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Sometimes it’s odd how reality plays catch up with us.

I started this blog on the Blogger platform, then switched and used the (excellent) Windows Live Writer blogging tool to transfer, one by one, my posts from the Blogger thingy to my new shiny abode at WordPress.com. Anyway, one post I neglected to transfer was called ‘Second Opportunities at Second Life’. You can read it here in the now-unmaintained first blog iteration. I wrote it on October 17th. Just to save you the trip there, here’s a long excerpt from it, which explores one or two aspects of the commercial opportunities for telecom in the world of Second Life:

What if you started selling virtual mobile phones to the game’s netizens? what if those mobile phones had special value-add features that were integrated to aspects of mobile service in the real world? let’s assume there’s a character named IHaveNoLife, whose friends lovingly call IhnL. One bright virtual morning, IhnL walks into a Second Life (SL) mobile store and buys, for proper virtual credits (that easily translate to real world currency, by the way,) a super cool virtual mobile device. What’s so super cool about it, is that it can receive caller ID signals, or maybe even SMS, from real mobiles, so that these appear in a special “handset” panel he gets onscreen. Wait, there’s more. It actually is a softphone in a dressing. What you can really do with it is make SecondLife-to-phone calls! You can even get inbounds from outside SL. At this point you can probably see where I’m getting at: extending the virtual experience as far as it can go. You see, the reason IhnL needs an SL-to-RL device in the first place is to maintain his RL identity anonymous…

Anyway, now there is a mobile account to manage, and charging to take care of, and invoicing. And get this: competing services rise up, so one day IhnL actually considers to churn. So maybe the service provider starts a cross-product benefit program to keep people (characters?) from churning, or perhaps some loyalty program. The next thing you know, we’re talking about a virtual-real-world convergence scenario…

If you think this whole talk is too far fetched or science-fictionary, or if you don’t get this whole thing at all, you’re probably not alone. However, while it’s not entirely clear how service models will develop in virtual worlds such as Second Life, the road certainly leads to interesting developments in this arena. Commercial ventures are springing up there on an almost daily basis, and with these come opportunities for the quick entrepreneur - or the agile established service provider - to exploit. For a taste, sample this BusinessWeek slideshow. And you don’t need too much imagination to figure out that there is an opportunity - all you need to do is pay up the SL fee and walk down its virtual lanes, then buy yourself a virtual diet-coke and drink heartily from it. At least that’s what I would do, after such a longwinded visionary talk

Today I learned, through the x-series blog, that Second Life netizens can now communicate via virtual handsets with real-world cell phones. Here’s a line from the PR text:

With the introduction of real-time communication between handsets in a way similar to SMS and providing a range of useful information services in-world, these new phones look strikingly similar to popular models from well-known real world manufacturers, and can be used to send actual SMS messages to the real world

Odd, I was sure nobody read that entry of mine on Blogger…

Technorati tags: mobile, secondlife

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Filed under Mobile, Virtuality