do no t copy my stuff

1. Casey Callinan<br />IS 201 OM2 <br />Professor Art Fifer<br />Is Second Life Ready for Business?CASE STUDY<br />Seeing Second Life for the first time, the game shows idea to the thought of virtual business, and can produce value to businesses that can use it properly. As mentioned in the passage, major companies and universities invest in the idea because it provides them with a different means to run their business or institution through a new type of “realm”. Imagine how much faster a company can recruit new employees or how a teacher can deliver work to students if they can just simply log in anywhere and complete their task. Businesses can use World Stock Exchange in the game to raise capital that holds value in real currency. I feel businesses that want to advertise could use Second Life to promote their brand. The passage said companies like Toyota and Dell advertise in the game, so mostly any type of business can use the game for some type of value. Whether you are a company like IBM or a flower shop, the game will provide you with new ideas that may be considered in your real company; you are able to test ideas before making that risk. Anyone can use this game for any sort of entertainment. I could use this to promote side business. If I wanted, I could purchase “grid” and sell it as real estate in the game for actual money. If I invested time and some money, I could discover places that people are in demand for and sell it to them for money; hopefully, making a profit. This is a good choice of product because space is limited. The high demand for servers to run this virtual world is costly, therefore, space is limited. If someone wants to establish a company or business of some sort, they need space for it in the game. If I bought up a lot of grid, someone is going to want it eventually. When the time is right, I will sell it to make a profit. Looking on Ebay, I discovered that you can buy Lindens (Second Life currency), land, avatars, etc. I am not surprised by this because it is typical that someone would do this. But what I am surprised about is how much things are going for. An example is you can buy 10000 Second Life Lindens for $5,000. I did not expect how much money people would actually pay for “fake” money. With all this said, Second Life has its drawbacks from making it a mainstream business tool. For instance, people who play the game should be aware of scammers and possible malware injections from the game. The game has “adult entertainment” and with that comes possible risk of infections on your computer. I read that the game has technical issues as well. Besides meeting hardware recommendations, Second Life’s rapid growth rate is producing system instability; resulting in increased system latency and client crashes. This is due to the cluster of data servers taking on heavy load when communicating with the main servers. Because of the rapid growth high amounts of bandwidth is needed in order for users to successfully use this as a mainstream tool. A company cannot have latency when it comes to business transactions and the need for things to travel fast without corruption. This is going to give more obstacles if it was to ever be a mainstream tool for education. It is tough enough for students to email papers to teachers without corruption or user error. How could Second Life ever be used for teaching a class? It would be tough to actually get the student to comply with installing the game and making sure his computer can run it before even getting them to come to class and focus in communicating in class discussions. Maybe the game could go as far as requiring the student to have a webcam and the class can view each other in some sort of conversance. But who knows, the game has yet to develop. I do not feel a virtual world should be used for something as an interview because it really takes away from first impressions and the realism of actually taking the time to be there. I think it is necessary for that type of interaction in hiring a person face to face so you can hear about their qualifications and seeing them in person for who they are and not some fake avatar who they wish they were. Why else would they create them to look that way? Someone could go to interview or even class dressed in a chicken outfit if they wanted, but wouldn’t dare in the real world. I do not think this game and virtual business will ever be used over real assets. It is good for advertising and testing ideas, but I do not think it will take over real structured business. It will open up new ways for hackers and scammers to manipulate the system and put a business at risk if they invested much in their virtual world. I just do not seeing it take over other tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social network tools that do not demand an application to be installed. <br />