Tag: The Wall Street Journal

UPDATED! The Wall Street Journal Launches a Four-Part Podcast Series on the Metaverse and Second Life

The Wall Street Journal has launched a four-part podcast series called How to Build a Metaverse, with the introduction posted on September 19th, 2022:

We’re in a metaverse déjà vu moment. Companies are spending billions of dollars creating new metaverses, imagining a 3D virtual future. But there’s a metaverse that’s already been around for decades. In this world, people have started businesses, built homes and fallen in love as avatars.

In a new four-part series from The Journal, producer Annie Minoff heads back into that largely forgotten metaverse – Second Life – to tell the story of the metaverse we already have and what it can reveal about the one that’s coming.

Start listening to How to Build a Metaverse on Friday, September 23rd.

You can listen to this podcast via The Wall Street Journal website for the podcast The Journal (here’s a link to the first episode), or via your favourite podcast service, such as Apple, Spotify, or Google. I will definitely be listening in!

As I often say on this blog, Second Life is the perfect model of a mature, fully-evolved metaverse, which newer companies entering this marketplace would be wise to study, learn from, and emulate. This seems a rather appropriate time to share an image which I discovered while browsing on the r/SecondLife subreddit over on the social media website Reddit, directed towards all those newer metaverse wannabees (looking at you, Meta!):

UPDATE Sept. 27th, 2022: I listened to the first instalment of this podcast on Sunday, and I can recommend it highly! Annie Minoff interviews many different people—including former Linden Lab senior staff like Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka—and it’s clear that she has immersed herself into Second Life and its culture a lot more than most reporters! I look forward to listening to future episodes of this podcast.

UPDATE Oct. 4th, 2022: The second episode has dropped, and can be found here: Avatars Behaving Badly (LOL!). Note that new episodes of this four-part podcast will be available to listen to on Fridays.

Thank you to Zella Jane for the heads-up!

Editorial: The Wall Street Journal Looks at Breakroom and Other Virtual Office Spaces as an Emerging Business Trend

Yesterday, in an article titled Miss Your Office? Some Companies Are Building Virtual Replicas, the American financial newspaper The Wall Street Journal took a look at a current trend: businesses setting up virtual office spaces for their employees who are working remotely because of the pandemic:

Stay-home orders and the shuttering of workplaces have given corporate employees some respite from getting dragged into time-wasting water-cooler conversations.

But some companies and their employees don’t want to leave everything about the office behind, it turns out, and are replicating their offices in “SimCity”-like simulations online.

And, among the companies that WSJ reporter Katie Deighton spoke to was Sine Wave Entertainment, the makers of Sinespace and Breakroom:

Sine Wave Entertainment Ltd. last month introduced Breakroom, a virtual-world product for remote workforces. It can accommodate all-hands meetings, secure one-on-ones and document sharing. Clients of the product include Virgin Group Ltd. and Torque Esports Corp.

Many customers initially assume they will recreate their offices, then realize they can make tweaks that would be impossible in the real world, said Sine Wave CEO Rohan Freeman.

“We spend our lives wishing we were working in open, sunny campuses with butterflies outside,” Mr. Freeman said. “Here you can realize that dream.”

Although clients can use Breakroom to create their office utopia, the platform also enables real-world elements such additional privileges for senior staff. In Sine Wave’s own virtual world, senior members can lock the boardroom, which is located on top of a hill overlooking the rest of the office.

A meeting in Breakroom (source: WSJ)

The Wall Street Journal article is a signal that corporate America—and indeed, businesses in countries around the world—are increasingly interested in virtual worlds. As the saying goes, “A rising tide lifts all boats“. I predict that Breakroom and a host of competing YARTVRA* firms are going to see a continuing boom in interest and inquires as the coronavirus pandemic drags on.

*YARTVRA is an acronym I coined that stands for Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality App, which I am still hoping will catch on!

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).