The breakout success of Microsoft’s Defy All Challenges campaign has led
us to up the ante. The games are back, complete with puzzles embedded in
elusive eggs - but this time they’ve been devised by the winners of the
campaign’s first phase. The games
have thus come full circle, with the challenges now being developed by
the elite logicians of the Coder’s Cove community.

There was a celebration party yesterday for the winners of Phase I; the

Come and try to Defy All Challenges: Phase II!

Good luck!

Coming from a belief that education is so important to not only children, but adults as well, I found the Imagine Cup in Second Life a great support to the real-life version on the Imagine Cup! If you are unaware of what the Imagine Cup is, it is an event held to encourage and amplify young people’s creativity and talent in technology while uncovering and dealing with real-world issues. These young people come from all over the globe and now they are in Second Life! This year, the theme is “Education”. How great is that?!

I had a chance to talk to several people there, some contestants, and some just visitors checking the place out. I was seriously amazed that when I arrived, there were already 69 people on the island! The students and visitors were simply amazing and their creations were phenomenal! The event ends today, the 29th. If you get a chance, hang out there and see what awesome creations that have been made!!
Hope to see you there!

Today, Intel (in cooperation with MRM Worldwide and Millions of Us) will be unveiling the consolidated Intel presence in Second Life known as Intel Island. At the heart of this 3-sim build, including the previously launched Intel OCC (Intel’s partnership sim with Orange County Choppers) and Intel Software Network, is what we like to refer to as “the journey.” Should you decide to partake in this journey to the depths of Intel Island, you will encounter a visual feast complete with flying laptops, a gigantic Intel Core 2 Duo chip, and lava ‚Äì yes, lava. The visual feast isn’t quite over when you’ve explored the build. From videos showing creative ways of re-purposing your “obsolete pc” to the hip Intel “Multiply” ads done Second Life style, there is plenty to see on the 6 different screens placed throughout the sim.

Just exploring this underground build can provide quite an experience, but aside from the eye candy, the sim is full of interactivity. Grab an Intel jetpack and embark on a quest to find the Intel Core 2 Duo chip halves to power your pack to the max. Or, if you want to know about the latest and greatest Intel has to offer, connect to Intel using the conference phones and download brochures, pdfs, and other informative packets. For our bike enthusiasts, don’t forget to check out the new bike path connecting all 3 Intel sims. Just build your custom Intel OCC chopper and ride up Intel Island in style. Like the music in the Intel “Multiply” ads? Check out the New Young Pony Club and other great musicians at the Summer Music Festival on Friday, June 29th. All in all, there’s plenty to do and see. It’s designed to keep you engaged and informed for a long time to come, so check it!

When: June 28, 2007 9:00 am PST
Where: In Second Life on Intel Island - 125,9,134
SLurl: http://tinyurl.com/2jrso6

Got Questions?
Contact: Eliana Sur
Email: eliana(at)millionsofus(dot)com
Second Life: Eliana Millionsofus

At this week’s Supernova conference, we announced a partnership with Gaia Online - an extremely hot online community for teens - where we’ll now be able to execute campaigns for our clients. The deal is a key element of our cross-platform strategy.

Gaia attracts more than two million unique visits from teens every month - to play games, make friends, and participate in the world’s most active online community. There is a virtual world component in Gaia’s ‚Äútowns‚Äù, where avatars can interact in realtime, and its forums are among the web‚Äôs busiest, with more than 1 billion posts to date and counting. What has marketers and others in Silicon Valley really paying attention is the remarkable stickiness of this community: each day there are 55,000‚Äì80,000 simultaneous users who typically spend more time on Gaia than they would on competitive teen sites.

Gaia has been something of a quiet powerhouse, but its success is too compelling to ignore, so buzz is building quickly. The company was a winner in the community category at the inaugural WebWare 100 awards sponsored by CNET, rubbing shoulders with the likesof Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. When GigaOm’s Blake Snow listed the top MMOs earlier this month, he noted Gaia’s 2m monthly uniques, which should be placed in the context of a top-notch 7m registrations. The site has also garnered considerable ink in the recent burst of coverage around youth-oriented virtual worlds and social communities; Club Penguin and Stardoll are prominent examples.

Gaians have a vibrant, authentic community and we’re looking forward to the challenge of helping brands engage them in the playful spirit that has made Gaia so successful.

Was on a really fun panel yesterday with Raph Koster and Clay Shirky, moderated by Sandy Kearney of IBM. Sean Amirati has a good write up at Read/Write Web as does Caleb Booker .¬† Sean mentions the model I laid out for different types of virtual worlds and I realized that conferences like Supernova that discourage Powerpoint are great when that leads to me, Raph and Clay engaging in verbal pyrotechnics (Clay actually used the word “Desiderata” ) but not so great when bozos like me spend a while describing highly visual concepts that need a picture.¬† So here it is.¬† A picture.

PRWeek has covered the ongoing Defy All Challenges campaign for Microsoft’s Visual Studio, placing Second Life activity in the context of a larger program that harnesses social media along with traditional methods. This is a great example of how virtual worlds marketing can complement and smoothly align with existing campaigns. Some companies continue to view their virtual world programs as experiments, and there is a case for that ‚Äì the environments are creatively diverse and unscripted (I would argue that’s a good thing from a consumer’s perspective) . That hasn’t stopped Microsoft from extending a high-profile campaign into Second Life, with jaw-dropping user engagement results that we highlighted a couple of weeks ago.

