New Members of the Executive Team

Greetings all!

As those of you who follow Linden Lab have probably noticed, I’ve been expanding the executive team since I joined in May, 2008.  Each hire has been focused on major initiatives within the Lab designed to make Second Life more reliable, more relevant and more usable.

We are reworking the user experience end-to-end.  We started with the website (we recently launched a new home page which is the start of a larger redesign), are hard at work on the viewer and will shortly start redesigning the first landing locations for new users. Last week, we made two ecommerce acquisitions that will be more fully integrated into the Second Life experience as well.  We have a new land store in the works.  We’re developing a behind-the-firewall product for enterprise customers.

Put all these things together, and you will see we are intent upon making dramatic improvements to the Second Life platform and experience.  At the same time, the team has been hard at work on stability and scalability.  Last year, we halved the user hours lost to downtime in the second half of the year.  But, with growth ahead, we have more to do and the team is hard at work on continued platform and network improvements to enable us to break peak concurrency records on a regular basis as we did this past Sunday when we hit 82,653.  [As you know from FJ’s blog posts, it was “all hands on deck” this past weekend to ensure we delivered a stable experience to Residents.  I watched the action on our internal chat channel during peak sessions on Saturday and Sunday as we broke our peak concurrency record without a hitch.]

All in all, we have a long list of ambitious projects on our “to do” list for 2009.  To help us move the platform, product and the user experience forward, we’ve added two senior executives to an already excellent executive team:

Brian Michon (Michon Linden) will take on the role of VP of Core Development. Brian will be responsible for the voice, database and simulator infrastructure of the Second Life platform, scaling it to support our growth and our product expansion. Brian has over twenty years of technology experience with Fortune 500 companies. He joins us from Intuit, where he managed the development and operation of Web-based services and made popular products like TurboTax and QuickBooks easier to use and manage, both for organizations and individual consumers.

Judy Wade (Judy Linden) has come on board as VP of Strategy and Emerging Business. She’ll be responsible for working with the executive team in refining Linden Lab’s overall business strategy, including seeking out key partnerships to expand the capabilities of Second Life in key geographic and vertical markets. She joins us from Kapor Enterprises, the investment company of Linden Lab board member Mitch Kapor. Prior to Kapor Enterprises, she was a partner at McKinsey and Company, where she worked with a variety Fortune 500 companies, helping them define and implement significant strategic and organizational transformations across multiple sectors.

Brian and Judy join a stellar crew of Lindens on our executive team, including three hires I made over the past six months (in reverse order of appointment):

• Howard Linden, SVP Customer Applications, responsible for improvements to the Second Life experience and the development of new products and features that enhance the usability and overall customer experience of Second Life

• T Linden, Chief Product Officer, responsible for driving the product strategy for Second Life

• FJ Linden, SVP Global Technology, responsible for processes, systems and tools to maximize the scalability of Second Life’s network architecture

I’m really pleased and honored that we’ve been able to bring on such extraordinary individuals.  Each is a great talent in their own right and together form what I feel is a superb team.  Our ability to bring on such great talent is a testament to the power and potential of Second Life and to the wondrous content and experiences you – our Residents – have created.

I can tell you that going into 2009, everyone at Linden Lab is focused on making Second Life an even more important, more useful, more joyful experience for the Residents and we’re pleased Brian and Judy are joining us. Thanks to all of you for making Second Life what it is today. I look forward to all that we will accomplish together.

If you’d like post some questions, thoughts or congratulations on the Forum, you can do so here. I won’t be able to read and respond until after 5PM Pacific, but I’ll jump in then to answer questions.

Cheers,
M Linden

A Look Back, A Look Ahead…

Greetings all!

M Linden here.  I’d like to wish you, your families, friends, partners and loved-ones a happy and healthy New Year.

As we come to the end of the year, I thought I’d share some of the wonders of Second Life I’ve encountered over the past seven months and talk about what’s ahead in the year to come.

This has been an incredible period of discovery for me.  Second Life is a wondrous place, filled with amazing avatars, beautiful places and unbelievable things.  I can’t do them all justice in a blog post, but I’d like to share some of the experiences and content that make Second Life unlike any other platform for creativity, connection, discussion, interaction, innovation and commerce.   After the jump, I’ve listed some of the many things I’ve enjoyed, been inspired by and admired in and around Second Life since I joined Linden Lab in May.   I’d love for you to post your top picks in the Forums for all to enjoy, too.

Moving ahead into 2009, we at Linden Lab are continuing to pursue our world-changing mission.  We are working hard to create a virtual world that “…advances the capabilities of the many people that use it, and by doing so affects and transforms them in a positive way.”

