transmutable

Virtual Worlds Prognostication

A few people in the virtual world business were rounded up and asked a series of questions:

1. What are your top 3 trend predictions for 2008?
2. What business goals have you set for 2008?
3. What challenges do you expect 2008 to bring for the virtual worlds industry?
4. A number of new platforms are launching in 2008. What are the biggest impacts this will have on the industry?
5. How will the above changes affect your specific segment of the industry in 2008?

Find out the answers at the Virtual Worlds Management Industry Forcast 2008 overview. My answers are clearly from the perspective of a web builder, so it's funny to see them next to all of the virtual world developers' predictions.

VC is thrilling, but less so than billing.

While most Web 2.0 startups and virtual world darlings are taking venture capital we've taken a different path by working with idea that we will fund our growth by providing products and services which people will find so valuable that they will actually pay to use them. It's crazy and old fashioned, I know.

I won't go into the many ways in which a shorter runway keeps us focused on our users and their needs but instead I'll just mention that when we're elbow deep in the details of billing I understand why lots of startups just go for eyeballs: it's hard to be both nice and paid.

For example, there is an easy way to bill you for Tomorrow Space event halls. They're daily rentals so it would be easy as pie to charge you at the time you make a reservation. But life is more complex, and you'll want to change and cancel reservations, and sometimes you'll forget that you even made them and nobody will use the hall. So we added a bit of code which only records a rental fee the first time a guest arrives at your event. You can poke and prod event halls all day and only pay when you're actually hosting an event.

It's not that these small tweaks are individually hard but to make this system something you feel good about supporting we're doing quite a bit more work than just plugging in a Paypal shopping cart and calling it a day.

Now there are edge cases to find and test cases to write, so it's back to the code mines with me.

Visible Progress

One excellent thing about working in the open and working with people who grok the web is that I get to link to posts like this one from the artist currently known as "Dr. Offset" who is crafting a couple of avatars for us. I simply can't wait to get high quality art onto the Ogoglio platform and into Transmutable avatar accounts so that people can start modding and styling their way to a better tomorrow.

If you know our company strategy of giving back to the Ogoglio community then you won't be surprised to learn that we plan to release this art under a Creative Commons license as soon as it's ready for prime time. Yep, we're paying people to make open licensed art.

I love my job.