After building a vast virtual world with a complex internal economy sustained by the labor of more than a million active users, what do you do for an encore?

For Philip Rosedale, the founder and former CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, the answer was to try to recreate some of the same dynamics in the real world.

Coffee & Power, the San Francisco crowdsourcing startup that Rosedale founded in 2010 with former Linden Lab colleague Ryan Downe and former Accenture consultant Fred Heiberger, is all about making it easier for people to do small chunks of creative work for one another, and get paid for it. Transactions are initiated online, at a website where people can post small jobs they need done or are willing to do. But most of the actual work happens offline—and there are even two physical Coffee & Power “workclubs,” in San Francisco and Santa Monica, where members can meet to collaborate or deliver services.

Coffee & Power co-founder Philip Rosedale

“At Linden Lab I was the sci-fi, physics-and-atoms guy, a total geek for assembling things out of digital pieces,” says Rosedale. “But the magical thing about Second Life—what changed me more as a person and was more inspiring to me as a leader—was not the digital Legos. It was the way people’s welfare and livelihoods were changed by their interactions with each other. Ryan and I said, ‘We have got to do this for the real world.’”

Coffee & Power, which opened to the public on November 1, is far from the first online marketplace for small jobs. Investors have been paying a lot of attention lately to bigger crowdsourcing players like oDesk and Elance, as well as upstarts such as TaskRabbit, MobileWorks, and Zaarly. But one of the things that makes Coffee & Power interesting is the way it copies three of the elements that, in Rosedale’s view, made Second Life so successful. (In its heyday in the late 2000s, the virtual world had more than 20 million registered users and as many as 88,000 people online at any given time).

The first element is rich communications, in the form of profiles, reviews, status updates, and a live public chat space (sorry, no 3-D avatars this time). The second is radical transparency, meaning the details of every transaction are available for everyone to see. The third is a virtual currency, called C$ in an echo of Second Life’s Linden Dollars or L$.

Those are the “key enabling features” that help sellers and buyers find one another, decide who’s trustworthy, and pay for work completed, Rosedale says. “All you have to do is put the right pieces together so people can very rapidly decide to work with each other or for each other.”

There’s something else that makes Coffee & Power unusual: the fact that the site itself was crowdsourced. It turns out that Coffee & Power is the second thing Rosedale and his co-founders set out to build after the Linden Lab experience. The first was Worklist, a new collaboration system for software developers. It’s a place where entrepreneurs who need help building a program or a website built can farm out the job in small pieces—a half-day’s work is the usual increment.

Downe, Heiberger, and Rosedale assembled the entire Coffee & Power website by posting tasks such as “fix Facebook/LinkedIn login redirects” and “change ‘about us’ copy” on Worklist. As of yesterday, they’d spent a cumulative $289,628 on the project (the figure is visible to everyone, thanks to the aforementioned transparency principle).

It’s no coincidence that Coffee & Power matches up buyers and sellers of small jobs, with all payments handled digitally; the site is simply a broader implementation of the ideas built into Worklist itself. After launching Worklist, “the three of us sat down and said, ‘How can we apply what we have learned and how we do things with Worklist to more generalized forms of work that might be more highly scalable?’” says Rosedale. “That was the birth of Coffee & Power. We said, ‘We have got to be able to use this to let people do anything they want.’”

Now that Coffee & Power is up and running, Rosedale says Worklist is developing into a business of its own, with … Next Page »

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The boardroom windows at ON24 look out over San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the city’s largest convention complex. Every year, Moscone is home to giant events like Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Oracle OpenWorld, Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce, and the MacWorld Expo; in fiscal year 2009-2010, more than 919,000 registered event attendees visited the complex.

But as busy as Moscone is, the number of business people who travel to trade shows and conventions is actually dropping. Moscone’s 2009-2010 attendance was down almost 20 percent compared to 2007-2008 levels. The economy is partly to blame, of course—but so is technology. In 2009, Cisco Systems canceled two San Francisco events and said it would hold digital conferences instead, saving $50 million. And in the growing movement to replace big, expensive physical events with cheaper virtual ones—where the booths are made from bits and attendees let their mice and keyboards do the walking—ON24 wants to take the lead.

ON24 CEO Sharat Sharan

After surviving a brush with death back in 2002, ON24 emerged as one of the country’s leading providers of webcasting technology, which allows companies to stage live online presentations and webinars for employees, trainees, or sales prospects. On the strength of that business, which brings in at least $25 million in revenues every year, the 275-employee company became profitable back in 2009, and is still growing at 25 to 30 percent per year, according to CEO Sharat Sharan.

But whereas a webcast might last 45 minutes, a virtual event can go on for a day, a week, a month, or forever—providing many more opportunities for the host to collect leads that might turn into sales down the road. So ON24 is aggressively pushing its newer “Virtual Show” and “Virtual Briefing Center” technologies, which are both built on a newly overhauled back-end called Platform 10.

This month ON24 is gearing up for VUE2011, a virtual show about virtual shows. Slated for November 17, VUE2011 will be emceed by the San Francisco Giants’ shaggy-bearded relief pitcher Brian Wilson and will be set amidst 3D simulations of San Francisco landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chinatown Gate on Grant Street (see the video on page 3 of this story). In Wilson’s honor, the conference’s tagline will be “Fear the beard, not the technology.” (Of course, after the Giants’ lackluster 2011 season, the beard has lost a bit of its fearsomeness.)

“What we do better than anybody else in the world is live virtual events,” says Sharan. Webcasts are still “the foundation” of the business, he says, but ON24 is growing into a “one-stop shop for webcasting, virtual events, virtual briefing centers, demand generation, corporate communications, and training.” If the flying avatars, corporate islands, and virtual stores of Second Life represented a wild, uncontrolled experiment in virtual commerce and communication, ON24 is the company coming along behind with a broom, civilizing and detoxifying the virtual-spaces concept for business users and serious marketers.

