A while back we launched a Brooklyn Brownstone for Warner Brothers Records’ artist Talib Kweli.¬† It was really cool, but we all wondered when the man would be stopping by for a visit.¬† Well the answer is. . . . tomorrow, at 1 PM, SLT/PST.¬† It’s very casual, just a fan meet and Q & A and hopefully will be a cool way for fans to connect with the artist.¬† Here’s a slurl to the event.¬† Here’s the announcement on Talib’s Myspace page.¬† I’ve predicted that by the end of 2007, avatars will be as much a requirement for celebs as Myspace pages are today.¬† All these early experiments are so interesting.¬† My feeling is that these things work best in SL when there’s less fanfare and it becomes more about hanging out and less about screaming adulation.¬† We’ll have to see.

Today I talked with Mike Monello. Mike is a partner in Campfire Media: the company we’re working with on the Motoratilife Project for Pontiac. Their campaigns, which break almost all the rules of conventional advertising (campaigns such as the Art of the Heist for Audi and Beta 7 for Sega), descend from a theory of social media dating back to their days making the Blair Witch Project. What’s interesting is that many of the production values and marketing techniques associated with Blair Witch are coming into the spotlight these days as marketers attempt to enter the dialogue in the Second Life/Youtube era.

Find the audio of the Sun Open Source Java audio stream here.

We’re incredibly proud to announce the launch of Scion City tonight.

On Scion City you can not only buy customizable versions of real Scions but you can
also drive them around and (in the future) see the coolest user mods that the
community creates. You’ll also be able to check out a
broad range of cutting edge film, music and art that will be playing
in the city and showing at the drive-in.

Scion City is the product of many months of work by a very special
team of people. First, may I encourage you to pan your cameras around
this sim — you’ll notice some amzing lighting and an attention to
detail and nuance that is uniquely the work of Neil Protagonist. He
crafted the vision of Scion City as a dark and futuristic urban locale
and poured long hours into bringing it to life..

Like all big visions, this wasn’t a solo effort. Francis Chung,
creator of the famed Dominus, was the lead car creator and wrought the
xB as well as the customization system. He also drove a real xB about
as hard as any human ever in the name of research.·

The xA was a different sort of challenge and for
that, we called on the skills of Lucky Millionsofus. Lucky’s hard
work resulted in a fiery little package that’s easy on the eyes and
fun to drive. To get the job done, Lucky torqued prims in ways that
are illegal in most states.

Finally, the tC, the performance car in the Scion stable. Bill
Millionsofus did the honors here, and as you fire yours up, you’ll
hopefully appreciate the energy, devotion and attention to detail that
went into creating it.

What makes these cars cool is the degree to which they’re customizable.
Basic users (like me) can change the body color and rims with a simple HUD.
Intermediate user can create convertibles and weird mashups and
pre-painted panels. And for more advanced users, we’ve made ALL the Photoshop files
available here so you can rip your car apart, modify it, show it, and
sell it!

Finally pricing. Our goal was to make the cars as similarly priced to their Real World equivalents as possible — after much research ad argumentation we decided that L$300 was a good price for the Scion which in real life sell for about $13,800.

Our entertainment at the event came courtesty of Baccara Rhodes who has
coordinated the entire event. We’ll be treated to some really special
tunes courtesy of Komuso Tokugawa *The BOOGIE MAN*
and DJ Nexeus Fatale.

OK, Now It’s Officially an Empire. I have to relish these moments of being a startup CEO in Second Life. Yes, we have all the typical startup difficulties , but every once in a while, it just gets easier. Just off the coast of Millions of Us’ Island, we now have a pair of sharks. . . . . with lasers. Mwuuhhaaaa!

