Rivers Run Red with Linden Lab: A Second Life for the enterprise
by Tateru Nino 
Sep 18th 2008 at 11:45AM
Filed under: Business models, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Remember back in August where we predicted that a corporate/enterprise version of the Second Life grid was more or less inevitable? Well, that appears to have functionally come to pass, though the details are still hazy.
Rivers Run Red has partnered up with Linden Lab to provide a product called Immersive Workspaces to (what appears to be primarily) the global enterprise corporate market. Immersive Workspaces is a fusion of Second Life grid technology along with a blend of Second Life objects, web-sites and web-services, all apparently very tightly integrated.
As a part of the partnership, each company may either individually or jointly sell and market each other's products, and Linden Lab has an exclusive license to Rivers Run Red's Immersive Workspaces product. For its part, Rivers Run Red will provide "product and content development services to Linden Lab's clients and developer community". Right now, the only known customers of Immersive Workspaces appear to be Unilever and Diageo.
 |
Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop. |
'Linden Lab has provided us with the most versatile, advanced platform on which to develop our solutions,' said Justin Bovington, CEO of Rivers Run Red. 'This agreement will now allow us to work more closely to create and deliver the most relevant solutions for the emerging virtual enterprise market.'
Rivers Run Red was not immediately available to comment, and Linden Lab -- well, they don't answer -- so there are a number of things we don't know or can only speculate about.
The spaces look as if they may well be all of relatively identical design. Cookie-cutter 3D environments.
We do not know if they truly exist on a separate grid from the main adult Second Life grid, but the spaces are implied to be private. We do not know if there is any crossover permitted between spaces, and if they are generic Second Life simulators, or if they have been customized to this new purpose.
UPDATE: Rivers Run Red removed all mentions of Linden Lab, and their partnership with same from their website, a few hours after we published this piece. We are making further inquiries.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Marx Dudek said on 12:13PM 9-18-2008
Virtual sex on the office copying machine. You know it's coming. Chickabowww.
Reply
Just Some Guy said on 12:50PM 9-18-2008
6 months, 9 months tops: Same blogs and publications now read "Virtual Office Roleplaying Utter Waste of Time, Money and Bandwidth".
This current (I predict brief) trend of "office role playing" will only result in a nasty backlash when everyone realizes how utterly ridiculous and useless it is.
This shouldn't be a surprise - what we're doing here is equivalent to taking a magazine ad and just tossing it on television.
We're wasting the medium.
"Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter." -Seth Godin http://is.gd/1Y8c
Reply
jo_auto said on 1:36PM 9-18-2008
I suspect it will be on the main grid but private. That's the way IBM's internal islands are working right now. I can't see a reason for them doing something different.
Reply
Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 7:55PM 9-18-2008
Interesting how RRR suddenly, after two months of having dissed LL and SL when they did their "big announcement" of full support of Google's Lively, now do a 180º turn and consider SL "the most versatile, advanced platform on which to develop [RRR's] solutions".
I guess that when after two months, Lively's most visited room just had 1000 non-unique visitors per day (on average), RRR thought they were betting on the wrong horse, did a huge mea culpa, and came back to where they should have never left.
Well, speaking strictly for myself, I'm glad they saw the Light beaming on their backs and came back. I wonder if the Sheep and MillionsOfUs will do the same or not.
And the biggest question is if this is the beginning of a change of LL's old stance of "we do no partnerships".
Reply
Doubledown Tandino said on 11:13PM 9-18-2008
Gwyneth Llewelyn, that was EXACTLY what I was thinking. RRR basically disappears any community inworld work, then BAM, right back in the front lines selling office furnature to bigwhigs that don't know any better.
Reply
Just Some Guy said on 4:56AM 9-19-2008
Office furniture - haha, bingo, Doubledown.
As for my anonymous self, I don't pledge any allegiance to any platform: I've seen beyond doubt that LL really couldn't give a crap for those who turn the grid into something worth blogging about. After many years as an ardent supporter, I have to say that LL has about as much loyalty to us as - well, as anyone has left for them.
So while I've no love for RRR, it's hard to distinguish any of these behaviors at this point.
It's just a big, grey goo.
Alesiter Kronos said on 9:16PM 9-26-2008
Virtual Worlds News first ran this story a couple of weeks back, when it was announced at VW'08.
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/09/rivers-run-red.html
I have since pointed friends at the "press release" on the RRR website (as recently as 24 hours ago in fact). And was intrigued to find, when I wanted to quote from it today, that it had now disappeared.
Perhaps a case of "excessive enthusiasm"? Who got cold feet about whom? I don't suppose I will ever get the full story - but good luck hunting it down!
Reply
Pavig Lok said on 7:08AM 9-19-2008
I believe, from the bits i've gathered from this, that there is a "partnership" on some level, but that partnership is more of the kind that ESC once enjoyed with LL, based on access to technology and expertise etc, rather than in a business sense.
This may simply be a case of the difference between the software engineers concept of partnership and the business worlds concept - which have very different implications. The material may have been removed to avoid that confusion - but that's just speculation on my part.
Reply