But to someone from the dot-com boom years, when ON24 was founded, the current company would be unrecognizable. It started out in 1998 as a distribution hub for … Next Page »

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Internet tycoon Bob Metcalfe, who recently moved from Boston, is giving his first lecture as professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin this afternoon. I don’t know exactly what he plans to say, but what’s particularly interesting is how he’s delivering the talk—to more than just the people in the room, through a virtual collaboration interface from Avaya, the New Jersey-based business communications firm. The technology is being led by an Avaya group with a strong presence in Boston.

Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet local-area networking standard, founder of 3Com, and partner at Polaris Venture Partners, moved to Austin for the faculty job earlier this month. He has been a mainstay of the Boston innovation scene for the past couple of decades. (For his part, he said he’s not leaving, he’s expanding—and he’ll still spend his summers in New England.)

The topic of his lecture will be “Enernet: Internet lessons for solving energy.” Reached by e-mail, Metcalfe says, “I will again urge that we all use the Internet to conserve energy: Transport your bits, not your atoms.”

Case in point: Metcalfe will speak not only in person to the audience in the UT auditorium, but also to remote viewers (who will see his avatar) using Avaya’s new system. The online platform, called web.alive, uses video-game graphics, immersive audio, and personalized avatars to create a 3-D virtual environment for business collaboration among remote participants. Metcalfe calls it “emersive collaboration through the Internet.” (The URL for the lecture has not been given out publicly; I’ll update this story if that changes.)

The point of web.alive is to do better than existing collaborative tools like video conferencing, which don’t let you move around in the remote environment or interact with people individually. So presumably you could ask Metcalfe’s avatar a question in an interactive way, or even greet him “in person” after his lecture (see image of the virtual auditorium below).

And web.alive is different from existing virtual worlds like Second Life, in that you can set up secure and private meeting areas. What’s more, you have an individualized audio mix through your headphones—so you can have a private conversation with someone in the back of the room, say, and not disturb the speaker (though his avatar might yell at you).

It’s still early days, but Avaya is signing up customers in industry and academia who seem eager to try it out. “Every person we’ve shown it to has wanted it,” says Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of corporate development and strategy, who heads up the web.alive effort from Avaya’s Waltham, MA, office. As a start, he says, “We want to link up other universities.”

Ali says when he’s in the office, he conducts about half of his meetings in the web.alive environment. And Avaya uses it in-house for all of its leadership training courses and new-employee programs. “Over the next year, we mostly want to get people to use it,” Ali says. “Then at some point we have to figure out how to make money with it.”

Metcalfe says he will also use the Avaya system to hold “virtual” office hours, which will be open to his UT students as well as remote visitors. The first session will be tomorrow from 2-5 pm Central Time. If you have a Windows-based PC, you can check it out (and say hello to Metcalfe’s avatar) at utexas.avayalive.com.

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It would be easy to dismiss Jerry Paffendorf and his friends as a bunch of art-nerd carpetbaggers from San Francisco who see Detroit as the latest canvas for their airy-fairy ideas about virtual communities and social entrepreneurship.

In fact, that’s how some locals reacted when reports surfaced in The Detroit News last year that Paffendorf had bought an abandoned lot on the city’s east side for $500, renamed it Plymouth, and announced plans to resell it, one square inch at a time, on the Internet. “People brought up stuff like, ‘Who does this hipster f*ggot think he is, moving in from San Francisco with stupid Internet ideas,’ or ‘It’s illegal to represent that you are offering land for sale if it’s not real,’” Paffendorf says. “And there was some skepticism that I would want to stay in the city.”

For the record, Paffendorf isn’t gay. His girlfriend, Mary Lorene Carter, is the community engagement director for Loveland, the company Paffendorf set up to pursue a range of creative projects, including Plymouth and another developing “microhood” called Hello World. And now that Paffendorf has been in Detroit for a year and a half, people have stopped asking him when he’s leaving.

But getting an accurate fix on Loveland is still a bit difficult: the project would be an unusual addition to any city, let alone Detroit. It’s part artists’ collective, part consulting firm, part neogeography experiment, and part non-profit foundation. It started out with the previously mentioned real-estate microtransactions experiment—the group sold 10,000 square inches of Plymouth to a total of 588 “inchvestors,” each of whom can log on to the Loveland website and see where their parcel is located. Lately, though, the company’s efforts have gotten a lot more hands-on. This summer Loveland and a group of community organizers bought a pair of abandoned houses near the old Michigan Central Railroad station in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood and are rehabilitating the property, with the aim of turning it into a public art exhibition space, digital media center, and small-business incubator.

They’re calling it Imagination Station. But don’t be fooled by the name. You don’t have to stay long in Detroit, Paffendorf says, to realize that the city needs more than imaginative ideas—it needs action.

“With the deep troubles this city has, you can’t just do a happy dance,” says Paffendorf. “[Loveland] started out as this really apolitical, creative act; selfish isn’t the word, but there was the joy of being the author of it and having it be really playful and not worrying about where it goes, but just making something cool. But the more we work on things, the more we get approached by people who say, ‘What you guys are doing is so fantastic—have you considered partnering with these guys? Or applying this not to inches on an empty lot but to sustainable farms? Could you break a $10,000 house into 10,000 shares and put a family back inside it and feel social ownership? When those kinds of opportunities come around, you start to feel obliged to work in those directions. Then it becomes less of a cool idea and more something that’s needed.”

Part of Paffendorf’s hunger to make a difference stems from the failure of his previous entrepreneurial venture. The 28-year-old, six-foot-five entrepreneur, who’s been called a “Shaggy lookalike” (unfairly), has always been happiest when sliding back and forth between the real world and various virtual ones. I first met him about four years ago, when I was working on a story about Second Life and he had just left a job as “resident futurist” at virtual-worlds builder Electric Sheep Company. His next gig, with a group of fellow programmers and designers in Brooklyn, was … Next Page »

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Vivox, the Natick, MA-based voice software startup, said today it has received a $2 million equity investment from Peacock Equity, a fund that is run jointly by GE Capital’s Media, Communications & Entertainment business and NBC Universal. The company says the money will be used to fuel its growth, expand into new markets, and enhance its offerings in virtual goods and audio advertising.

