Cool article about IBM’s recent announcement that they’ll be investing $10 million over the next year on Second Life. Nice slideshow too.

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

Great mentions of Leo Burnett, Crayon, Scion, Intel and AKQA.

I’m really excited to announce that Sun’s Tim Bray and Simon Phipps alongside Mark Shuttleworth will be hosting a Q&A session in the Second Life Sun Pavilion http://tinyurl.com/m338r this coming Monday, November 13th, at 1:00 PM PST. The Q&A session is to follow an announcement that morning by Sun via webcast and other media channels. We will be broadcasting the webcast at the Sun Pavilion to kick off the Q&A session.

A bit more about the hosts, as these guys have really interesting backgrounds: Tim Bray is Sun’s Director of Web Technologies and a co-inventor of XML and Simon Phipps is Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer. Joining them will be Mark Shuttleworth, the Founder of the Ubuntu project (and one of my favorite Linux distributions), and odd tidbit, the version of Linux I used to run (and test) the Second Life Linux Alpha when I worked at Linden.

We hope to see you at the event. Please RSVP via Second Life Instant Message to Ted Millionsofus or myself (Chris Millionsofus) if you are planning on attending.

First off David Kirkpatrick, Fortune senior editor, published a piece about Second Life with the premise that Second Life is not over hyped, it’s important, and not going away.
The following quote really captures the power behind this medium “… one of the great things about Second Life is that whenever you are doing anything, you can see the other people who are nearby as well. This brings a dimension of social life - so elemental to how we live our lives offline - to the Internet in a way that up to now the Web has not. In Second Life everything you do is done in a social space, though you can get privacy if you want.”

But that’s not enough for a Friday! Gina Chon, of The Wall Street Journal, published today an article about Scion’s and it’s strategy to stay cutting edge. A part of that strategy is Scion’s entry into Second Life, which of course we have blogged about considerably here. The bulk of the article goes into the details of Scion sales strategy for the upcoming year and the challenges faced by an upstart brand when it has the potential to become to popular for its own good.
That all said, I can’t write about Scion and not post some of the latest virtual Scion that I have seen aroun Scion City.

I’ve always loved Morning Edition, so I was expecially thrilled to do this interview that appeared today on NPR. The challenge in producing the piece was to paint a verbal picture of a virtual world for listeners. To aid us in this, we put together an avatar for Steve Inskeep and tried to pay constant attention to the fact that listeners weren’t able to see what we could. It really struck me how similar this process is to the task we engage in daily — trying to explain Second Life to people who have never seen it.

You really come to appreciate the power of the platform when during your launch party, people already show up with customized cars. Congrats Dedric Mauriac for being one of the first to get their Scion xB modified!

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.