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I understand that virtual worlds are a new thing, and that companies need to experiment with business models and pricing structures to see what fits the market best. And I’m totally in favor of lowering prices, simplifying pricing structures, or providing more options for customers. But I don’t understand whereRead More →

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Update 4: We’re back on Google! Yeay! The problem turned out to be in the htaccess file, which had mysteriously mutated so that it was blocking search engines. So, overall, I’m happy with my experience with Dreamhost. The first few solutions they offered didn’t work, but each time I came backRead More →

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If you’re planning to create a new grid website, or redesign an old one, a great place to start is WordPress themes. WordPress is a popular blogging platform, so it’s easy to update. You can create accounts for all your grid administrators and volunteers so that they can upload newRead More →

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OpenSim grid owners are busy people and, sometimes, the website is an afterthought. Many grids simply go with the default website created by the Diva Distro or New World Studio, which is usually the grid stats, an image, and links for creating accounts. In fact, you don’t need to have aRead More →

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I just got back to my computer from a big, turkey-filled family dinner, taking a quick break before settling in for a marathon session of Arrow episodes and writing a book chapter about the Chinese economy. And, reflecting on the current status of the hypergrid, there’s quite a bit toRead More →

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I heard that Walmart is making its employees work on Thanksgiving this year, because the poverty-level wages they’re paying out, at a time of record corporate profits, aren’t making employees suffer enough. Do companies have to be this way? Callously disregard people’s needs in favor of the all-mighty bottom line?Read More →

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Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey was in Cambridge Saturday, at the Microsoft NERD Center, for a recruitment event and mini virtual reality conference. If you couldn’t make it, you missed three different tracks of presentations, running from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., plus demos of several Oculus Rift games. MostRead More →

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Today at the SAP TechEd conference I got a change to try out Google Glasses in conjunction with an SAP-powered warehouse application. Up to now, I haven’t been a big fan of Google Glass. If you need to know something, how hard is it to pull out your phone andRead More →

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Hypergrid Business articles and other content — except where noted — is copyright protected and cannot be cut-and-pasted to other sites. Though I don’t mind people using excerpts or quotes. There are both good and selfish reasons for this. The good one is that we might have made a mistakeRead More →

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As the editor of Hypergrid Business, I regularly hear from people with stories of projects that failed. Most of these don’t make it into print — nobody wants to go on the record in a story about things going wrong, no matter how useful or enlightening it may be forRead More →

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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told me he was excited about the potential of virtual reality. “I’m bullish and predict a huge future for it,” he said. “Not only that, but it’s a great opportunity for entrepreneurs.” He said he can see a lot of uses for it. “Especially for games, butRead More →

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In researching today’s news story about Linden Lab terms of services change, content seemed to be the main topic. Protecting it, licensing it, controlling it, owning it. Everyone wants content. Creators make content, then content attracts users. Without any content, there is no grid. Or is there? Is content reallyRead More →

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If anyone has visited Hyperica lately — hypergrid teleport to  hg.hyperica.com:8022 — you might have noticed many of the gates not working correctly. The scripts keep requiring manual restarts because they keep doing weird things, and I haven’t been able to track down the problems. But it’s all a mootRead More →

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Over the course of the past week, I attended two very different technology conferences. One was a virtual conference, last weekend’s OpenSimulator Community Conference 2013. The other was a traditional conference, held in a hotel complex in the Chicago suburbs, the Unisys Universe conference. Both included participants from around theRead More →

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I recently read Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses and as I was reading it, I kept thinking, “This would be great advice for grid owners!” Ries was the co-founder and CTO of IMVU, which I’ve never used, butRead More →

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At some distant point in the future, virtual reality will be good enough and immersive enough that we can telecommute to our jobs by simply stepping into some version of a Holodeck or plugging into some version of the Matrix. Today’s virtual reality has only very limited use for theRead More →

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The promise of virtual reality was all the rage in the 90s, but didn’t go anywhere because the headsets were laggy, low-resolution, had small fields of view, and made their users sick. Today, the Oculus Rift is ushering in a new wave of virtual reality technology, with over 17,000 developmentRead More →

