue of the M2, AND it's on the front page so you don't have to scroll through the PDF.

Yeh, I wanna be Dee Dee Ramone.

ONE TWO THREE FOAH!





P2

Outsource to East Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Cost of living is lower and there's been a big upsurge in the labor pool recently.

LL needs PROGRAMMERS! Not BURGER FLIPPERS!
Cost of Living is alot lower, tho.

Personally, I hope it DOES NOT become open source! Although I do support *some* open source development (PHP, Apache, etc), in general I feel it is not necessarily the most efficient or best way to develop a product.

Keep it closed!!!!

$11 million? Sounds like Philip is getting a new yacht.

Thanks for the info Flip doubling the employees was a good move. As well as the equipment you listed. WoW? I didn't mention that, but again good info.

Cat

There is some ambiguity in the meanings which can be assigned to the acronym CPU.

From answers.com:


I remember widespread use of CPU to mean the box back in early home computing days, this was to distinguish it from the monitor and the keyboard.

You know, the CPU, the thing with the floppy disk drive slot where you load the operating system floppy and then when MS-DOS or CPM is loaded you take it out put your data floppy in.

Move a little further south, near San Jose, and you'd be correct (specifically, Santa Clara County--even more specifically, Sunnyvale).

Ah, I know you didn't mention it; however, SL is compared quite frequently to games like WoW, like in the C-Net news release linked at the beginning; that's what I was talking about. Often people expect ease of scalability on the level of these games which transmit miniscule amounts of data from small amounts of servers; SL is really on a whole different scale.

SuezanneC: I find that definition ridiculously bush-league, hehehe. CPU = Central Processing Unit. The chip that deals with the zeros and ones. The thing with the floppy disk drive slot where you load the operating system floppy is called a "Computer". And the VDU is the Visual Display Unit. If you show a keyboard to 100 people, 99 will call it a keyboard and 1 will call it an input device. I think the same goes for the CPU comparison!

Eep: They're all the same to an east coaster like me...and some west coasters I've spoken to as well!

Regards,

-Flip

While that may be true these days, for a while (particularly before the mid-1990s or so), the computer case was called the CPU. Now they're, annoyingly, called "boxes" (which I think is stupid and I don't use).

Probably not westcoasters who actually LIVE there... San Francisco is NOT Silicon Valley; hell, it's not even IN the valley. However, the area IS called the San Francisco Bay Area, but Silicon Valley is in the South Bay (Area)

Funny, I've been building computers since the 1980s, and I always recall that chip that did the math being referred to as the CPU. I've never seen a computer case referred to as a CPU. If you could show me somewhere where they refer to the full computer case as a CPU, that would be great, I've just never seen it.

TigerDirect calls them "Cases" versus the chips being called "CPUs (Processors)".
NewEgg calls them "Cases " versus the chips being called "Processors / CPUs".

I guess I've just missed ever hearing a full computer system referred to as a CPU...I've always called them "Computers" or "Servers" or "Workstations" or "Desktops" or "Laptops"...or for slang, yes, "Box" occasionally.

As far as San Fran, my point is that LL is very geographically close to Silicon Valley, heart of the U.S. high-tech industry; if you read my original reply to Lewis Nerd, I make that fairly obvious.

Regards,

-Flip

wow with all that money maybe they could lower tier costs, hmm? or land costs in general? to buy a region is an incredable amount and a scam. They practically make you buy the server and then tehy charge you ridiculous amounts for the tier, linden scam on you.