In February, Vivox announced it had raised $6.8 million in third-round venture funding from IDG Ventures SF, Benchmark Capital, Canaan Partners, and GrandBanks Capital. The company was founded in 2005 and is best known for providing voice chat software that lets inhabitants of virtual worlds like Second Life, EVE Online, and EverQuest talk with each other over the Internet. Its focus is on gaming and social networking communities.

“This partnership further solidifies our ongoing growth efforts and signals Peacock’s intention to provide the NBC Universal audience with the most engaging online experience possible,” said Vivox co-founder and CEO Rob Seaver, in a company statement.

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What would “The Matrix” look like for businesses? Imagine a virtual-reality system that a company could jack its employees into in order to train them, evaluate their decision-making skills, or test out different management strategies. The technology might not be as far off as you think, thanks to a Seattle-area startup.

This is the story of one of the most intriguing and entertaining companies I’ve heard about in the past couple of years. Please excuse my lack of objectivity here. I’m talking mostly about the company’s core idea, not so much its business prospects (more on that later).

First, the news peg: Novel Inc., a 20-person startup based in Redmond, WA, has raised an undisclosed amount of first-round financing from McLean Capital and Nairbo Investments, a couple of venture capital firms in Vancouver, BC. The big idea behind the company is to apply massively multiplayer online (MMO) video-game techniques to create new kinds of games and business simulations for companies.

“I look at Novel as being a leader in the future of virtual reality,” says Brayden Olson, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “If we can help businesses with simulations, it can put us in position to be at the cutting edge of R&D.”

Here’s what that might look like. A company might evaluate its prospective employees’ leadership and teamwork skills by having a group of job candidates enter a game-like computer simulation where each person controls a virtual character. The simulation would present the group with various management problems, or other business situations. By watching how each person performs and interacts with others, the company could potentially learn more about them than it would in a run-of-the-mill interview. And if done right, it could be more time-efficient as well.

OK, this system doesn’t quite exist yet. But what makes it viable is that the technology and user interface are grounded in Novel’s multiplayer online video game engine—it probably won’t require a quantum leap in tech development. And that seems to be one of the company’s key competitive advantages.

The idea of using virtual reality and gaming technologies to create training exercises and work-related simulations is not new, of course. Organizations ranging from the military to Microsoft Research have pursued such projects for more than a decade. And Second Life, an example of a 3-D virtual world, has become a sleeper hit inside some big companies as an efficient tool for collaborating and teleconferencing. In recent years, computer interfaces have gotten faster and easier to use, graphics have become more dazzling and realistic, and online multiplayer games have taken off. Those factors all seem to be in Novel’s favor.

The company, previously known as Novel Interactive, officially formed at the beginning of 2009. Olson, its 22-year-old chief executive (see photo, above), is a recent graduate of Seattle University, and has gotten national press in BusinessWeek and a New York Times blog for winning a regional entrepreneurship award, and for competing in a business plan competition. The buzz around him is that … Next Page »

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[Updated 3:30 pm, 4/23/10. See below] Zoran Popovic, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, is constructing 3-D virtual recreations of real life. First step, the UW campus; next, the whole world.

Building on a previous program called Photo Tourism that pieces together photos culled from Flickr into virtual 3-D models, PhotoCity is a “capture the flag”-esque game that recreates sections of campuses or city blocks, or, eventually, entire cities from user-generated photos (see reconstructed image, above right).

Photo Tourism was created by UW professor Steve Seitz, Microsoft researcher Richard Szeliski, and former UW graduate student Noah Snavely (now an assistant professor at Cornell University), and in 2006 was licensed to Microsoft. But that program was limited, Popovic said: While they could easily build a 3-D version of the Coliseum based on tourist photos deposited in Flickr, they were never going to get a usable model of the building next to the Coliseum, for example. [The list of people involved with Photo Tourism and PhotoCity has been corrected and updated---Eds.]

Popovic is interested in what he calls “serious games,” computer games that rely on volunteer user input to solve problems too difficult for computational power alone. Usually, players are motivated to help solve a problem by the lure of some kind of online competition. But recreating 3-D versions of city blocks or whole cities adds another layer of challenge—the game has to be compelling enough not only to get people to sit down and play it on their computers, but to take extra digital pictures for the sole purpose of expanding the 3-D world. “It occurred to me that one big problem is that you have to step away from the computer,” Popovic said. “So we wanted to know, is it possible to form a game framework where people go out and do stuff in the real world, instead of just sitting in front of their computers?”

To motivate people to take more pictures for the models, the group (including UW graduate students Kathleen Tuite and Dun-Yu Hsiao) created the PhotoCity game, which can be played on a computer or iPhone. A Google Maps image shows the playing field (so far, game locations include the UW and Cornell campuses, and neighborhoods in Seattle, New York, Boston, Chicago, Santa Barbara, Portland, Washington DC, and Moscow), and “flags” pop up at various points on the rough facade. Players then win these flags by taking enough pictures of that site—say, the northwest corner of UW’s Odegaard library—and then uploading them to the PhotoCity site. Win enough flags and you’ll eventually be the “owner” of the whole building. Other players can steal flags away by taking even more pictures.

The researchers launched the game at the end of March by announcing a competition between UW and Cornell, to see which school’s team could get the most photos of their campus by April 20, but soon other locations were added. Any user can “seed” a new playing field. The cross-country competition is now over, but results are still being analyzed, Popovic said, and the teams are planning a second round to start up April 30.

Popovic (left) is happy with how the game has progressed, but his group’s eventual goal is loftier: to recreate entire cities and, eventually, the world in 3-D from digital pictures. “If you can build a 3-D replica of your world, you can all of a sudden have all different kinds of games in that world,” Popovic said. “The idea is to make a game where the actual world itself is built, and people can actually become avatars and walk around and do … Next Page »

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For the first time in as long as I can remember, IPOs dominated the New England tech and life sciences deals news this week.

—Glasshouse Technologies, an IT consulting firm in Framingham, MA, indicated in an SEC filing that it’s planning an initial public offering worth as much as $75 million. Glasshouse, which is aiming to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GLAS, had abandoned a previous attempt to go public back in March 2009.

