Take a picture of a Silver Fox. Note: “Silver Fox” is open to interpretation by photographers. For example, a picture of “Coop” might be a picture of Coop, Gerrard Hammer’s car. Or it could be a chicken “coop,” or a Second Life resident named “Coop.” Email your Snapshots to pics@sluniverse.com with the subject line: hammerandcoopsl using the Second Life Snapshot feature. Three (3) Prizes awarded each day to “most creative,” “most MINI” and “quickest” submissions.

Attention: Please DO NOT email pictures as attachments. Send using the Second Life SNAPSHOT feature in the Second Life viewer.

Good luck!

Hammer & Coop have been all over Second Life, fighting Ninjas and getting dirty at the Bikini Car Wash. And now the fearless Gerrard Hammer & his suped-up sidekick Coop Zero7 are on the road again!

Join Hammer & Coop this Saturday as they launch the Hammer & Coop Photo Challenge, a 7-day / 7-challenge journey across the Second Life grid. After the screening of the final two Hammer & Coop episodes, Hammer will announce the first photo challenge, which will later be posted here, on the Millions of Us blog.

LOCATION:

Hammer & Coop Photo Challenge Kickoff – with a challenge each day this week!
Saturday, March 31, 2007 2 PM SLT/PST
Four Aces Gas Station, Film sim
SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Film/132/159/25/

HOW:

Each day at 2 PM SLT/PST, from Saturday (3/31) until Friday (4/6), come here to the Millions of Us blog and look for that day’s challenge. Before midnight SLT, email your snapshots to pics@sluniverse.com with the subject line: hammerandcoopsl. The winners of the three prizes will be announced the next day. No nudity or alcohol in the photos please.

THE WINNERS:

Each day, REAL LIFE prizes will be given to the Most Creative (Grand Prize), as well as the Most “MINI” submission and the Quickest submission.

Say cheese!

First Question from Daniel Terdiman: What stage is the industry at?

Sibley: Very early stage — companies are making exploratory moves but its not core to their business

Chris Collins: Growth is amazing

Prentice: Same as Internet in mid 90’s but inability to move from one world to another is the major inhibitor to growth.

Joe Lazlo, Jupiter Research: PR benefit is a big driver now
Terdiman: 6 months ago the PR was a lot easier because the 1st’s were more prominent. What’s the pitch today?

Sibley: Pitch is same as always was. How do you pursue your goals using virtual worlds? Today its longer-term and that’s sobering and encouraging to pursue long-term value?

Bovington: Second Life is moving out of brand equity building and towards mass collaboration. 80% of communication is happening outside of Second Life on the web etc.

Chris Collins: Echoes Philip’s quote that companies are eager to unite people in concert with the web.

Bovington: SL is a great place to originate content.

Verbeck: Entertainment is a primary business driver.

Prentice: VW’s are great for creating colloboration and community within and across organizations.

Terdiman:  What is the ROI?

Sibley:¬† MLB example we allowed people to watch games together.¬† We’ve had events that were as high as 1200 people.

Lazlo:¬† Just like early days of web but that’snot a lot of people.

Bovington:¬† Linear scale (90 minutes) presents a scaling problem — longer term is a lot easier 6000 over a week with the BBC. We sold 27,000 pairs of Adidas shoes.

I’ll be speaking at the Wildfire Conference in London on April 24th and 25th. This is going to be super fun — lots of great speakers including Ze Frank, Jordan Weisman and Johnny Vulkan. Give a shout if you’re going to attend or want to hang out in London — reuben AT millionsofus DOT com

The first phase of any of our engagements involves what we call “Brand Translation”. During this phase, we examine a real-world brand and create an experience that is suited for Second Life, that captures the sentiments and emotions of the real world experience.

I’m really proud to announce te launch today of our project with Diageo (and Thebar.com ). Developed in partnership with our friends over at Bite Communications, this has been one of our most challenging (in a good way) and hopefully creative projects.

The big problem we started with was: “How do you translate drinking in an environment where alcohol has no effect?” We chose to focus on the social aspects of the drinking experience. The result is a virtual bar kit, available for free for any Second Life bar owner (provided you’re over 21 and located on a Mature sim without explicit content). Within the bar kit are a wide variety of Diageo’s brands including beer, wine and spirits like Tanqueray, Captain Morgan, Johnnie Walker and Guinness. All the bottles have been programmed to provide a variety of cool social networking features, including toasts and other animations. We hope everyone enjoys it and look forward to watching it be used and develop.

To launch, we’re having a Bar Crawl — please join us to celebrate.

What Thebar.com Virtual Bar Crawl — Make a Toast in Second Life!
When Wednesday, March 21st
Time 3pm-6pm Pacific Time / (6pm-9pm Eastern Time)
Where Second Life

LOCATIONS:

– ASpiRE! Isle, ASpiRE! Magazine and Modeling Agency
http://slurl.com/secondlife/ASpiRE%20Isle/144/165/26/
ASpiRE plan to have a trivia contest and great prizes.

– The Witch’s Brew
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Evalua/223/226/28

–The Blarney Stone
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dublin/80/106/26/26/
“Real world” Irish band Callaghan will be playing live at The Blarney Stone.

