AviWorlds is coming back — again — with a brand-new business model and a brand-new technology partner.
Since early 2011, owner Alexsandro Pomposelli has experimented with being the most expensive grid, and with offering land for free. He tried to have the grid hosted with Dreamland Metaverse, with Zetamex, with Kitely, and, most recently, with DigiWorldz. He has tried to run the grid from his garage. (That experiment ended with a catastrophic power surge.)  He has turned hypergrid connectivity off and on several times.
He’s changed the grid’s name from AVWorlds to AviWorlds. Last year, he rolled out the Avi-Labs brand, the umbrella name for his grid and his short-lived hosting company. Domain names have changed, and so have social media accounts.
Pomposelli has also burned through several partners and the breakups typically ended with a great deal of public airing of dirty laundry and threats of legal action, usually on all sides.
But he keeps coming back, and is somehow able to attract new residents, new customers, and new business partners.
His new business partner is Deiviti Costa, who is also known as Johnny Button in-world. According to Pomposelli, Costa is an expert in hosting and maintaining servers for his customers, including gaming servers, and previously created the Castaway Island, CitybydBay and Welcome Center regions for AviWorlds. He is based in Brazil, and can be found on Google Plus as Dex Web and on Facebook as DexWeb.xyz.
In addition to the new business partner, there’s also a new business strategy.
This time around, the key ingredient is going to be Second Life, despite the fact that Second Life has been hemorrhaging users and regions for years.
“That’s exactly why,” Pomposelli said, when asked why he was heading into Second Life. “It is like when the stock market is down its the best time to BUY! Avi-Labs will promote OpenSim right from the whale’s gut.”
An embassy in Second Life
The new Second Life embassy is already open, he said, on the AviLabs region. A second region, Beach Bums, offers land parcel rentals. Both regions are live. Since Second Life is not hypergrid-enabled, visitors will need to create a Second Life account if they don’t already have one.
The AviLabs region will host events, promote land rentals, sell OARs, and advertise other services, Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business.
“We will offer many services plus content and a market place that works in Second Life and in OpenSim,” he said.
In addition to investing in Second Life land, the grid will also invest in content, he said.
“Avi-Labs will not wait for creators to want to go to AviWorlds or Avi-Labs,” he said. “We will and are employing staff that will create items exclusively for Avi-Labs to offer OpenSim residents.”
Parcels will run from 2,500 Lindens a month, or about US $10 for a 2,048-square meter parcel, to 20,000 Lindens, or about $80, for a quarter region.
By comparison, the average cost for a full OpenSim region is $20 for an entire month. So it makes sense that OpenSim might be an attractive deal for people looking for lower prices, but it doesn’t explain why Pomposelli will be renting Second Life land as well. In addition, there is already an OpenSim embassy in Second Life.
He did not respond to questions about how he plans to accomplish all this, how he will maintain financial stability, or prevent losses due to outages, payment interruptions or personnel issues such as those that have plagued him before.
For more information, contact Pomposelli in Second Life at AlexAviWorlds Resident or via email at arpholdings@gmail.com.
You can also follow him on Facebook at AviWorlds Grid. The AviWorldz and Avi-Labs websites are not yet up, and the AviWorlds OpenSim grid will re-open in mid-July, he said.
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