My own background is in PR agency-land, and I’m pleased to see PRWeek highlighting the relevance of virtual events and programs for its readership. All of the proven tools of the trade ‚Äì media relations, community relations, event management ‚Äì are readily translated into virtual spaces, albeit with the help of a little savvy tweaking and an open mind. As the technology improves, user numbers grow and interfaces with other forms of social media emerge, PR practitioners will find virtual worlds to be fertile ground for their work.

If you did not know already, there is a cool little freebie out there that is exclusive to those that meet Buzz Balogh, our Nokia avatar! What does this freebie do? Well, you know that typing your avatar does when you are chatting? This li’l puppy overrides that by having your avatar write on the Nokia Stylus! AND!!!! There are cool effects that shoot out while you type….or in this case, write! How fun is that?!
Not only can you get a free Nokia stylus N800 in Second Life, but you too can get on in REAL LIFE! HOW?!?!? It’s easy! Our lovely avatar (with a wicked walk) has been going around and attending several events using her awesome Nokia Stylus N800! Now, she only has one more event left! What does that mean?! Well, it means that anyone that wants to be in the running for a free REAL LIFE Nokia Stylus, needs to meet with Buzz Balogh at her next appearance.

So….where’s she gonna be? Well, Buzz Balogh has been to 70’s and 80’s club, snail races, and western clubs. Now it is time for her to go into the sciences! That’s right! She is going to go to the SL Sci Fi Expo on Sunday June 24th. The event is from 5-8, but Buzz will be appearing to check out the great people on Constellation Island for about an hour. If you see her and want a Nokia Stylus N800 for your avatar AND a chance to win a Nokia in REAL LIFE, come on over and see the SL Sci Fi Expo!

See you there!

I have one information pipe coming into my Oakland home, just one – and it carries digital television, a VOIP landline, and all my IP traffic, ranging from iTunes downloads to every motion of my Second Life avatar (sometimes, it does all of this concurrently). I doubt the people who built out the cable television network in the 1960s and 1970s saw all that data in the copper they were unspooling. You may know that any cable subscriber in Oakland is a Comcast subscriber – and Comcast, in turn, is a Millions of Us client.

Comcastic! Island launched today, and appropriately enough, it’s poised to be a major new in-world entertainment destination. It’s packed with races, rides, giveaways, gizmos and other attractions. There’s a very cool top-secret lab (try to find it!) that lets visitors engage in the kind of ‚Äúmad science‚Äù featured in Comcast’s TV campaign for broadband. It’s being touted in the media as a theme park, and that’s a pretty apt description. We’re also promised a calendar of real-life and virtual world music performances.

Second Life residents will benefit from the addition of all this great in-world content, but it’s in Comcast’s interest to nurture the kind of data traffic that virtual worlds create. Our partners at One to One Interactive and Comcast recognized the inherent wisdom of joining the community….and we think you’ll be endlessly entertained by the results of our collaboration.

BusinessWeek covered Diageo’s presence in SL this week ‚Äì a campaign that began back in March with a St Patrick’s Day pub crawl. That promotion involved the installation of virtual bars (tied to Diageo’s TheBar.com property) in top Second Life pubs, with various animations and avatar moves programmed into the drinks on offer, including Diageo brands like Guinness and Johnnie Walker. The interesting challenge here was translating the fun, spontaneous character of social drinking into a virtual world where alcohol had no effect on avatars. Another intriguing wrinkle was the need to comply with strict regulations that govern the marketing of alcohol to minors; age-verification functionality was essential.

Beyond the initial promotion, SL bar owners have reported that their patrons enjoy playing around with the drink scripts (the funny actions associated with each beverage, for example toasts or dances), and that TheBar.com units have been successful in drawing additional traffic into their venues.

This story was back in the news after Robin Dargue, Diageo’s CIO and business process director, spoke at a Forrester conference in Scotland. At that event, Forrester’s Bill Nagel sought to contextualize much-ballyhooed concerns about the use of Second Life and other Web 2.0 social tools on corporate networks: “not all information needs to be protected. Only put high levels of security around data you cannot afford to lose. Consumer technology is very useful and is not going to go away.”

In other words, protect what you really have to protect, but encourage employees to interact with customers using today’s most innovative tools. This mirrors larger discussions about the benefits of transparency and openness in many areas of business and society. The days of hiding behind corporate data-barricades appear to be numbered. Wasn’t it FDR who said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself? So offer that high-minded argument to your boss when you amble down to your (virtual) corner pub with a prospective client at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon…

Building on the runaway success of last month’s “Mystery of the Blimp” at Microsoft Visual Studio island, the games are back. Winners of the inaugural games faced a particularly difficult set of math and logic puzzles; when they had solved all 10 puzzles, players gained access to the blimp and plots of land on neighboring Coders Cove. Consider that while the average player spent 24 hours on the game, winners spent 74 hours playing — these people weren’t fooling around. In version 2.0, players will be competing for the chance to collaborate with the elite residents of Coders Cove in developing the next iteration of the game….winners will earn admission to the blimp and to the Coders Cove Society, a group otherwise open only to the puzzlebusting homesteaders of Coders Cove. This group includes RL software professionals and SL residents from the US, UK, Japan, Russia and beyond. It’s a great chance for budding or aspiring programmers - or puzzle fanatics (there seems to be considerable overlap) to get a seat on the game design team and begin writing the script.

Kicking it all off is a developer forum at 6pm SLT/PT tonight at Visual Studio Island, hosted by Microsoft’s Carol Grojean and Neil Enns (in avatar form, naturally). Carol and Neil will discuss how Microsoft radically changed its approach to the process of developing product for a project codenamed “Orcas.” They’ll address how Visual Studio was used to design and implement these changes, and they’re keen to meet and take questions from participating developers. So come on over and earn your spot on the winning team…