To make real progress, we’re continuing to focus on a small set of strategic initiatives:

* Ensuring the platform is stable and able to scale with the growth
ahead

* Improving the first-hour experience (on the web, in the viewer and
inworld) for all Residents and especially for new users so that we
can continue to expand our active user base

* Making the mainland experience more attractive and fulfilling for Residents

* Localizing our content and experience in key international markets

* Developing new products (e.g., land products as well as new social
and commerce tools) that offer Residents more opportunities to
create, connect, socialize and transact

While the majority of our resources are focused on our core market (content creators and consumers), we are also focused on building the business and education markets.  Second Life is a powerful platform for doing business, collaborating, teaching and learning and we want to ensure we remain a vital platform for businesses and educators worldwide.

To support our growth, we will continue to recruit key staff and executives to the Linden Lab team.  This year, more than 100 new Lindens joined the company.  Three of them (FJ Linden, T Linden and Howard Linden) are senior leaders who bring decades of highly relevant management experience to our leadership team.

I feel very fortunate to have joined Linden Lab at this stage of the company’s development. It is immensely gratifying to be part of this amazing thing called Second Life.  You — the Second Life Residents — bring unbounded creativity, passion and commitment to the virtual world.  You — with the content you create and the experiences you craft — make it an amazing world.

Thank you and Happy Holidays!

M Linden: Second Life Update and Welcome to Howard Linden (aka Howard Look)

Greetings everyone!

Over the last several months we’ve been hard at work making Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable.  Our work is showing up in Second Life’s usage statistics.  On Sunday of this past weekend, we hit another concurrency high of 76,946 and yesterday log-ins for the previous 60 days crossed the 1.4 Million mark.

What have we been up to?

Reliability is a top strategic focus for the Lab.  In October, FJ Linden described how we are launching LL Net (our private fiber optic ring connecting our data centers) to provide additional redundancy and eliminate our reliance on VPNs.  I am happy to report that this project is ahead of schedule and other improvements are underway.

Happy Thanksgiving, from all of us at Linden Lab

M Linden here. Greetings everyone!

For those of our Resident population who celebrate Thanksgiving, I’d like to wish you a happy and joyous holiday!

Sailing to Plymouth

It’s a time to count our blessings and offer thanks for all the good that has come our way.

I can speak for all of Linden Lab when I say we are immensely grateful to our wonderfully passionate Residents who have created many fantastic, rich, engaging, thought-provoking, educational and entertaining experiences on the Second Life platform.

At Plymouth

Look around Second Life and visit some fun locations like Southern Cross!

You can see a great build of the Mayflower and have a bite of turkey…or be a turkey because there are some great turkey avatars in Second Life.

Happy Holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving Day to All

A Letter to Second Life Residents

M Linden here. Many thanks to everyone who responded constructively with their concerns and suggestions about our Openspaces announcement. We’ve listened carefully and your feedback has led to some amendments to our original plan.

Before I jump to the policy amendments, I’d like to provide some insight into our decision and then recap what we’ve heard from you. When the Openspaces product was originally launched, Linden Lab offered Island owners the opportunity to add Openspaces to their land for light use only –- such as ocean or park land. But we didn’t build in and enforce specific, quantifiable performance limits on the Openspaces. Why? For two simple reasons:

Virtual Worlds London

I’m excited to announce that Linden Lab is going to be heavily represented at this year’s Virtual Worlds London event, taking place October 20-21. The event promises to be a fascinating and productive look at the future of virtual worlds, particularly in terms of how businesses can benefit form having a virtual presence.

I am honored to be opening the event with a keynote speech, where I’ll be discussing many of the initiatives I’ve spoken about in this space including our focus on improving overall stability, further tailoring the platform for our core audiences and enhancing the first hour experience for new Residents.

As we have so many engaged and enthusiastic Residents in Europe, this is a great forum for myself and other Lindens to discuss how Second Life will be an integral part of ongoing virtual worlds development, including looking at new ways for communities to connect and grow.

Second Life is becoming an increasingly global experience, with a majority of our users coming from outside the US. We’re doing everything we can to support and encourage this growth – as seen by our announcement a few days ago that we are planning to localize the viewer for ten different languages by the end of the year.

Other Lindens will also be presenting and taking part in panel discussions on topics dear to our heart such as the “Future of Virtual Collaboration in the Enterprise” and “Virtual Worlds and Web Integration.” As with any conference we attend, we’re most looking forward to spending time meeting with Residents, hearing your stories and brainstorming new ways that we can keep delivering the optimal Second Life experience to you all.

Thanks everyone; hope to see a lot of you across the pond.