—BG Medicine also revived its IPO ambitions this week, after nixing an $80 million offering in January 2008. The Waltham, MA-based developer of molecular diagnostics is now proposing to raise as much as $86.3 million to help bring its test for heart failure to market in the U.S. and Europe.

—The much-anticipated initial public offering from Cambridge, MA-based Ironwood Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: IRWD) priced below its proposed range of $14 to $16 per share on Tuesday, with 16.67 million shares going for $11.25 apiece. The stock’s price climbed modestly on its first day of trading, closing the day up 3.6 percent at $11.65.

—In non-IPO news, Westford, MA-based BioBehavioral Diagnostics raised $10 million in a Series B financing led by Sevin Rosen Funds and Tullis Dickerson. The startup intends to use the funds in part to expand sales and marketing efforts for a system used to diagnose attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

—Software maker Vivox of Natick, MA, raised $6.8 million in a third round of venture financing led by new investor IDG Ventures SF and joined by return investors Benchmark Capital, Canaan Partners, and GrandBanks Capital. Vivox’s technology allows gamers and inhabitants of virtual worlds such as Second Life, EVE Online, and EverQuest to talk with each other over the Internet.

—Unica (NASDAQ:UNCA), a marketing software firm in Waltham, acquired the MakeMeTop search marketing business from UK-based Microchannel for an undisclosed sum.

—Robotics startup CyPhy Works raised $1.75 million in a round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The Cambridge-based startup is led by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner.

—Lexington, MA-based 1366 Technologies, a developer of more efficient photovoltaic panels, nabbed $5.2 million in a Series B financing round, according the company’s president, Frank van Mierlo. North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners provided $5 million of the funds and members of 1366′s management provided the rest, van Mierlo said.

—Cancer therapy developer Syndax Pharmaceuticals of Waltham collected $9 million of a planned $16 million in an offering of equity, options, and warrants, according to regulatory filings.

—Newton, MA-based Powerhouse Dynamics, a developer of home energy usage monitoring tools, closed a $1.02 million financing round. The deal was led by Lexington-based CommonAngels.

—Tepha, a Lexington-based maker of polymers for medical applications spun off by Cambridge-based Metabolix (NASDAQ:MBLX), raised $3 million in an equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The deal could eventually total $7.4 million, the filing indicates.

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Every once in a while, I sit down with a businessperson who brings a unique perspective to a huge global trend—and helps me see things in a profound new light. In this case, that person is Kelly Jo MacArthur, and the global trend is the explosion of social media and its broader impact on corporations.

MacArthur was the former general counsel, senior vice president, and chief of staff at Seattle-based RealNetworks—and she also did a stint at Linden Lab, creators of the virtual world Second Life—so she has her digital media and Internet technologies down cold. A 10-year veteran of Real, she left the company in 2007 and has been focusing on consulting work with startups, big companies, and other organizations across the fields of social media, networking technologies, cleantech and sustainability, traditional media, and arts.

We were talking recently about the future of companies like Twitter and Facebook, and what struck me was the way MacArthur thinks of social media as an inevitable—and inherently predictable—evolution of communication technologies on the Internet. That means smart entrepreneurs and executives should be able to anticipate how all of this is affecting societal behavior, and what the new opportunities will be. What’s more, she’s finding that these technologies are forcing big companies and organizations to completely rethink their core strategy and value proposition—indeed, their very existence.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation:

Xconomy: So what are you hearing from companies out in the field?

Kelly Jo MacArthur: In my own work as a strategic advisor to CEOs, various boards, and executives on their corporate strategy, the inevitable conversation is, “What should we be doing with social media?” I’m not a marketing person—they work with their advertising and marketing agencies—but it leads you to the conversation that each business, especially in more traditional, entrenched industries, should be thinking about how they’re relevant in the future. And how we as citizens and consumers are demanding more, and also participating more, in the offerings and opportunities that these businesses have.

There’s a huge opportunity, no matter what business you’re in, if you’re constantly thinking ahead about how we as societies are shifting. Versus focusing on, “Should I be using this tool, or should I have a Facebook page?” You should be using these tools for your … Next Page »

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When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that … Next Page »

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If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009′s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

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When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to … Next Page »

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For a long time, Second Life was stuck in the cyber equivalent of the silent-movie era: people communicated by typing, and their words showed up in little thought bubbles above their avatars’ heads. All of that changed drastically around 2007, when Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, hired an obscure outfit called Vivox to equip its 3-D virtual world with a voice communication system. Now any Second Life citizen who has a headset connected to their computer can simply speak, and everyone whose avatar is standing nearby will hear them in living stereo.

For the Gloria Swansons of Second Life, like myself, the changeover from typing to talking was a bit traumatic—and indeed, 20 percent of Second Life citizens still abstain from voice communication. But the other 80 percent gab for a billion minutes every month, which is a rather convincing demonstration that most people inside 3-D computer environments prefer talking to texting.

And now Vivox, a four-year-old startup based in Natick, MA, is about to introduce its technology to three new communities that could vastly increase its user base. The company announced this morning that it has formed a partnership with Redwood City, CA-based Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS), the world’s largest entertainment software company, to add its voice services to several online EA games. First up is Command & Conquer 4, a continuation of EA’s hugely popular real-time strategy game that’s expected to launch early next year.

At the same time, Vivox is announcing the launch of Vivox Labs, an incubator-within-a-startup where the company is trying out different ways of delivering its voice services over the Web. And the first two Vivox Labs experiments are aimed at big targets: Facebook, where the lab’s “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” application will allow members to invite their friends to instant Web voice conferences; and World of Warcraft subscribers, who will be able to use a new Vivox-powered website called Puggable to assemble teams of players for in-world campaigns. Both the Facebook and Puggable applications are in private beta testing and are expected to go public by January.

“We started the company about four years ago with the goal of making voice a seamless, natural part of every online experience,” Vivox co-founder and CEO Rob Seaver told me when I visited the company last week. “Our view at the time was that more and more human interaction would take place online, and the richest form of communication we have is talking to each other. So we thought there would be an opportunity to turn the Web from this silent, barren place into one filled with the warm sounds of human voices.”

