Stagecoach Island defects to ActiveWorlds

Wow I must have hit a nerve. If there was no contract that is a whole other problem, there should have been. Certainly between Wells Fargo and Bedazzle there should have been.

I am abosultely right about the worker for hire issue. Its not BS Legalse at all. It might not be what you want to hear, but that does not make it BS.

As it happens, if you agree to do work, and someone agrees to pay you, you have entered into a contract. Period. If it is not reduced to writting, that is a problem. Thus if you or bedazzle or anyone else agreed to provide content in exchange for payment, they have contracted. If someone agreed to provide content to Bedazzle for compensation then they have entered inot a contract (or maybe a subcontract).

So obviously, fropm a legal perspective, a contract existed.

This contract should have been reduced to writing for clarity, and I cannot beleive that wells fargo parted with 15,000 bucks on a hand shake, with nary a purchase order. If that is, in fact that case, then there is a world class mess here. Maybe you have rights, and maybe you don't. Obviously that depends on a lot of factors.

When I was in Stagecoach Island you were able to build and script in there.

Do we know if they eliminated that while it was still going?

Seriously? You mean to tell me Wells Fargo a well known bank just handed over 10-17K US$ to a group in SL without a contract. Not that I don't believe you Cubey because I do, but wow what the hell were they thinking. I think everyone assumed because it was a deal between LL, WF, and Bedazzle that there must of been a contract. After all that is a good deal of money between parties for a specified amount of work to be done. No contract. Sorry but thats just unprofessional for everyone involved.

Wow. Bummer.

*yes i mean written contract. 12.:22am sorry.

I agree.

You like silly assumptions. Makes things really dramatic, doesn't it? Unfortunatley, it doesn't make you sound any cooler.

How would you or I know what contracts Wells Fargo has, let alone how much the contracts are for? That's right... we don't.

Now, back to reality...



Let's go over that again. "LL"... right. And "WF"... ok. And "Bedazzle"... right. So where are the other content creators in that? Nope don't see them.

So much for your legal expertise.

I think his claim is that he did not enter into a contract.

And so long as we are chatting about contract law, I believe you will find that in order of a contract to be valid something of value must be exchanged. Merely signing a document is not enough.

I have a question. Any of you guys have to sign any paperwork at all?
I'm now under something like three NDAs from three completely unrelated projects (oddly, two are non-SL entirely) and was wondering if anyone else has crap liek this. It makes my trolling fodder really limited.

OK Cubey I used the figure of 10-17K via these forums that I read when WF island was first announced.

You said there was no contract. Are you a liar?

You said you were part of the team, and I saw some of your items published in this thread. Are they not your items?

Hows this for reality if anyone did any substantial work for any company that is not LL With or without LL acting as the agent. I would assume ppl would be smart enough to get all the details in writting and read them. If they didn't then they have nothing to bitch about.

I didn't shit in your cereal, I have never had any problem with you. Your decision to lash out at me because your pissed is misdirected.

I was on the side of those who appeared to be getting screwed. Excuse me.

There is some misunderstanding going on here, and that is part of the problem.

1) There is a third party marketing company called Swivel Media that was the representatives for Wells Fargo - WF is their client.
2) Linden Lab provided the server resources for the project, and other support resources, so they had a relationship with Swivel. I am sure some type of contract was involved.
3) Swivel hired Bedazzle to build the actual island itself. It's unclear if there was a formal written contract, but I imagine that there was for the type of money that was involved and the complexity of the project.
4) A group of content creators in SL were asked by Bedazzle to sell content in stores on Stagecoach Island for a dramatically reduced rate ($1-50L) because the users would not have much money at all. This is the group that Cubey, Torrid, Beryl, Aimee and others were in. They gave their content over to provide purchaseable content. There most likely was not a formal written contract involved.

Now verbal agreements are contracts, though how enforceable they are is a different matter. Just to clear up, when people talk about the $10-17,000 fee, they are speaking of the relationship between Swivel and Bedazzle. That has nothing at all to do with the content creators who provided stuff for the grid.

I am pretty sure he is lashing out at you because you are acting like a bit of an ass.

And that is just in the post where you are making the claim that his being annoyed at you is unjustified.

Martin,

Read my post, it clarifies things, and I imagine the misunderstanding is why Cubey is annoyed. I can't speak for him, but I do repeatedly see people mistaking the group of content creators who had stuff for sale there, and Bedazzle - two totally different situations.