 

M

 

 

4 months at the Lab

I recently celebrated my fourth month at the Lab and it has been a terrific adventure so far. As the leader of this amazing company, what have I been focused on? Leading the company’s efforts to make Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable.

How are we doing?

We wrapped up a very busy and productive Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere with great results to report. First off, each week since August 31st has brought a concurrency high. Yesterday, the peak hit 71,232 – that’s an increase of 6% in less than a month. Year-over-year, peak concurrency has grown more than 38%. An even more impressive figure is the number of Residents who logged-in during the prior seven days. For the week ending September 19th, we had 505,839 unique log-ins – another Second Life record. Plus daily user-to-user transactions in Linden Dollars continue their steady climb.

What can we attribute this to? We simplified the registration process to make it easier for Residents to join, registrations are continuing at a healthy clip, existing Residents are spending more time inworld, viewer crash rates have declined, teleport failures have declined and database/network/simulator outages are down substantially (for the past three months, simulator outages were 24% of what they were the prior three months).

All are indications that Second Life is becoming more relevant, more usable and more reliable.

What’s next?

My First Two Months at Linden Lab

I’ve been with Linden Lab for two months and each day has surfaced something interesting — and often quite unexpected. So, what have I seen? Read on.

Second Life has evolved dramatically but perception has not kept up with reality in five important ways:

1. Second Life users are more mainstream than many assume. It’s not just tech-savvy early adopters or gamers. It’s a much broader cross-section of society with a median age in the early 30’s and nearly half the time spent in world is by women.

2. The diversity of use cases in Second Life is mind-boggling. If you were able to read every story around the world about Second Life, you’d see a tremendous variety of use cases presented – for instance, medical research and treatment, education, marketing, customer support…and the list goes on.

3. Second Life has an enviable business model. While some may have written off Second Life during our post-hype phase, Second Life has a business model most media, metaverse and social networking companies would kill for. We monetize unique users at many multiples of advertising based models. Plus, with a healthy and growing inworld economy of more than $330 million annually, our users are able to make real money and pay more than half of our fees with credits from selling Linden dollars they earned inworld — by creating valuable content and providing valuable services.

4. Second Life’s killer apps are just beginning to evolve. I’ve come to see a couple of use cases as future killer apps – namely virtual meetings and education. And, one simple feature – inworld voice – could be a significant product in its own right. Since launching 3D spatial voice inworld, our users have logged more than 7.2 billion voice minutes making us one of the larger providers of VOIP services.

5. Second Life is leading the industry toward interoperability. Finally, some have said Second Life is a walled garden that will go the way of AOL. Second Life is opening up, so the risk of that happening goes down every day. It dropped pretty substantially recently with the big news on interoperability from the IBM/Linden Lab partnership.

…Please read on as I expand on some of these points after the jump…

Letter to Second Life Residents

Greetings. I’ve been here for almost two months and have still just scratched the surface of what Second Life is and what it can be. You know this because you are inworld frequently. Second Life continues to expand each and every day. New Residents are joining, artists are creating amazing content, new businesses are springing up, big companies are entering for the first time, educational institutions are building virtual universities… and the list goes on. Everyday I learn of something new, something bold, something you’ve created.

The possibilities of Virtual Worlds have attracted a slew of entrepreneurs and even some Internet giants. Some are offering a simple, visually appealing chat solution. Others are more ambitious. Second Life offers something no ones else does – an astoundingly rich array of user-created content and a large, diverse and ever-expanding virtual economy. The content and economy reflect the diversity of the Resident population. Your creativity covers 1.5 billion meters of space that’s taken more than 500 million hours over the past five years to assemble. It’s a mammoth undertaking.

My First Week

Greetings friends of Linden Lab! M(ark) here. I am starting my second week on the job as CEO of this fantastic enterprise and I thought I’d share some of the highlights with you, as I experienced them from the moment I accepted the job, right through my first week.

My avatar was created by Linden Lab well before I was on the payroll. I began my Second Life experience like any other noob. I fell into the world in a white t-shirt and jeans with generic brown hair. Before I could take over my avatar and dress him properly, I/he was found sleeping on a job that I hadn’t officially begun. Here is the amusing but incriminating photo. I blogged about it in my farewell note to my old company. It put me on notice that Residents are highly engaged and very observant

Fast-forward to announcement day: Philip announced my arrival to the great people of Linden Lab inworld. I logged in to listen and was instantly surrounded by Residents offering best wishes, welcome cards, gifts, friendship and thoughtful advice on how to make the Second Life experience better. It was a heartwarming (and, frankly, overwhelming) introduction to this amazing world. Thanks to all that stopped by to say welcome.