The Financial Times site provides a very worthwhile analysis of business in the meshverse:
Because Web 2.0 is such a vague and sprawling concept, let’s focus on one of its flagships, virtual worlds. One consulting group optimistically forecast that 80 per cent of internet users by 2011 will spend time in a virtual world. After major business magazines featured the largest of them, Second Life, on their cover, nobody, it seemed, wanted to be left behind in the old first world. Reuters established a news bureau on the site. The Swedish government built an embassy. Congressmen gave virtual speeches.
But can this virtual world sustain itself economically? Or is it fundamentally a high-tech Ponzi scheme in which early participants reap the benefits from later arrivals? There are at least seven business models in a virtual world:
This article also has a very good collection of links about business in the virtual world. I would say though, that before you accept the article’s(or any else’s) assertion that “Running a quality corporate island can cost $500,000 per year”, contact me – I can probably save you quite a bit of money. As I’ve said before:
Nevertheless, we learned a lot from that um experience which when combined with what’s being done in MMORPGs and Second Life could be quite valuable especially for folks thinking about dropping $25K – $3M into virtual world development
The “consulting group” FT refers to was Gartner as previously noted here on the MJ.
Trevor F. Smith said
I must admit that I started the article expecting to read nothing about new style businesses like Transmutable, but the section entitled “4. New-Style Services” actually addressed both goal-oriented applications and portable avatars.
It’s like they were expecting something like Tomorrow Space, which is summarized in this short video.