Robin L - Turn Key SL Business Ops!

Excellent!

Robin I'd like to see LL create Service Industry Turn-Key Business opportunities. (Service Industry - Various Healtcare, EDU, Financial, Insurance, RL Realty, Brokers, etc)

LL creates several trun-key designs (1/8, 1/4,1/2 full sim, with structures all set up - meeting rooms, video, text, audio displays/devices, billboards, etc) that are up and running and all I have to do is plug in my RL business - ie. do the Links from my commercial Web site, plug in all my RL marketing, etc. etc.

That I would be very very interested in!!!

Wow, that's a very interesting idea. Could this work if it was resident-created turn-key business plots?

I wonder if a live online meeting area in SL is worth $1250 + $200/month to a business, plus a handful of $10 basic accounts. I talk about full sims because I think if it was multiple businesses per sim it could create privacy problems.

Not to me it's not worth that much monthly US$ - thus the smaller price point/parcel size. And I would only do business this way directly with LL directly, ie. business to business.

Service business do not need lots of space since we don't sell "things" and don't need lots of square footage.

Thinking outside the traditional LL Island-Sim-Land-Use model, I'm visioning more of LL offering a virtual-place (think RL commercial office space w/built in infraStructure) targeting real world web-based service businesses (non-retail).

This type of new offering would harness the established customer/client base of established RL web business and tap into a huge potential market beyond the LL target market, ie. each client I bring into my Virtual-SL-business (my income), is a potential SL customer for LL. So on, and so on, etc.


_/_/

I considered this idea a while back. But the big issue I have is, as mentioned, confidentiality (even though many of my clients don't practice it, they do talk alot about it). For me it's a deal-breaker and effectively turned my SL office - which was originally intended for that purpose - into little more than a gallery of ID work.

Apart from running a separate sim, I'm unsure how the issue of security could be satisfactorily resolved. But would be very happy to see it happen.

Some of the new PLM software goes to this but doesn't limit itself to service industries. UGS, Dassault, PTC, and the rest are into this now. Everything is merging. I even started an (overly) long blog entry on this very topic last month. It seems that while the big players are going that route on the highend - integrating all their data with 3D; SL (and others like Croquet) could be the grassroots movement where people use the tools available to arrive at their own, similar solutions. At some point I expect there will be a happy middle ground.

my mom recently joined some amway type resale thingy. no, i don't know why.

would it be ok if i put stuff in sl up so people could purchase from her and have it delivered to people?

though i think it would be easier to do it with just a webpage.

For a long time now I've been contemplating the use of Second Life to run virtual training courses for my RL company, with the advent of HTML on a prim, once that's proved to be sufficiently developed to provide the kind of functionality needed, that removes one large obstacle in the way of doing that.

However, there are a few other obstacles that I think would need to be overcome before I could be confident in using it, and some of these are technical requirements, some are not:

1. Whiteboard functionality. Now this may come to pass through HTML on a prim, depending on the interaction available (I don't think the functionality will be there in the first release, but maybe not too far down the line). Interactive Flash could also provide this I suspect.

2. Account creation and billing. Here I'm thinking more of ease of actually creating an account. If we were to charge a fee for our training sessions, the best solution is if we could pay LL for the creation of the account, rather than our customers having to pay seperately for an account. We could then include the cost of a basic account in the cost, for instance. I suspect that sorting out the details of this would be more problematic than they appear on the face of it.

3. Learning curve. This, I think, is a kind of "suck it and see" point. Would the learning curve be too great as to effectively limit what our customers could get out of it? I'm thinking here of the fundamentals, such as moving the camera, sitting down, dealing with some inventory etc. Many of the people we'd be dealing with wouldn't be game players, so they wouldn't necessarily have the familiarity in moving around 3D environments.

4. Computer Requirements. I'm not sure this is such an issue for the majority of customers we deal with, but I can appreciate that it would be an issue for many. To a certain extent this becomes less of an issue over time, unless LL make changes that render some of the current configruations (e.g. graphics cards) incompatible.

5. Security. At present security isn't complete, and it feels a little like sticky tape over the problem. I'd need to see cast-iron security facilities, so anyway at all who wasn't invited could not get in - this is also important for charging for sessions.

Certainly something like this would need to be on a private island invisible from the mainland, and accounts would initially need to have that private island as the login point (I think this is already possible for LL to do). Whether they are allowed to go elsewhere after that isn't much of a concern for me, but may be for others.

Past the actual features of Second Life and the need for some arrangement on account opening, I don't see that LL really need to provide the facilities. I know that one thing I would do, should we get setup with a training facility, is hire that out to other companies wanting to do the same. So again, this is something the community could provide, and I'd say they'd probably do a better job as they'd be running it as a business - if there's one thing I've learnt about LL, it's that project they run in-world tend to fizzle out quite often. That's not a critisism of them as a whole, I think it's just not something they're setup to do on a prolonged basis, it's not their strength.

Good thinking Merwan
Products and services to meet all of your content preparation and publishing needs..I see this coming soon to sl and good luck with it when it does

/bump

Yep - and many other industries as well Roseann.

Moopf, those are very well thought out points. The learning curve has been the greatest challenge my company has seen so far. What we've chosen to do is have a trainee watch the simulation of the shoulder of someone who knows the SL basics.

Another thing I'd like to see is the ability to better log conversations. In the United States K-12 public school market, the ability to have full access to all chat logs, and IM conversations, would be essential.

Regards,

-Flip

Just one question, seriously. Will the General SL population still be paying a subscription fee to LL if these ideas are implimented IW?

Cat

I think I'd much rather LL worked on stability rather than this.

Without stability / scaleability we can't do *anything* nevermind business ops.

I would suppose so Cat. I'm proposing a new classification of user, so people with existing accounts can choose to have a 2nd RL user account which is unrelated to my Merwan account.

The productive use of this software doesn't require vast scalability. The growth of a single gridded virtual world game does.

Professionally useful grids will operate independently and only be "linked" to each other using URLs. I wonder if Google or Yahoo will build the first 3D search engine grid? In any case a school, business or organizational w3bsite won't need vast tracts of utterly scalable virtual land and inventory. They'll only need enough land to build their displays, enough inventory capacity for shoppers to use their site, and enough bandwidth to support a reasonable number of browsers at peak times. School grids, shopping grids, artistic grids, public service informational grids, pornography, grids, organizational grids, promotional grids, wiki grids, training grids, roleplaying grids, developer grids, et al will web together into a metaverse as scalable the Internet is today by simply adding websites and links.

Let me clarify that none of these, or more to the point all of these, will have no effect on Second Life or Linden Lab's bottom line. SL's only competition would be from a grid that promoted no theme or function other than having a good time. If LL develop the wisdom of licensing this capability themselves, they can include a clause that prevents the construction of a competing grid under the threat of license revocation.

It'll be an easy step linking from 2D websites to 3D environments that then start linking to each other and, eventually, bypass the 2D web altogether. Oh my goodness I've typed a lot and I'm totally wasting my breath and your time aren't I. Sorry.

Not too much. Not wasting breath. Agree with it all. That's more or less how I see things too.

Good points Khamon...I'm so ready for 3D Google. My RL business commands number #1 ranking across 8 different searches in a service (non-retail) industry. I would so rather to integrate into SL than another (as has been suggested) 3-D environment.