It is not fair of you to say that people have nothing to bitch about - I think you would be unhappy if you gave content to be used for something, and it ended up in a completely different environment outside of your control. Cubey and others gave content in good faith for it to be used for this project - so it is a shock that some of it (the non-Bedazzle created content) is in ActiveWorlds.

Are you a drama queen? The answer to your question is no, but the answer to my question is pretty clear to anyone reading this thread.



Where did I say I was part of any team? I'm not nor have I ever been associated with Bedazzled. The problem, since it's escaped your finely-tuned legal mind, is that content created by me and by anothers has appeared in ActiveWorlds without consent. If there was a contract signed, I wasn't involved. Hence my statement, "There was no contract."

"despite the dissappointment of seeing this project move to ActiveWorlds, it was a very powerful learning experience for us at LL."

Thank you for confirming what we all already knew.

LL only listens to complaints when people with large sums of money are talking.

Ok if I'm understanding Cubey correctly - he wasn't involved with stagecoach at all - and his stuff appears in the AW version...

*IF* I understand it right that means someone just looked at his stuff in world and ripped it - that would suck.

Of course I could be reading that whole thing wrong.

after reading this whole thread, post for post, i can't help but spit out a few words..

all i really want to say is that most of us don't have much of an idea about what went on behind the scenes.. and honestly, we don't have any innate rights to either. what we do have is experience through observation.. something that could help out any future endeavors by anyone here so that they know to get things in order and on traceable documents before moving ahead on any prject of any significant size.

Wells Fargo appears to have been a bit shady, betweeen texture grabbing and product reproduction (i.e., Cubey's "Sport Parachutes" that is questionable in permission. for me, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth about WF.. and that's the only one. (well, and AW for allowing an original SL existance into their world when it benefits them and leaves us in the cold)

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oh, and just for the record, LL doesn't just talk about money issues.. there's this forum called Second Life Answers where they directly answer all sorts of questions. as far as comments they initate themselves, there have been a variety of those as well.. i think it has less to do with their pockets and more to do with dealing with issues that TRULY affect the world of SL, these just happen to usually have business related origins.

i mean, really.. does chair camping REALLY cause a world-shaking epidemic?
now, compare that to a RL~SL business deal worth thousands in US$ and repercussions that will reverberate through ALL business deals to come.

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sorry, i've rambled a bit more than i planned too.. and dammit, much more intelligently than i normally would, as well. argh... stop making me think!

I have to say that i'm not really that surprised about about WF moving to AW.
As far as i understand it stagecoach island shared the same grid/asset server as the normal grid, but i never undstood why.
It makes it victim to all the issues that the main grid has like upgrade issues or grid attacks.

Would it really been that hard to create seperate grids? As i understand it, LL has seperate testing grids. I wonder if Stagecoach Island could have been a succes if they kept using the 1.6 client and had their own asset server. There would be no problems with grid attacks and the software and performance would have been the same from start to finish.
I'm sure their will be less surprises for them in AW.


About the possible content theft by WF, i think it would be more prudent for the content creaters and the resident lawyers to work together and see what they can do about it.

Now the pressing question that come to my mind is: What could/should we all contribute to make such disaster not happen again? Is there any way we could support Lindens in make SL more newbie friendly or more attractive to the professional companies?

My first suggestion to Linden Lab: run the special professional projects on one SEPARATE grid that you run on one STABLE and tested SL version and NOT the newest patch you throw at us.

I have faith that it will get better. Bleeding edge is always a rough frontier.

/positive_side_comment

Pym

That is a great suggestion, Anshe. I think the rest is really up to Linden Lab. There is a lot about making the SL experience better that is beyond our control. Dramatic improvements to the UI (especially inventory management), a graphic engine that scales to the hardware it is on (so even users with lower end computers get an acceptable experience), and a more streamlined start for new users that doesn't immediately bombard them with the complexities of SL are all things that we can't really help with, other than making feature suggestions.

Although the AW version is awful in a lot of ways and the SL version was much better looking and cohesive, what struck me the most about the AW experience was immediately it had you stepping through choosing your hair color, skin tone, eye color, and some clothing options, all from an attractive web page with predefined choices. Right now this is not possible in SL because of the lack of HTML support and because inventory items/clothing are not scriptable, but something as simple as this would go a long way toward improving the new user experience.