My sister is visiting from London: she comes a couple of times a year. We’re doing this funny thing where we sit aroun drinking coffee on a Sunday morning, each with a laptop surfing Youtube and comparing clips. Remember the Sunday NY Times? So 2006.

Anyway, she was kind enough to turn me on to the French art of Parkour. Parkour is a sport that came out of France that is also sometimes referred to as free running. Videos like this one give a good idea of what Parkour looks like in action — it really inspires me to watch it and I can’t help wondering how this relates to Alternate Reality Games, Cosplay, the Sultan’s Elephant, Apophenia and Second Life.

(FROM WIKIPEDIA)
“According to the founder David Belle, the spirit of parkour is guided in part by the notions of “escape” and “reach”, that is, the idea of using quick thinking with dexterity to get out of difficult situations, and to be able to go anywhere that one desires.”

Hammer loves to rock out to Asia’s classic tune “Heat of the Moment.” But c’mon, who doesn’t? This is your chance to be a rock star!

Come to Millions of Us’ Globe Theater on the Millions of Us region and jam on stage during the screening of the Hammer & Coop Music Video (we provide the instruments with animations). Our photographers will be on hand to capture your glory—and will upload your videos to YouTube for your chance to win real life 80’s “super packs,” complete with vintage Asia vinyl. Everyone who posts even a single image will get a glossy image of H&C.

WHEN:
Hammer & Coop Music Video

Thursday, March 15, 2007 5:00 PM SLT

WHERE:
Globe Theatre, Millions of Us Sim

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Millions%20of%20Us/157/134/23/

HOW (RSVP):
Join the Group “Hammer & Coop” in Second Life or IM Event Manager Anthony Millionsofus. Email events@millionsofus.com for more information or special press access. Space is limited!

WIN:
—-Winners of the contest will be those with the most comments and the highest rated videos on YouTube (url TBA). Instruments and animations will be provided. No rock star experience necessary. Contest ends one week from date of event.

—-Get your own autographed photo of Hammer & Coop star Jim Turtledove in the mail! Email pictures of the event to pics@sluniverse.com with ‚Äúhammerandcoopsl‚Äù in the subject line.

Rock on!

Hammer & Coop are at it again! Come out and watch episodes 3 and 4 of the Hammer & Coop series in a social setting with other Hammer & Coop fans. While you are here, stay for the Ninja Fighting Contest, Hammer style!
As you can see in the attached images, I’m not so hot at this whole fighting thing. Hopefully you can do better than me.
Screening and contest start at 5:00 PST Thursday March 8th at the following location in Second Life.

So I’ve taken to referring to myself in the 3rd person.¬† Reuben is making fun of himself.¬† Reuben writes blogs entitled “Reuben’s Travel Schedule”.

Anyway, I’ll be in LA today and Friday (send an email if you want to grab a drink).

On Sunday I’m off to Austin for South by Southwest where I’m on a panel entitled “Gamer’s Games:¬† MicroContent and User Creation”.¬† Should be lively since it’s being moderated by the ever-provocative Mark Wallace and includes Raph Koster of Areola (kidding, but I can never remember how to spell his company’s name), Betsy Book from There.com and Corey Bridges from Multiverse.

At the end of the month I’ll be speaking at the Virtual Worlds 2007 Conference in NYC. This one’s looking to be a bunch of fun.

Oh yeah, I’m also looking to revive the Roadcast. This is the podcast I do while multitasking on my drive to work. If you have suggestions for who I should chat with or would like to be on the “show”, drop me a line at reuben(at) millionsofus (dot) com.

Steiger Out.

So I’m sitting here in Aspen getting ready to fly back to San Francisco and just thinking about the event. Overall, I was blown away by how well it all worked and people really seemed to enjoy themselves. Going into it, we were pretty nervous because (as Mark Wallace said to me), “comedy is such a high bandwidth experience. With the impending release of realtime voice capabilities in Second Life (and the inevitable debate about that), I thought I’d jot some thoughts about doing comedy in SL.

The general format of the event was as follows:

1.  People arrived and we had drinks and hung out for about 15 minutes.

2.  Hyla Matthews, the standup comedian, welcomed the crowd, did about 5 minutes of schtick and then introduced some videos of comedians from the Festival in Aspen

3.  Hyla did more schtick, this time walking into the audience for some live interraction.  Intro to more videos, this time selections from the film festival component ofthe Aspen Event.

4.  More schtick, this time focusing on Second Life jokes, which seemed to work really well.  Intro final videos from This Just In.

The toughest thing, by far, was the 17 second delay from when Hyla said something on the Skype call and when it was heard in Second Life.¬† Hyla really struggled with this — trying t get straight who was haring what and when.¬† In so many ways, comedy is about split second reactions and when the audience said something in chat, a 17.5 second reaction just doesn’t quite feel split second.¬† Behind the scenes, we did a lot of work to make this easier for Hyla and less apparent to the audience.

The other thing we noticed was that without the immediate feedback from the audience, Hyla couldn’t tell whether people were laughing or she was getting “crickets”.¬† One great idea that came up was in the future to have Laugh-Meters that the audience¬† could click to register overall amusement.

In general this was an amazingly enjoyable and eye-opening experience.  It also makes me realize just how game-changing the addition of real-time voice will be for day-to-day interraction, collaboration and work, and for entertainment.