Train wreck image by Wystan via Flickr

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Whenever a grid closes unexpectedly, there are always some users who are surprised and unprepared. They didn’t make offline backups of their builds, didn’t get their OAR or IAR exports, didn’t move their in-world social networks to a more permanent — or, at least, different — platform like an emailRead More →

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The Oculus Rift is coming to Second Life. It’s already available for the Unity platform. Other virtual world platforms and games are rapidly signing on, including the Unreal engine, Valve, Bioshock, Hawken, Minecraft, Portal, and many, many more. This 3D headset — and the flood of competitors soon to comeRead More →

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So I’m building a themed region — Maria’s Virtual Fit Club — on Kitely. (Facebook group here, Kitely login link here, story about the project here.) So, the first thing I think about, because I’m at heart a traditional newspaper layout designer, is the style template for the signs. There’sRead More →

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Today, two commercial grids — AviWorlds and Avination — announced their continued support of third-party currency exchanges. The announcements were in reaction to yesterday’s Linden Lab decision that third-party exchanges would no longer be authorized by the platform. As a result, 11 exchanges have already announced that they are endingRead More →

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Three years ago, I participated in a groundbreaking fitness and lifestyle modification program in Second Life, as a result of which I made long-term changes — and lost 20 pounds. (Read more about my experience here and more about the Club One program here.) It may seem crazy that virtualRead More →

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I love participating in online conversations, so here’s my take on the “Why do I blog?” meme which recently showed up on New World Notes and Journey To The Center of the Metaverse and Daniel Voyager’s Blog after a challenge by Strawberry Singh. How long have you been blogging? I launched HypergridRead More →

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These last few weeks, I’ve felt a feeling of foreboding. Like there were big things looming on the horizon. Big things that would change the world as we know it. These big things are still far off, and even bigger things maybe creeping up behind them, out of our view.Read More →

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As a technology journalist, I get to look at a lot of vendor websites. As a former newspaper and magazine editor, I’ve done my share of layout and design. So as I look at OpenSim hosting websites I can’t help think of all the ways they can be improved inRead More →

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We’re about to see a big increase in the size of the hypergrid. According to my data, there are currently 96 grids that I know of that are hypergrid-enabled, with a total of 16,628 regions and 8,052 active users — though some of those active users might overlap as someRead More →

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The following mistakes are totally and completely a matter of my opinion. I don’t expect grid owners to rush out and redesign their websites because I didn’t like some aspect of it. However, if you’re designing your website for the first time, or planning a make-over of your existing siteRead More →

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Yes, it can. I really think it can. So here’s the deal. Personal computer sales are going down the toilet. According to IDC, total sales are down 14 percent for the first quarter of this year compared to last year. There were more than 88 million computers sold in theRead More →

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I’ve written about Bitcoin before, warning that I was worried about volatility and botnets. Bitcoin has been on my mind again, lately, due to a big bubble spurred in part by the Cyprus financial crisis, worries that Linden Dollars might see increased regulation, and a Kaspersky Labs report about botnets beingRead More →

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Last month, Entropia Universe “discovered” a new moon. Today, the company announced that the moon “sold” for $150,000 to a player-led group of investors. This isn’t the first time the company has “sold” virtual property — a virtual setting called “Treasure Island” went for $26,500 in 2004. In 2005, “ClubRead More →

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When it comes to graphics, I’m not much of a power user. I mostly stick with cropping and scaling in Paint. People who know what they’re doing using Photoshop or its free, open source alternative — GIMP. When I absolutely positively need to use GIMP for something, I Google howRead More →

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In virtual worlds, the question of free stuff — free content, free software, free land — comes up a lot. Some people love free stuff. Some people hate it. Some people say that all content should be free because there are no distribution costs. Some people say that content should cost moneyRead More →

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Sick and tired of the inaccurate statistics in Hypergrid Business every month? You know who you are. You’re sure you can do better. Well, I’m going to help you out. We’re running far behind on updating the Hyperica directory and I was thinking of automating some of the tasks, suchRead More →