Instead of immediately introducing them to the sliders and the inventory window, ease them into it through some basic choices. We all take the complexity of SL in stride, but to new users, it is still very confusing at first. In a project like Stagecoach Island, the people weren't even going to be there to try out SL - they were there for the Stagecoach Island experience, so they would be even less forgiving if things didn't immediatley work right.

I don't think the loss of this project should be viewed as too horrible of a failure - it was a first try at a type of collaboration that may have been ahead of its time for both Wells Fargo and SL. I don't think honestly it is guaranteed much more success in AW than it was in SL, as it is kind of an unusual concept and target market. It will probably go down as just another failed attempt at big business trying to capitalize on virtual worlds (Coke, Sony, and others have tried in the past) in ways that are more about selling a product than really adding any compelling new experiences.

That is what Linden Lab can and should take away from this - how to make sure that SL is the best possible choice for these types of projects in the future - from an ease of use, cost, and performance standpoint. They are not anywhere near that goal yet, but it is attainable if they continue forward with stability improvements and the promised improvmeents to the UI and graphics engines.

May I suggest a simple answer to that question?

Cost!

It is relatively cheap to set up a few servers, configure them as private islands and let some "local entertainment" run there. Setting up the complete infrastructure of a "grid" and maintaining it, will be much more expensive. And if WF really was as thrifty as it looks (less than six figures for a project like this, OMG), I guess they simply were not willing to shoulder the costs for that. And maybe LL was not prepared to deliver. They only have so many people available to maintain a grid. Who knows ...

Besides that point: SL has some serious usability issues and a very steep learning curve (much steeper than AW or There or ...). That may be justifiably so (though I don't believe that myth), but a big brand corporate client is not interested in such justifications but in a project that is running smooth and is accepted by its customer base.

Excellent summary, Cristiano!

Yep, the biggest hurdles for a better user acceptance of SL are usability issues and the steep learning curve for newbies. And the biggest hurdles for corporate clients planning to use SL as a platform are the high demands of the client and the instability of the grid.

I hate to cite myself but ...

Cristiano, thanks for the well written and documented posting. Keeping everyone informed without unnecessarily spreading panic is a balancing act and you certainly did it.

I hope we do not all worry about this too much, however.

Philip is trying to connect people, give them a new way to interact, understand and relate to one another in a massive, virtual shared space.

Projects like Wells Fargo which do not leverage that massively shared space are going to be poor fits. While there is a minor influx of capital and the ability to point to a big brand like WF, at the end of the day they do not enhance the network effect which will bring us to the tipping point that Ben Linden writes about in his blog.

I think the bigger risk here was SL losing its way and with WF gone, I think this is now less likely to happen.

Hmmm ... That is true, but at least if I don't totally missunderstand Philips words (which is possible), his vision is to build the "Web 3.0", the thing that some day will supplant the internet. And such a platform must not only cater to the needs of millions of single users to become a success. There must be solutions for large corporations, too. If WF's Stagecoach was a good example for an application of "SL as a platform" is debatable. That they tested SL and found it unsatisfactory is at least not a positive signal.

Allways good to see the positive sides. But some of the "features" that would make SL a better fit for projects like Stagecoach, could make SL a better environment for many end users, too: enhanced usability, a gentle learning curve, more stability and better QA for example.

EDIT: After reading the post you are referring to, again, it seems that Ben Linden does agree with this assessment. Lets all hope that the companies actions in 2006 will reflect this insight.

You know they could make it much more user friendly when you first arrive without any extra SL development, just an in-world bit of development. This is off the top of my head, but this would work (I think):

User logs in for the first time and immediately has a HUD attachment showing right in the middle of the screen with selection options (much like AW to be honest) for their avatar. When they've finished making their selections, they click OK and a folder is given to them that contains their avatar shape and clothes. Then it's just talking them through pressing CTRL-I and dragging the folder onto themselves. The attachment could disappear as well.

Would that not be a great user-friendly introduction when they first arrive? And, it's all developed in-world with what's available now.

Actually, that is a great idea - I liked it enough to go in world at 4 am and test out the idea and work on a rough prototype (I tend to do that when I really like something). It actually doesn't even need to be a HUD attachment - it could be a giant machine right in front of them that they click buttons on and then push a button and it gives them the avatar folder, with clear instructions on how to wear it. Doing this in prims is more complex than it would be with a great HTML interface, but it is definitely a great interim step. I hope you don't mind if I create one as a proof of concept - I think it is a fantastic idea.