Here in California, you’re not officially a tech startup unless you’ve spent some time in a garage. Millions of Us is not different — we started out (when the company was really just me) sharing some office space from friends. Then Chris Lassonde came on board and Bill Wrentmore (out of Austin) and Rodica Buzescu (out of Boston). So that’s 4 full timers and over 10 contractors — whew!
Back in July, Chris and I decided to start out working out of his garage until we had enough breathing room to have time to look for office space. We never really got that breathing room, but we did finally find a space.
Friday was officially our last day in the garage. While I’ll miss hunkering over that desk and shouting at the Dobermans to leave me alone, we’re very excited about the new office. It’s on Liberty Ship Way in Sausalito, about 50 yards from the beach. I’ll post pics soon and invite everyone for our Office Warming/ Launch party. As soon as we have some breathing room. . . . .

This was an interesting interview this morning on the Brian Lehrer show. (If the first link doesn’t work, try the second one — bottom of the page). I woke up early and got ready, realizing that bizarrely my interview was scheduled to follow a long-ish piece about bicycle safety in Manhattan. I’m not going to say that it was an easy act to follow, but. . . . . .

Kind of fun that I got a chance to give props to Q-Dot Bunnyhug’s SL Bicycle. Also amusing that the host gave Millions of Us credit for creating Second Life (I did correct him ;-))

Last night a meeting was held at the Learning sim by the Kuurian Expedition. The overall project was created by Edward Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds, through the Synthetic Worlds Initiative. The expedition are a research group rooted at Indiana University.

Guest speaker was Amazon Web Services Evangelist and Scion afficionado (or at least RL user) Jeff Barr, aka Jeffronius Batra in SL. He is a tad busy with all those tubes over at Amazon at the moment, but found time to hit me with a rough transcript from last night. Email me at bryan [at] millionsofus dot com for a copy. In the meantime, enjoy this:

Jeff in SL: Do I spy a racetrack in the background? The Scion does in fact handle incredibly well, and I have been meaning to do the same.

Jeff in RL

Rik Riel has already posted his first thoughts about the event.

The Kuurian expedition is focused on a synthetic worlds initiative: that is, ” to promote innovative thinking on synthetic worlds” while “blurring the line between work and play,” which of course we are all for. You can also find them at World of Warcraft, “on the Silver Hand server, Alliance side.” To join, you must give the secret password to the guild officer by contacting them here.

By building guilds in a number of virtual worlds, the expedition makes its way through cyberia (nice), connecting with a number of people in a host of worlds and contexts along the way.

And though I am not quite sure to what liege they pay their tribute, they do indeed have a charter and abiding fondness for Scions, as they were on display last night.

OK, this is a piece of news I’ve been dying to break. Tomorrow at 12:30 PST in the New Globe Theatre on the Millions of Us sim, Mark Warner, the Democratic Governor of Virginia, will be announcing his entry into. . . . Second Life.

Speculation has been going on for the last month or so about who would be the first politician to open shop in Second Life. I honestly didn’t expect this to happen for a while, but it’s just a testament to the ability of Second Life to astonish me. Hamlet covers the event and Governor Warner’s background really well here.

What I’d like to share are a few cool and surreal details form today as we scrambled to get ready for the event. In politics, image is everything, right? Well, there we were, constructing the avatar for a man we’d never met face to face, tweaking pixels and complaining about SL’s avatar creation tools. We’d send a screenshot over and hear back fro the folks at Forward Together, Warner’s PAC, things like, “His head looks too small” and the like. And then we realized, we’re sitting here tweaking the avatar of the man who could be our next president. . . . .

Other fun details included rehearsing the grand entrance with Warner’s team and debating whether it would be more appropriate to walk into the Globe or fly. You can guess which way I voted. Anyhow, totally exhausted, but looking forward to tomorrow and the months ahead — join us at the New Globe and in the new Forward Together group in Second Life. The town hall has gone digital!

Hot off the presses, thanks to the machinimistic stylings of AngryBeth Shortbread. (FYI, the original play featured typed dialogue — we elected to add voice in post-production because we weren’t going to show the whole play and its just easier to follow this way)

Click here for video.