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With PixieViewer, we’re closer to the dream of a Web-based viewer for OpenSim than we’ve ever been before. This particular viewer, which is built using HTML 5 technology, solves the biggest usability problem that OpenSim has. It requires no download — no plugins, no Java, no configuration, nothing. You goRead More →

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The question of avatar rights may seem to simply be a special case of the consumer rights discussion. But the areas in which avatar rights are different from generic consumer rights is where the biggest problems arise. Many consumers feel that they are in an inferior position – they haveRead More →

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As the number of people using OpenSim grids rises, emotions seem to be rising, as well. I’ve been seeing it the comments on posts lately, and have had to moderate comments or close comments altogether. I want Hypergrid Business to be a place where people debate things in a nice,Read More →

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There was a cover story in Wired recently about how robots are going to take all our jobs. Since I started covering virtual worlds, I’ve been wondering what work was going to look like in the future. I had imagined it to look much like the work we do  now,Read More →

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Yesterday, I wrote about why sales are important to a company, and, more than that, are a good thing. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t bad ways of doing sales. And some of the worst techniques can actually work. Does that mean that you have to become evil inRead More →

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Many regular people have a negative view of the sales and marketing profession. And no wonder. Most of our experience with sales is negative — intrusive telemarketing calls, annoying commercials, rude clerks. It’s no surprise that many beginning entrepreneurs think of sales as either unnecessary — “If someone wants something,Read More →

Image courtesy curtfleenor.com via Flickr.

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Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2075 Worst day ever. Got hit by a bus yesterday, body a total loss. Now I’m online full time, instead of just visiting. The worst part? All the “little improvements” I’ve had done over the past few years, a little plastic surgery here, a little tinkering withRead More →

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A couple of people have asked me by email what what my definition of a grid is, and there was also some discussion of this in the comments of previous posts, and on other blogs, such as the Elf Clan Social Network. There seems to be a lot of confusionRead More →

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I recently needed an estimate for how many times OpenSim has been downloaded. Unfortunately, the main OpenSimulator.org site only began keeping statistics a couple of months ago. All we have is Diva Distro stats and Sim-on-a-Stick stats. The total number of Diva Distro downloads to date are about 19,000. TheRead More →

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A new paper published this month in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research listed a few reasons why business users are hesitant to embrace virtual environments: The main reasons were: Technical difficulties: “Due to frustrating first-hand experiences, professionals predicted that high technical requirements, slow system performance, and the inability toRead More →

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I’m still playing around with textures. After learning how to make seamless textures in GIMP with one click and a different kind of seamless texture with Texture Studio last weekend, I’ve been seeing potential textures everywhere. For example, I want to have stone walls in my build, but am worriedRead More →

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After learning how to make seamless textures yesterday, I became a bit obsessed with it, taking pictures all over the place and trying to turn them into textures. And I discovered that that turning bricks and boards — anything with a large, regular pattern — into a seamless texture isRead More →

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This is probably already known to everybody else, but either I’m an idiot, or I missed the day that everyone learned about it, but there’s a very quick and easy way to create seamless textures. Now that I’m thinking of sharing the stuff that I make, I’ve become absolutely paranoidRead More →

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Update Apr. 25, 2023: It looks like I ran out of the free trial credits on the Google App engine, and my original app no longer works. You can create your own, however — instructions at the bottom of this article. Plus, the folks at Outworldz have put up theirRead More →

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Update Aug. 2016: DigiWorldz is now registered. Do you own a grid? Do you allow other users to upload content to your grid? Do you have legal license agreements on file for every script, texture and object on your grid? If your answers are yes, yes, and no, then get outRead More →

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In the face of recent grid outages and terms of service changes, it doesn’t just make sense to back up your content, as I urged content creators to do  so in my column on Sunday — it also makes sense to back up your customers. No, that was weird. IRead More →

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I read a great article by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, “Start With a Business Model, Not a Business Plan,” in today’s Wall Street Journal. It reminded me of entrepreneurs I have known who spent ages creating a business plan, only to have it fall apart the minute they tried toRead More →