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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We love what the folks over at Virtual Worlds News are doing with their blog.¬† This effort is part of Chris Sherman’s Show Initiative company, the people producing the upcoming Virtual Worlds West 20007 Show in San Jose.¬† For over a year now, we’ve really craved a daily news source that covered all worlds and Joey Seiler is doing just that.¬† So have a read — you’ll notice, just to the side of the high quality editorial, a little ad for MoU.¬† We’re really proud to support thei continued growth and coverage of our industry.

It’s official and we’re busting with pride. Wagner James Au has the full story of the deal on New World Notes and Xeni Jardin covers it on Boing Boing.

Back in March of this year, my email box filled up one morning with notes from everyone I knew containing links to this film on Youtube. Each email had an almost identical message — usually something like “Have you seen this!?” Well, I contacted the creator and learned that it was the 1st episode in a 10 part series. I also learned that Douglas was a part time goat farmer recently returned from living in Tuscany and now living in nearby Petaluma. Since then, we’ve formed a friendship and he’s joined MoU as Chief Creative Officer. Together we’re begin to shape a cross-platform vision of virtual worlds and a goal of elevating the medium to an art form.

Congratulations Douglas. Can’t wait to see the rest of the episodes on HBO.

We’re 2 days in to the WWE Invasion of Gaia. John Cena arrived on Monday to a frenzy of fan response and controversy over the perspective outcome of his match against Randy Orton at Sunday’s pay-per-view event at Summerslam. So far we’ve had over 25,000 forum posts on Gaia. Unreal.

Below is a picture of Jeff Freedman of Millions of Us next to Andre the Giant’s boots.

Today is a big day for us at Millions of Us. At 1 PM PST, we officially launched our first campaign in the virtual world of Gaia Online. Within the first 31 minutes, we’ve had over 50 pages of comments.

Over the next week, we’ll begin to unfold a new form of storytelling and narrative using virtual worlds. Stay tuned for the twists and turns. (BTW, to those Gaians wondering, yes, the wrestlers are all real).

I understand its tough being a journalist. You have to sell headlines, and “Second Life Losing Lock on Virtual Site Marketing” sells better than “Virtual World Space Broadens Appeal: New Sites Prospering”.

The second would be a more accurate title for Andrew Hampp’s recent Advertising Age article which states that the “giant in the space seems outdated” while telling the details of Zwinky, Stardoll and Doppelganger’s recent music industry campaigns. Hampp’s argument that Second Life is losing appeal is just flat out wrong however and I was frankly shocked by the lack of fact-checking. He argues that “mass immigration to the shores of Second Life had stabilized, with the application averaging 132,000 downloads a month from November 2006 to May 2007″. Huh? There have been single days within that range where there have been that many downloads, I’d guess. Here’s a chart I compiled just now of the Second Life growth figures (pain in the butt btw, had to go back through a years worth of date-stamped presentations).

He then goes on to make a variety of other illogical statements such as “Zwinky, for example, garnered nearly 3.6 million unique visits in May alone, while SecondLife.com accumulated just under 4 million unique visits in the span of an entire year, according to ComScore”. Huh? First, this is a ridiculous comparison because the whole world of Zwinky is browser based, whereas users only visit Secondlife.com to download the application. If you were to compare usage hours (which should be the defacto standard for comparing virtual worlds), Second Life with >20 million (vs. 3 million a year ago) is the equivalent of a top ten Comscore site. But leaving that aside, if Hampff is to be believed, then some 2 million users over the last year managed to download Second Life without ever visiting Secondlife.com (it’s a miracle). Never mind the people who visit but don’t download or go to the blog or buy currency, etc.

There are a variety of other bizarre things in the article, such as his ridicule of hype-based Second Life marketing campaigns that claimed to be the “First This That or the Other” in Second Life followed almost immediately with a discription of “the first avatar concert” as a testament to Zwinky’s drawing power. C’mon. . . . These have been happening for a long time (Suzanne Vega, Ben Folds, Chamillionaire, etc. ) and they’ll continue to happen.
Let me be really clear here. The headline should have read “Virtual World Space Broadens Appeal: New Sites Prospering”. That’s true and it’s why we’ve announced our recent partnership with Gaia Online and will be announcing more over the next few months. These new worlds are great and they offer our clients a diversity of formats, programming choices and demographics.

As the industry matures, there will be plenty of opportunities and rivalries emerging. I would implore platform providers to sell themselves on their own strengths and merits rather than trying to tear Second Life or anyone else down. I hear this all the time and it’s silly and small-minded.

And to our friends in the press — we know you have to sell stories, but if you’re going to go negative, check your facts.