That’s exactly what could happen if even more gaming, virtual-world, and social networking communities turn to Vivox’s services. Not bad for a company that started out as a wacky idea from Jeff Pulver, the founder of the company that became Internet phone service provider Vonage.

You’ve probably heard of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP; it’s the technology behind Vonage and Skype, and the one that has turned the telecom industry upside down by transforming phone calls into digital data packets and routing them over the open Internet. Vivox’s system works on similar principles, except that … Next Page »

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Allegedly, surfing the Web is a leisure activity for a growing number of people. I wouldn’t know—my job as a technology blogger obliges me to surf the Web all day at work, so if I have to use the Web from home, it’s usually because I’m taking care of some task like paying bills, uploading photos, or getting driving directions. But for people who do use the Web as a hangout, there are more and more ways to make it a social experience. And one company, Hamburg, Germany-based Weblin, is optimistic enough about the future of its animated chat service—which gives surfers inch-tall avatars that can communicate directly with the avatars of other Weblin members visiting the same Web pages—that it has expanded to the United States, starting with an office outside Boston.

If you belonged to Weblin (I’m guessing the name is a combination of “Web” and “gremlin”) and you had downloaded the company’s Windows-based plugin, your customized avatar or small-w weblin would be standing on the status bar at the bottom of this browser window right now. If another Weblin member happened to be reading this Xconomy article at the same time, their weblin would also appear. You could then chat, joke, or flirt with that person via text balloons that show up above your weblin, the same way avatars communicate in virtual worlds like Second Life.

You can even make your weblin smile, wave, dance, or run. So what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did for horrible B-movies and what Lycos Cinema is doing for online video, Weblin does for the entire Web (although in practice, you’ll only run into other weblins at a small fraction of websites, since there are only about 10,000 to 100,000 Weblin users online at any given time).

“Even with social networking, the Web is not a social place; a typical website doesn’t allow you to chat with other visitors,” says Jan Andresen, Weblin’s co-founder and CEO, who’s based in Hamburg but was traveling on the East Coast when I reached him by phone last week. Yes, Andresen acknowledges, you can leave a text comment at your friend’s blog or their Facebook Super-Wall. But that’s like deciding you’re only going to communicate with your family by leaving sticky notes on the fridge, he says. “Why not interact instantly with other people, make jokes, and see their reactions? It’s so much more normal.”

Well, “normal” if you don’t mind a bunch of cartoon characters sauntering around your Web browser. And the 20- to 35-year-old users who are Weblin’s main target audience probably don’t. (Indeed, the system still bears the stamp of the virtual-classroom application, developed by CTO and co-founder Heiner Wolf, on which it’s based.) But for older or more mission-oriented Web users like me, Andresen agrees, a crowd of weblins might be a distraction. “If you have to book a flight or finish your spreadsheet, you don’t do it in a pub,” he says. “But maybe you’re at home, you’re bored, you have a glass of wine next to you, and you just want to be entertained. We call that moment ‘chilling.’ For that time, Weblin is ideal.”

Andresen and Wolf launched Weblin in 2006 and have raised $1.3 million in funding from a combination of private investors and the High Tech Grunderfonds, a public-private initiative that invests in early-stage technology startups in Germany. The startup’s technology is built atop XMPP, an open-source instant messaging platform formerly known as Jabber. Andresen says that Weblin hit the 1-million-member mark in September, and that about 10,000 people are downloading the Windows plugin every day. (There’s also a purely browser-based version of the system called “Weblin Lite” that works on Mac and Linux computers, but it assigns you a random avatar that does not persist as you travel from Web page to Web page.)

The company hopes to make money in two ways. The first, more predictable revenue stream will come from selling ads, which will pop up in the same transparent layer over the browser window that the weblins themselves inhabit. But while that may sound like another annoying distraction, Andresen says … Next Page »

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A Boston startup transposing MySpace-style teen social networking into a 3-D virtual environment is one of the companies making its public debut at this week’s TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. Executives from Hangout Industries, which has raised $6 million in venture funding from Polaris Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, went onstage at the conference today to demonstrate their service, Hangout.net, where each user receives a free, private virtual room that can be outfitted with virtual objects bearing real-world brands, such as Skullcandy headphones and Monster Energy drinks.

Hangout is currently in private beta testing, and expects to open to the general public later this fall, according to CEO Pano Anthos. As the name of the service suggests, the rooms are intended to function as impromptu meeting places for young people in the 16-24 age group. Members buy decorations for their spaces using a virtual currency, and designate friends not by linking to their profiles but by handing out the “keys” to their rooms (i.e., permission to enter).

These hangouts aren’t just static spaces—they’re virtual media rooms, with embedded players that link to content from the Web, such as Facebook photo albums, YouTube videos, and songs from music search engine SeeqPod. “On Hangout, teens interact with their friends as they do in the offline world—whether it be watching favorite videos on YouTube, listening to music, sharing Facebook photos, engaging with popular brands and products that they love, playing games or making music, or just chatting ‘in person’,” in the words of a company announcement released today.

While Hangout.net might sound similar on the surface to other online virtual worlds such as Second Life, There, and Google’s widely panned Lively, Anthos argues that it’s very different in scope and intent. “The model is not a world where you go out and explore,” he told Xconomy last week. “It’s about creating your space, expressing who you are physically through the kinds of objects and activities that surround your room, and engaging with your friends.”

It’s also about advertising through branded merchandise. And in that respect as well, Hangout.net is much more similar to MySpace—which offers members a range of brand-driven materials, including badges, background images, songs, videos, with which to personalize their profiles—than it is to other virtual worlds, which typically generate revenue through subscription fees. “Kids hate banner ads—they ignore them,” says Anthos. “Cool brands really love this idea of ‘emergent exposure’….Advertisers can’t wait to put their products in. But at the same time we’re careful to let the kids be the shoppers. This is entirely about an opt-in model where you decide what products, services, and media you want in your space.” For example, members can decorate their walls with a selection of posters from Art.com and Allposters.com, and dress their avatars in T-shirts based on designs from Threadless, a hip online clothes store.

