OK, so the seasons here in Northern California are much milder than what I grew up with in New Jersey, but there’s still an optimism and general sense of rebirth that happens every year around this time.

For me, this year is especially poignant — we’re pulling up on our 2nd anniversary as a company and looking forward to the next year. While we began as a company building presences in Second Life, we’re now operating in a wide variety of worlds, building worlds from the ground up for major entertainment companies, creating Alternate Reality Games and asking ourselves, “What do we want to be when we grow up”? Will we continue to focus on connecting the real world and the Internet? Or maybe go more broadly into Social Media? Or maybe all of the above. It’s Springtime after all, and these questions seem normal and healthy.

Second Life has a new CEO — as Mark Kingdon’s start date approaches, we’re curiously watching, wondering and wishing well.

I’m mostly happy to be back home — for the last two months I’ve been traveling at least 2 days every week. It’s so nice to be able to take a deep breath now and spend a couple months (semi) stationary. We’ve got some big announcements coming out in the next few weeks, so that’ll keep things interesting. Aaah Spring.

Any Summer predictions?

First, a quick note. I just realized that I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon. So, in the spirit of Spring, I’m going to hop back on. Stay tuned. . . . .

I’m currently in Spain, speaking at the Radiate Group’s European Summit. Radiate is part of Omnicom and a world leader when it comes to experiential marketing. For those of you too lazy to click the link, here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry — “Experiential marketing attempts to connect consumers with brands in personally relevant and memorable ways”. OK, it’s a broad definition, but from what I can tell, this refers to marketing techniques that have been around for a while but recently were grouped together and given a sensible category name.

Most of my talk focused on virtual worlds — explaining what they are and how brands and entertainment companies are using them. I tried to focus on the fact that despite the fact that Second Life gets 99% of the media attention, it really only accounts for about 1.5% of the 80 million total users in the category of virtual worlds.

There was a great moment about 5 minutes into the talk, when Radiate’s CEO Jay Lenstrom interrupted me and said, “So, are you guys going to put us out of business or are there good ways for us to work together?” When I got over the surprise at this question, I understood what he meant and answered. You see Radiate’s specialty is live event marketing: The Olympics, FIFA World Cup, Rolling Stones concerts etc. And what I said was that it really depends.

The promise of virtual worlds for the experiential marketing industry and brands is that we will be able to combine the aspects of live events and experience design that produce fantastic engagement with the aspects of the internet that lead to cost efficiencies and reach. And so I responded to Jay that the answer to his question really is in Radiate’s hands. If they embrace this new category, it can be a great value added service for their clients and a driver of revenue. Or, they could take a page out of the record company’s playbook. They could see a disruptive technology and instead of embracing it, argue about it until some outside force (iTunes) steps in and virtually replaces them. These guys are smart and my money says they’ll do the former.

Driving up to my wife’s parents’ house for Christmas, we listened to an old recording of Jimi Hendrix playing “Who Knows” with his short-lived though brilliant band, the aptly named “Band of Gypsys“. As we drove across Route 37, I remembered that the band’s drummer had been a true genius and eccentric, but could not recall his name.

A day or two later, during a Wikipedia/Google session, I rediscovered my old friend Buddy Miles. I encourage you all to read this recent profile of the legendary drummer, especially the final sentence.

But more importantly, I love his dream of convincing all the Union Pacific Railroad to sponsor a “nationwide tour, tracing the railroad‚Äôs lines, for him to educate young people ‚Äúabout how important their lives are.‚Äù This should happen. Ideas?

Welcome to 2008!

I always find these last weeks of the year daunting, reflective and (when I’m lucky) inspirational.¬† The photo below, taken at MoU”s Holiday Party.¬† To see more of these, start here and just go forward in the photostream.

Looking back to 1 year ago, it amazes and humbles me at the progress we’ve made and the degree to which we’ve begun fulfilling our dreams.¬† 18 months ago we were some guys in a garage, a year ago there were 9 of us in a cold barn.¬† Now we’re at 34 and have begun to cement a reputation as a hardened group of virtual world leaders committed to evolving this from a singular phenomenon to a category.¬† An industry.

The first quarter of 2008 will include some very exciting announcements from Millions of Us, and ones that we believe will be profound for the direction of the industry.¬† These will range from new platforms entering the market to the launch of our products business. But now, instead of boring you with my pronouncements of the future, I’d like to invite you all to join me in the year-end exercise we’ve been doing here at MoU.

This is the email I sent everyone yesterday:

In these last days of 2007, I’d like to join me in a simple and powerful exercise.

Please think about where you’d like yourself and the company to be 1 year from today. Be ambitious and realistic.

List your comments for both yourself and the company as simple bullet points. I’ll asemble and distribute the company wide comments. The personal ones we’ll discuss use to set personal growth goals.

Happy holidays!

Please feel free to leave your own version of this in the comments.

Windows Media

Reuben’s a proud father. Here’s a link to the full story.

And they got there on a plane the size of a lunchbox!¬† Gothenburg seems really interesting — has anybody been?¬† Would love to hear more.

It is with great pleasure that I announce that Sibley Verbeck, former CEO of the Electric Sheep Company has joined Millions of Us.

OK, I’m kidding, but you have to admit that he throws a mean “M”!

Last Sunday I left for Japan to keynote the inaugural Japanese Virtual World Summit and attend the Tokyo International Film Festival.¬† The event was created by the Kadokawa Publishing Group with help from Japanese virtual world developer Meltingdots.¬† I traveled with our esteemed CCO Douglas Gayeton, whose enthusiasm for all things Japanese led me to some of the cooler epicurean experiences of my life, including sumo stew called Chanko, Yakitori, (skewered barbequed chicken including gizzards, skin, hearts and liver).¬† An episode of Douglas’ film “Molotov Alva” is showing in the festival.¬† We also hung out with a whole bunch of great virtual world creators, Net pioneers and media folks (see the picture below taken by Joi Ito right before we walked the red carpet on Saturday.

The unexpected highlight of our trip turned out to be an near total immersion and obsession in the toy stores of the Akehabara district, which feature robots, transformers and millions of tiny toys fromthe longstanding Japanese anime and character culture.¬† We bought close to 400 of these, focusing primarily on “Gashapon”, the small vinyl characters dispensed from coin operated vending machines in Japan. ¬† These will be carted today in a large suitcase to the MoU Sausalito offices where they will be greeted with joy by fellow MoU’ers (Gregory and Emma in particular).¬† Once Douglas returns (he is now in Rome),¬† I promise to upload the photos of our trip to Flickr and begin sharing how these toys will become integrated into the MoU creative process.¬† How’s that for a cliffhanger?

Back in April I went to London where I spoke at a fascinating conference called Wildfire, put on by Leo Burnett and Contagious Magazine. The program focuses on the emerging disciplines of viral marketing, branded entertainment and networked storytelling. At 1:30 PM Monday morning I leave for Singapore for the Asian counterpart to this event, aptly titled “Engage 2007″. At times like this, I truly question my sanity — wondering why I’m willing to fly 14 hours each way to speak for 40 minutes. The answer, I hope, is that the other speakers will be more interesting than I am.

It’s official! At 2PM PST today we launched a project that we have been working on since May.

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