Anheuser-Busch, through Millions of Us, is bringing Budweiser Select and Stuff Magazine’s Lingerie Model Search to Second Life. Two out of the ten real life contest events, which are being held at the hottest night spots across the US, will be paralleled and simulcast within Second Life at the Select Lounge on the Style sim.

A panel of three style-savvy Second Life residents, including MJ Garrett from MTV’s The Real World, will choose a finalist from each virtual event. After the second event, visitors to budweiserselect.com will pick the ultimate winner—a Second Life female avatar to receive a two-page spread within the September 2007 issue of Second Style, an online magazine dedicated to high fashion within Second Life.

The two virtual lingerie contests, which will be held next Thursday, July 26^th from 7 – 9 PM SLT (PDT) and Thursday, August 9^th from 9 PM – 11 PM SLT (PDT) in the Style sim at the Select Lounge, will take place alongside the real life Lingerie Legends events at the Manor nightclub in Chicago and the Tao nightclub in Las Vegas, respectively.

Enter by following the guidelines below. Millions of Us will select up to 25 participants for each event, who will be contacted and granted exclusive access for the rehearsal and event.

Contest Rules & How to Enter:

To enter, please complete #1 and #2 by Sunday, July 22^nd at 11:59 PM PDT:

1. Drop two (2) Second Life texture files on avatar MJ Garrett:

a. A full body shot in lingerie (please name file YourName_Fullbody)
b. A headshot (please name file YourName_Headshot)

2. Drop a notecard (please name file YourName_LingerieLegend) with the following qualifying information on avatar MJ Garrett:

a. Are you 21 years of age or over?
b. Can you attend the July Lingerie Legends contest on 7/26 from 7 – 9 PM SLT and the rehearsal on 7/25 from 4 – 5:30 PM SLT?
c. Can you attend the August Lingerie Legends contest on 8/9 from 9 PM – 11 PM SLT and the rehearsal on 8/8 from 4 – 5:30 PM SLT?

Phase II of the Visual Studio Challenge: Defy All Challenges has officially started!

For the next 6 weeks there will be an egg with a puzzle to solve. On two of the weeks, an additional egg will be released. The excitement is in the air as we have another island parceled up for grabs for the new winners! Those that have won from Coder’s Cove will get a community plot of land where they will be tasked to create buildings and objects for a community.

Many of the puzzles in this game have been created by the members of Coder’s Cove as they are the Game Masters! So, come and play, see if you can solve the puzzles that are set out!

We work next to a marina, and extracurricular temptation abounds. We think we’ve found the solution: create a great business case for a summer bbq on the marina’s beach.

Said business case: invite our friends, clients, prospects, relevant journalists and analysts, and serve beer and burgers. We’ll kickstart the conversation and let things go from there.

So now you’ve got a solid business reason for coming. Wouldn’t you rather spend Friday afternoon at the beach than in the office? We thought so.

When: Friday July 20, 12:30 - 6:00pm

Where: Schoonmaker Point Marina Beach, Sausalito
end of Liberty Ship Way, Sausalito, CA
Your hosts:

The venue:

We’ve had a few strategic arrivals in recent weeks, but we’re especially proud to welcome our new Chief Creative Officer, Douglas Gayeton. Douglas’ eclectic career has found him at the cutting edge of filmmaking, video game design, and social media. His documentary film, “Molotov Alva: Video Diaries from My Second Life”, was the first machinima ever screened at the Cannes Film Festival and is the first piece of its kind to be acquired for distribution as a television series. Prior to joining Millions of Us, Douglas also worked with MTV on their virtual world initiative.

Douglas’ arrival is a key development in Millions of Us’ strategic plan to assemble the world’s leading talent across multiple virtual world and social media platforms. He’ll mentor our production teams and inject a fresh perspective into all of our client campaigns. And who better - Douglas created “Delta State”, an award winning animated TV series, and also directed and co-wrote “Johnny Mnemonic,” an interactive film based on a story by cyberpunk author William Gibson. He is also among the earliest architects of social networking technology, having built applications for AOL, Microsoft, Vivendi and Napster.

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.

Interview happening now on the Kadokawa sim with Meltingdots.¬† Airs July 9th.¬† Hopefully nothing get “lost in translation”.