Is Second Life Ready for Business? Essay

1. How can Second Life provide value to businesses that use it? Second Life can be a birthing ground for new industries and transform business, commerce, marketingand learning the same way that the Web did in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It alsocan facilitate internal communications and to position themselves at the forefront of the digital landscapein order to recruit tech-savvy employees. Second Life is a low-cost business tool and also a new marketingtool.Companies can use Second Life as a business tool for online conferencing, online collaboration, knowledge management and prototyping. Also companies can test new products using Second Life’s 3 -Drendering programs, experiment with new marketing and advertising campaigns to see how people react,receive feedback on real-world products or services. 2. What kinds of businesses are most likely to benefit from apresence on Second Life? Why? Retail businesses that are already used to doing business online may have an easier time of establishing aviable presence on Second Life. They are used to advertising and marketing to customers online and havethe systems built for taking orders, accepting payments, and shipping products. Other companies, likeIBM, that have established online collaboration systems and online knowledge management systems willprobably have an easier time using Second Life as another outlet for these activities. 3. Considering what you have learned about Second Life, howcould you, as an individual, create a modest start-up businesson the Grid? What goods would you sell? Why would this be agood choice of product? What, in simple terms, would yourbusiness plan be? Why would it work? There are several ways to start up business in an online virtual server. Second Life as of now harbored fewto many online companies that does business online as a form of advertising or even setting up their virtual business inside the server by buying up â€Å"lands† in the so called â€Å"Grid† world. Of course, to do that,you have to buy the virtual â€Å"land† to start up the virtual business by subscribing to the premium [pic]  membership on the website. By subscribing, several beneï ¬ ts can be enjoy including owning a house and rights to own a land. The current subscription cost according to the game website – secondlife.com – isUSD$72 for an annual  subscription, USD$22.50 for a quarter subscription or USD$9.95 for monthlysubscription. Personally and hypothetically, the initial cost for me to setup an online business on the â€Å"lands of the Grid† would be a monthly subscription of USD$9.95 as uncertainty in conveying the business over a decade plus old virtual server especially these past two years have been radically risky withmushrooms of similar online servers like gaiaonline.com and social networking sites like facebook that hasbeen rampaging in this fast-paced information system industry. Also, there are questions about itscurrent popularity against the other fast information changing platforms and how it cope with the current market segment. A typical online business would be an online auction/selling business. Speciï ¬ cally, i would set up a small business that deals with money changing/transfers between users and other onlinegames that offers on line services to its users. For example; an online game offers â€Å"cash –  shop† items that  is only available when you bought it online usually using credit/debit cards, often through sites like pay-pal. What i am offering here in my business is variety of online payments especially in terms of ForeignCurrency exchanges through local banks and also a much more user-friendly interaction between me andthe customers due to the live chatting system and in-game atmosphere in Second Life. A simpleexplanation why this might be a good choice is that, Second Life offers a casual sims like platform thatdoes not stress up their users like those of a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that needs hours and hours of â€Å"training† to achieve a better standi ngs in the game. Another good point isthat online gamers that plays particular games tend to hang out in the same channel or platform towhich, the simple Second Life w hich has quite low speciï ¬ cations  offers a range of 3D avatars to theplayers. This is especially true when the online game that they are playing having their routine servermaintenance which usually comes up once per week. During these one to several hours of maintenance,they could log on to Second Life and have chat with their online gaming friends from another game. Thus,simultaneously advertising my business over to them during these times. In summary, an online  basedbusiness would be a good addition to set up in Second Life. Though prone to risk and currently, the powerof substitutes are increasing like facebook and other networking sites, the opportunity to set up a smallbusiness within Second Life is still feasible due to the nature of online gaming and rapid increase ingaming communities.Considering what I have learned about Second Life, I, as an individual, will first start up my business byfiguring what products are mostly used in Second Life. The product that will sell in Second life will befurniture. This will be a good choice because customers or people in second life will need furniture fortheir new homes and offices. My business plan will be to invest in other products and services and wait tillmy investment grows before cashing out. [pic][pic] 4. Visit eBay on the Web and see what Second Life items youcan find listed for auction. How would you rate the activitysurrounding these items? Are you surprised by what you see?Why or why not? Obviously the information for this question will fluctuate. As of this writing, eBay offered 211 items. Theyincluded how-to manuals for making money on Second Life, a guide to selling land, and businessopportunities on the site. One item in particular was a vending machine business package available for$4.99. The individual offering the item was an eBay Power Seller with 6,483 feedback postings. He wasobviously an established eBay seller. Other items for sale include a Gym Workout package for $4.99 and amacro that makes navigating the skies of Second Life easier. It sold for $12.99. Answers to the last threequestions will vary by student. The point is to have them realize how advanced and pervasive sites likeSecond Life have become. 5. What obstacles does Second Life have toovercome  in order to become a mainstreambusiness tool? Does it face fewer or more obstaclesto become a mainstream educational tool? To what do you attribute the difference? Second Life needs to overcome the idea and perception that it’s â€Å"just another game site.† Other obstacles include ease-of-use, interoperability between pre-established business systems and Second L ife’s  proprietary system. It needs to create ways to import and export data between  its system and externalbusiness systems —don’t require data to be re  -input into either system. Second Life faces more obstaclesin trying to become a mainstream educational tool. Educators are inherently opposed to online, distanceeducation because it supposedly lacks the face-to-face communication between teachers and students.However, as more education is carried online, Second Life has all the tools in place to make it easy toconduct classes, especially its online collaboration tools.