Supernova conference: Virtual Life or Virtual Hype?
By Adam Reuters
There were a few interesting tidbits in “Virtual Life or Virtual Hype,” a panel at the Supernova conference in San Francisco, featuring panelists Raph Koster, Reuben Steiger and Clay Shirky.
From the Wonderland blog’s write-up:
Raph Koster:
Within 5 years I predict it will be as normal to have your own personal virtual world as it is today to have your own blog. It’ll be odd if it can’t connect on a mobile device. We know it’s going that way, we can see it.
Does this provide yet another hint about the aims of Areae, Koster’s highly-touted but yet to appear virtual world?
Reuben Steiger:
[O]ur company, we’ve been around 1 year, we work exclusively in Second Life and we’ve just chosen to expand past Second Life. We’re going into Gaia Online: it’s web based, it’s a virtual world, the average user spends an hour a day, and has the 2nd biggest message boards on the net.
(More on Millions of Us’ Gaia Online plans here from 3PointD’s Mark Wallace.)
Additional write-ups of the panel available here and here
In other conference news, Susan Wu of Charles River Ventures is coproducing the Virtual Goods Summit on Friday at Stanford, and has written an interesting piece called “Virtual Goods: the next big business model” for TechCrunch.