But while all the marketing and branding going on inside Hangout may be reminiscent of MySpace, the new service has one big advantage over its 2-D predecessor: … Next Page »

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One of my goals with this column—which is now in its third week—is to tell you about new stuff on the Web that’s so delicious you just have to taste it. Here are three morsels to tide you over until next time.

The first is a quick appetizer: Very Short List, an e-mail newsletter funded by IAC/Interactive Corp. VSL has been around since mid-2006, but I just discovered a couple of weeks ago. If you sign up, every day they’ll send you one—exactly one—nugget of entertainment or media content that, in the site’s words, hasn’t already been hyped to within an inch of its life. So far, every item I’ve received has been intriguing at least (an amazing TV ad for a soccer video game), and often utterly engrossing (an online museum of online museums).

For the main course: I suggest Google Earth 4.3. This week Google rolled out the latest version of its free geographic browser for Windows and Mac, which lets you tour a 3-D simulation of the entire planet built on the company’s database of real satellite and aerial photographs.

Like its competitors, Microsoft Virtual Earth and NASA’s Worldwind, Google Earth started out as a digital atlas, showing huge amounts of classical map and photographic data that was itself 2-D but happened to be draped over a spherical globe, which mainly made it easier to shift between top-down views of different locations. As the product has evolved, however, the sphere forming the scaffolding for the map data has gained realistic 3-D topography, followed by other real-world touches such as 3-D buildings and even clouds based on real-time reports from the National Weather Service. In other words, it’s gradually becoming what Yale computer scientist David Gelernter first termed a “mirror world”—a software model that tries to recreate the human environment as accurately as possible.

The latest version provides improvements in both content and navigation that nudge it even farther in this direction—which is a blessing for people like me who are intrigued by virtual worlds and all the possibilities they offer for new kinds of learning and interaction (though it should be noted that some traditional map mavens like Stefan Geens, the author of the Ogle Earth blog, feel that the profusion of cosmetic improvements in Google Earth is diminishing its information value as an atlas).

The most visible addition to Google Earth 4.3 is an expanded crop of 3-D buildings for dozens of cities around the world, along with extremely realistic textures or “skins” for those buildings. In past versions of Google Earth, most 3-D buildings were represented by gray boxes of the appropriate shape and height. In 4.3, most of the 3-D models, including hundreds of Boston buildings, are now clothed with photographs of the actual structures. (Don’t ask me how Google pulled this off: The process of creating photorealistic 3-D models of buildings was, until recently, a tedious one tackled mainly by enthusiastic amateurs, who used Google’s SketchUp 3-D modeling program and uploaded their finished models to Google’s open-source 3-D Warehouse. Clearly Google has found a way to automate the whole process.)

The program’s 3-D buildings are now so detailed that it’s possible to “fly” to a given location in the Google Earth landscape and get a view that’s astonishingly close to actually being there. To see what I mean, compare the two images here: one is a photograph I took yesterday from the roof of the building in Cambridge, MA, where Xconomy is headquartered. The other is a screenshot from Google Earth with the imaginary “camera” positioned in roughly the same spot.

When comparing these two images, keep in mind what makes the Google Earth version so remarkable: It’s entirely synthetic. No one from Google went out and took a picture from that perspective (although Google’s vast collection of Street View photographs is now integrated into Google Earth—but that’s a different story). Rather, it’s a reconstructed view based entirely on 3-D modeling, pasted-on photographic skins, Google’s map data, and some very sophisticated computer graphics algorithms.

Google Earth 4.3 contains a ton of other great improvements, but I’ll just mention two more. One is the sun. Now you can turn on a feature that puts a simulated sun into the proper spot in the simulated sky and lets you adjust the time of day with a slider, generating realistic shadows on buildings and landforms. Finally, the Google Earth team has completely revamped the program’s navigation controls to make panning, zooming, tilting, and otherwise moving around inside the 3-D environment much more intuitive—which is to say, much more like a videogame or a Second Life-style virtual world. If you’re a longtime user of Google Earth, the new controls might take some getting used to, but ultimately you’ll appreciate the added flexibility. Meanwhile, if you’ve never downloaded Google Earth before, there’s never been a better time to start exploring.

And now for dessert: Go check out MyLOC, the newest online resource from the Library of Congress. Launched April 12, the site is a history buff’s dream, containing a digital collection of historic books, maps, and other resources from the Library’s vast archives. The site—the online counterpart of an exhibit at the Library’s Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C.—provides some clever Flash and Microsoft Silverlight multimedia tools for browsing individual books, including a Gutenberg Bible and several volumes from Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. Bon appetit.

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The “Cyber Monday” phenomenon is a baseless piece of marketing fluff crafted by the National Retail Federation—the biggest online shopping day of the holiday season actually falls somewhere between December 5 and 15 every year. But if virtual shopping floats your boat, today is a good day for it anyway: the novelty retailer Brookstone, based in Merrimack, NH, has chosen Cyber Monday to open its first 3-D online store using technology created by Marlborough, MA, startup Kinset.

If you’ve ever visited the virtual worlds Second Life or There, you’ll feel right at home inside the virtual Brookstone store. It’s a rough 3-D mockup of a real Brookstone retail outlet, fully stocked with the chain’s trademark so-cool-you-gotta-have-one gadgets, like the $70 iHome Shower Dock for your iPod or $30 White Microbeam keychain flashlight. You can saunter through the store using your computer’s mouse or arrow keys. If you see something you like, you can zoom in on it, pull up a text window for more information, and then add it to your shopping cart, just as if you were shopping at Amazon. (In fact, when you’re done, Kinset’s software sends you to Amazon to complete the purchase, which is then fulfilled by Brookstone.)

The Brookstone store is one of three adjacent stores inside Kinset’s 3-D shopping world, which was launched in beta form on October 22 and is accessible via a small Windows program that you download to your PC. Brookstone was attracted to Kinset’s 3-D retailing platform because it makes online shopping into “a deeper, more robust and interactive journey of discovery,” akin to visiting a bricks-and-mortar store, said vice president and general manager of direct marketing Greg Sweeney in a statement about the opening.

