Part Three
V.R. – Virtual Reality
Here’s another example of a Fortune 500 Company making money and building their brand in Second Life.
Pizza Hut had a virtual location in Second Life. You could go into their virtual Pizza Hut, be greeted by a friendly employee Avatar, place your pizza order, and… in 30 minutes or less, your pizza was delivered to your door!
Here are a couple of other personal experiences I had with Second Life you might find interesting about a virtual world.
When writing my best selling book “The Social Media Bible”, I asked to interview Mark Kingdon, the then CEO of Linden Labs the creators of Second Life. He refused a telephone call. I was disappointed. He then offered to do the interview only if it took place in Second Life and I quickly accepted! This one hour CEO interview is also available on YouTube.
What I didn’t know was, in the audience was a reporter from CNN. He had heard about the interview and just showed up. After the interview was over he came up to shake my hand and to tell me that I just performed the world’s first executive interview ever to be held in a virtual world. They then made me an official CNN SL Reporter. LOL! That story is still available on the CNN server through a Google search.
The final example is my Avatar working with ACS (American Cancer Society) on a fundraiser inside Second Life. The circle on a stand on the left is the SL Designer contest winner who created the best looking donation centers that were places in thousands of locations within Second Life.
The day of the fundraiser, so many people (Avatars) showed up to participate that it crashed the Linden Labs servers for several hours! Once we were back up and running, we raised more than $3.5 million for cancer research in that little known virtual world.
| Today, there are more than 25 major virtual environment platforms with more and more coming online everyday. | ||
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| If you have never experienced traveling around and being part of a virtual world, you have to do it. Virbela is a great place to start. Virtual worlds are experiencing a come back. Amazon has invested million of dollars in their new platform called “Sumerian”. If Amazon believes virtual worlds are here to stay, then I think they might just be! And, I bet all this was going on and you had no idea! I will be right back to conclude the series on The Four Acronyms Of The Apocalypse. Don’t go away! |
Lon Safko, Serial Innovator
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