Second411 sold to unnamed buyer
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Oct 26 (Reuters ) - Second Life search engine Second411 has been sold to an unnamed buyer after an auction that drew several bidders, its creator Hal9K Andalso told Reuters on Thursday.”This is not the first sale of a company in Second Life, but I think it’s interesting that there is a larger business community functioning within Second Life, distinct from all the companies that are coming in from outside,” he said in a telephone interview.
He declined to identify the buyer, and said the price “wasn’t much … it was on a Second Life scale.”
“I had created the software, and I felt it would have taken a lot of time to get off the ground,” Andalso said. He is concentrating his efforts on the newly-launched Fabjectory service, which builds real-life models of Second Life avatars using a rapid prototyping machine.
Mark Wallace of 3pointD, who was the first to report the sale of Second411, wrote: “Does this mean the market for investing in or acquisitions of third-party SL services is about to bubble up?”
Second411, which allows users to search for both Second Life items and real-life goods at Amazon.com through an in-world heads-up-display (HUD), had 5,500 unique items for sale, 4,000 HUDs distributed, and received 100 to 300 queries per day. It was singled out by Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr earlier this week as a prime example of integration between virtual- and real-world shopping.
Andalso, whose real-life name is Michael Buckbee, said he was also concerned about suffering the fate of Gaming Open Market (GOM), a currency exchange that was forced to quit the Second Life market when Linden Labs announced it was planning to offer its own currency exchange system.
“Another long term concern was being GOM’d, I think there is a real potential for that,” he said. “I know in a couple of town halls, Philip (Rosedale) has said ‘we’re looking into doing item-level search’ — if it ever got really valuable or useful, Linden Lab might just step in and do it themselves.”
Andalso said that the Fabjectory business is just getting started, but that the reaction has been encouraging so far.
“We’ve had a lot of interest, and some orders. It hasn’t been a stampede or anything, but a couple of orders a week,” he said.