That may be taking things a bit far. My own visit to the virtual Brookstone store—and to the demonstration bookstore and electronics store Kinset has built next door to it—didn’t feel terribly deep. It could be that I’m jaded, having spent more hours than I care to admit exploring Second Life and building virtual objects using that world’s extensive modeling tools. But I’d say that Kinset’s Brookstone store is a first, tentative step toward retailing’s 3-D future—a serviceable but not-fully-baked melding of 3-D modeling and navigation techniques with older e-commerce tools.

For one thing, Kinset’s default mechanism for moving around—using the mouse to jump from point to point—is awkward and disorienting; you really have to turn it off and use the arrow keys to understand where you’re going. And in the biggest departure from the Second Life model, you don’t have a personal avatar in Kinset’s world—the screen simply shows the first-person point of view from where your avatar would be standing, if you had one. That’s an understandable technical choice, since you don’t really need an elaborate Second-Life-style avatar to go on a shopping expedition. But the main benefit of an avatar is to orient you inside a virtual space, and without one I felt somewhat lost and, er, disembodied.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Brookstone store doesn’t contain any Brookstone gadgets—it’s a room full of boxes with photographs of the products pasted to the outsides. If you’ve been to Second Life, you know that it’s possible to build exquisitely detailed 3-D replicas of objects as small as flowers and teapots. That, frankly, is what I was expecting to see inside Kinset’s Brookstone store—not stacks of cubes covered with flat, 2-D pictures that I could just as easily have found in a Brookstone catalog or at the Brookstone website.

Even without avatars and detailed 3-D objects, however, there is still value to the concept of arranging products in a three-dimensional space. For example, spreading products out the way they’re arranged in a real store and allowing the shopper to walk down virtual aisles makes browsing—and serendipitous discoveries—much easier and more natural than on a traditional e-retailing site.

There are other advantages as well. I wasn’t able to speak with Kinset executives for this story, but the company’s FAQ points out that many well-known retail chains—think Best Buy, for example—have spent lots of money honing the look and layout of their physical stores. Kinset’s tools make it easy to re-create the experience of being inside one of those stores more faithfully than any flat website could hope to do. The Web, as Kinset’s FAQ puts it, “introduced an alien visual vocabulary to merchandising;” Kinset’s 3-D spaces restore the more familiar vocabulary of bricks-and-mortar stores.

At the same time, transposing retailing to virtual worlds allows new kinds of interactions that aren’t possible in the physical world. Without having to leaving home, for example, shoppers in Kinset’s world can ask questions of virtual clerks. In the future, they’ll be able to rendezvous inside the world with friends who are also connected from their home computers, or attach notes for their friends to specific items.

I’ve talked with lots of people about the evolution of virtual worlds, which range today from social worlds like Second Life to gaming worlds like World of Warcraft and practical map-based worlds like Google Earth. It’s not clear whether there’s a demand for a dedicated Shopping World, or whether retailing will simply be a component of other types of worlds—but all of the experts agree that social shopping experiences will be one of the 3-D universe’s key pastimes and moneymakers. Providing the infrastructure to make that happen is where Kinset is carving out a lead. “If, in the future, you find a store via Google Earth, that’s fine,” the company’s FAQ. “When you want to go inside that virtual store and buy things, we will be about rendering the inside experience.”

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Note to self: Next time you give a keynote speech in Second Life, tickle your avatar every once in a while to keep it awake.

I was slightly embarrassed yesterday at Life 2.0, a virtual conference organized inside the virtual world Second Life by multimedia publisher CMP, when I realized that I’d been lecturing for 10 or 15 minutes but my avatar was slumped over the podium like a narcoleptic. It’s one of the unintentionally hilarious features of Second Life that when a user is “afk” or away from the keyboard for more than about 10 minutes, their avatar falls asleep. I wasn’t technically afk, but I was gabbing away over an audio link without remembering to nudge my avatar.

Hopefully, my disrespectful posture didn’t sour the hundred or so people in the audience on my speech, which was about the current-day technologies giving rise to the “Metaverse.” That term is a product of the cyberpunk fiction of Neal Stephenson, but it’s being used today to connote the sum product (and the future shape) of immersive 3-D computer environments as diverse as Second Life, Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and World of Warcraft. I basically spent the first third of 2007 writing a massive cover story about the Metaverse for MIT’s Technology Review magazine—a story that, I’m pleased to say, a lot of people have ended up pointing to as a useful, centralized explanation of the current moment in the evolution of virtual-worlds technology. A few weeks ago John Jainschigg, the director of online technology and new business for the CMP Metaverse division of publishing giant CMP, invited me to give a talk about the article as the opening session for the fall Life 2.0, a quarterly event that attracts software developers and businesspeople interested in using Second Life and other immersive environments to engage with customers. Despite a few qualms about being able to translate the article into a decent talk, I accepted, and yesterday I was forced to make good on my commitment.

I mainly repeated the argument from my article that anyone who has spent time in both Google Earth (the most popular map world or “geobrowser”) and Second Life (the leading social virtual world, created and operated by San Francisco-based Linden Lab) should appreciate how powerful it would be to mash up the two technologies, or at least the driving ideas behind them. Wandering around Second Life demonstrates how natural it can be to build and explore 3-D structures and environments through the medium of a human-shaped, human-acting avatar. Browsing Google Earth demonstrates what a sense of freedom and mastery comes from having tip-of-your-fingers access to an entire globe’s worth of geographical data at multiple levels of resolution.

The next step—either bringing avatars into map worlds, or making social virtual worlds more map-like—is so obvious that someone will figure out how to do it, whether or not there’s money in it. And from there, it’s not too many more steps to a full Metaverse—a 24/7 immersive simulation of the real world, as ubiquitous and accessible as the Web and used for everything from recreation and virtual tourism to city management, logistics and supply chain management, military training, environmental monitoring.

I wasn’t arguing in my piece that privately controlled platforms like Google Earth and Second Life themselves will become the cornerstones of the Metaverse (although several rudimentary attempts are underway to make avatars work in Google Earth and to make giant maps work in Second Life, as I detailed in my article). Rather, I think these two programs are serving as testbeds and training grounds for the developers who will soon go out and build a new Metaverse infrastructure that’s much more Web-like (in the sense that it will be based on open standards, so that anyone can add to it).

That’s not to say that Google and Linden Lab won’t be there as participants. Linden Lab, where the programmers and executives are smart enough to know they can’t build the Metaverse on their own, has already released an open source version of its client viewer program and says it will eventually contribute the underlying simulation software to the open source community. And Google recently contributed KML, the formatting language that allows users to create data overlays in Google Earth, to the Open Geospatial Consortium for consideration as an industry-wide, open source geographical markup standard.

After I shut up, audience members posed several nice questions, such as (my paraphrases): “What business models will drive the Metaverse?” “Will there be wide enough access to the broadband Internet to make the Metaverse work for everyone?” “What critical mass of participation must be reached before Metaverse construction really takes off?” I won’t bore you by recounting my answers. But as at any well-run technology event (which—hats off to John Jainschigg—this one definitely was), there were far too many good questions at the end and too little time to talk about them.

I made sure to plug Xconomy and to tell people what we’re doing here to analyze, and hopefully cultivate, the innovation scene in greater Boston. In that connection, it’s worth noting that Microsoft and Google both have growing presences in Boston, and that several Boston-area companies are working on various aspects of the Metaverse, including the Cambridge outpost of Linden Lab, Quincy game studio 2K Boston, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s MMORPG development house 38 Studios, and stealth-mode social-virtual-world developer Conduit Labs. There’s also a project underway at Emerson College to create a virtual version of Boston, or at least its major landmarks, inside Second Life.

Life 2.0, which is being sponsored by Sun Microsystems and IBM, continues until September 21. You can register for free here to attend the remainder of the conference. I’m told that a videotape of my keynote and other sessions will be available at some point in the future.

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If you’ve spent any time in Second Life—or any other virtual world, for that matter—you know that the serious attractions are on the ground, not in the sky. The sky simply isn’t a priority for most virtual world-builders, who usually have their hands full just simulating players’ avatars and their interactions with virtual objects such as buildings and furniture. The synthetic cumulus clouds of Second Life look like raked-over cotton candy, the sunsets are a wan burnt-orange, and there’s nary a thunderhead, rainbow, or sunbeam to be found.

But Second Life’s weather is about to improve. Linden Lab, the company that launched Second Life in 2003, purchased Waltham-based graphics studio Windward Mark Interactive in May, and will soon integrate that firm’s atmospheric rendering software into its 24/7 online simulation, bringing the sky a new level of realism and spectacle. At the same time, Windward Mark‘s five founding programmers—all members of Harvard College’s Class of 2003—are moving into Linden Lab’s new 14th-floor offices at One Broadway, Cambridge.

This Kendall Square location is Linden Lab’s largest major outpost outside its San Francisco office. That means it won’t just be the lead site testing the new weather-modeling system (called WindLight)—it will also be the place where the famed virtual-worlds company explores whether it can, itself, operate virtually. “We see Second Life as a global platform, so we should be a distributed company,” says John Lester, Linden Lab’s Boston operations director and academic programs manager.

I sat down with Lester last week in one of the conference rooms that Linden Lab shares with the dozens of other technology companies renting bays in One Broadway’s busy Cambridge Innovation Center. The view out the windows was of just the sort of breezy, drizzly Boston day that the Windward Mark guys would probably enjoy simulating.

“The sky is never just a static picture,” Lester observes. “The atmosphere is always changing, and causing you to see what’s underneath differently. We want to give our users that kind of control in Second Life. And with WindLight you can change the level of haze, the types of clouds, the rate of the wind. That’s why it was such an effective match to hire these five guys from Windward Mark, who are just brilliant.”

Not long ago, these virtuosos of variation might have been asked to move across the country to work out of the Sansome Street headquarters of Linden Lab—a famously cultish company run by CEO Phillip Rosedale, who frequently proselytizes on the virtues of virtual communities. But Lester, who wears an amulet showing the signature raised-hand Linden Lab logo around his neck, says it’s now time for the company to welcome employees who might prefer to live outside the Bay Area. “We talk the talk about the Metaverse, and being plugged into a global data-space,” says Lester. “Now we want to walk the walk. Instead of all being in the same building in San Francisco, we’ll see the world from more points of view, and we’ll live where we want to live.”

Lester himself is a longtime Bostonian, having joined Linden Lab after a long stint as director of technology for the neurology service at Massachusetts General Hospital. “At MGH I got into how technology could help physicians and patients communicate, particularly patients with chronic incurable illnesses,” Lester recounts. He says he saw the potential for educational and social uses of virtual worlds after watching stroke survivors and people with Asperger’s Syndrome and cerebral palsy begin to flower through their interactions in Second Life. “I decided I saw so much potential for this that I wanted to help make it grow.”

In the Cambridge office, Lester and the Windward Mark programmers will work alongside a representative cross-section of other Linden Lab staffers, including software developers, community managers, business development officers–”the whole nine yards,” in Lester’s words. The weather-simulation experts may even have to get their hands dirty helping to improve the stability of Second Life’s basic simulation software—which, at times, is barely up to the challenge of supporting the tens of thousands of users who are online simultaneously. Just this week, residents have suffered through a series of outages related to a bug in the way Second Life’s simulation servers communicate with the databases that store all information about the world’s contents.

Improvements can’t come too soon for some users, who’d rather have working avatars than beautiful weather. “You need to slow down the development of WindLight, and get some of the people working on that moved onto the problems,” one Second Life user urged last week in a comment on the company’s blog. “Once the asset server does exactly what it’s supposed to 99.99% of the time, then we can talk about pretty skies.”

Like the Cambridge office, the company’s other locations in Seattle, WA, Mountain View, CA, and Brighton, England will have a broad mix of employees working on a range of such challenges—often meeting one another inside the virtual world. “The offices aren’t branches, they are just distributed instances of a single Linden Lab,” says Lester. “Our only central office is Second Life itself.”

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