Linden Lab, the company behind the Second Life platform is launching the open beta of Project Nebraska today. Project Nebraska was the working title for what is now called Second Life Enterprise, a standalone Second Life solution for enterprise use.

This "Second Life in a box" solution, is actually in two boxes. It consists of a combined software and hardware bundle, including two 1RU rack-mount servers, prepackaged as an appliance and configured to provide virtual environment and voice services, ready to use with standard Second Life viewer software.

But that's not all.

After Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon's announcement of a standalone virtual world product (essentially Second Life, but able to be run on private servers and with no connection to Linden Lab's virtual world) at the last Virtual Worlds London, the Lab's new director of enterprise marketing, Amanda Van Nuys has followed that up with an announcement that the product (codenamed Nebraska) is now in preliminary testing by a number of organizations.

The beta test (Linden Lab calls it an alpha test, but there's no denying that it is a preliminary beta) is being conducted by such organizations as IBM, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), the New Media Consortium (NMC), Intel, and Northrop Grumman.

Recently, multinational technology and consulting giant IBM ran some very successful Second Life events, purely for their own benefit. The Academy of Technology conference met the targets, and saved IBM a significant fraction of a fortune in costs. Nevertheless, the conference was quite a high-level affair, and a number of IBM staff feel that there are significant gains that can be had with a more down-to-earth virtual conference focusing more on those who are using virtual environments as an ordinary part of their day.

Jo Grant (aka Jaymin Carthage) has announced the Beyond Blogging conference, which is about exploring the use of virtual environments by IBM and IBMers alike in their social and working lives. Virtual environments are used for the expression of ideas, new concepts, collaboration, communication and community building. The organizers are are looking for papers, posters or presentation sessions along the lines of the conference theme: how virtual environments have affected IBM and IBMers.

Linden Lab have published a case-study based on their strategic technology partner IBM's use of Second Life to save money on meetings and conferences. IBM's experience is quite unlike Australian Bank Westpac, which did not find such a compelling case, but the details of Westpac's findings are a bit vague.

In this case-study, IBM staffers talk about their experience with running a Conference and their Annual General Meeting in Second Life , though what seems a bit odd is that it is hard to shake the feeling that we've seen this particular case-study before. Nevertheless, feel free to take in the report, bearing in mind that it seems to be targeted towards those who have the least familiarity with virtual environments, only very carefully introducing concepts and tropes like presence, for those new to the notion.

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	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.

From 22 to 27 March this year in San Francisco, the 74th IETF meeting will take place in San Francisco. The IETF is the Internet Engineering Task Force, a volunteer group responsible for the development and promotion of Internet standards, and while it represents just one of the cogs in the Internet's success and usability, it is fundamentally responsible for most of the interoperable network and communication protocols in use today.

For this particular meeting's schedule, there's a new BoF waiting for approval. To be jointly chaired by Linden Lab and IBM, the MMOX BoF (loosely translated as Massive Multiplayer Online X -- where X stands for 'stuff' or 'experience', take your pick) is to tackle the preliminaries of virtual environment standards and interoperability mechanisms.

Gamers have become something of a stereotype in recent times. In everything from the job market to South Park, players are perceived as nerdy, pimply-faced, basement-dwellers with no social skills who do nothing outside of work other than play the game of their choosing. But now we have some pretty high-level defense of our beloved past-time.

David Laux, head of games and interactive entertainment at IBM, has listed a myriad of positive skills gained by gamers from the problems they must face and overcome. Specifically mentioned is teaming in World of Warcraft as it emphasizes building diverse teams to accomplish tasks. It's certainly a breath of fresh air to hear such reassurances from someone in the capacity to hire.

While the announcement of the Google Lively public beta may have taken many by surprise, apparently it did not take Linden Lab unawares -- their Second Life messages were already lined up and ready to go.

Indeed considering that information about Lively's launch was available to a number of people who were close to Linden Lab, either as partners or ex-staffers, it seems silly to suggest that Linden Lab might not have known Lively's public beta launch date, unless those contacts were aflame with considerable, searing resentment.

Wheezing, clanking and dripping oil from dark and unnameable apertures, one of Linden Lab's most neglected subsystems -- the marketing machine -- arose from it's years-long slumber and went about it's ponderous, mechanical business.

There's a certain amount of background anticipation among Second Life users about the "very important announcement" that Linden Lab tipped to be a part of former chairman Mitch Kapor's speech on the morning of 7 July. At least among those users who are aware of it, which seems to be very few. The ripples of that anticipation, however, have spread far wider.

'Blizzard has bought Linden Lab,' I hear for the ninth time today, and it's early yet. Another item in my mailbox from a user tells me that they are sure that Electronic Arts has snapped up the virtual world operator. Two more pitch IBM as a potential purchaser, and five insist that an IPO announcement will come on the day.

What's interesting is that of all the material people are certain enough to send on to me, they all relate to a sale or an IPO, essentially taking the business out of the hands of its current owners, and it all seems to be presented with an astonished, yet hopeful air.

Technically it isn't supposed to be news until Noon (US Eastern) today, when it is to be announced at the big virtual worlds conference in New York City, but Reuters accidentally jumped the gun and seems to have taken the wind out of the sails of Linden Lab's and IBM's big joint announcement.

The plan, essentially, is for IBM to hold Second Life grid servers on their private corporate network, back behind the firewall, but (we gather) with enough network access to allow those servers to communicate with the central services on the Second Life grid.

This would give IBM a virtual world intranet of sorts; regions that are actively locked away from the rest of the world, but giving their employees the freedom to move between internal simulators and those that are part of the main public grid seamlessly.

Metaverse development company Multiverse has announced a partnership with Vivox, the voice service provider for virtual worlds and MMOs of many stripes. Being able to provide integrated voice chat, 3D positional audio, presence, speaking indicators, and management tools right out of the box will be a definite selling point for developers who are interested in using Multiverse's platform to create their virtual worlds.

Vivox is keeping influential company -- other partners include Wizards of the Coast, IBM, metaverse developers Electric Sheep Company, and EVE Online's CCP Games. With strong strategic alliances like these, they're quickly rising to the top of voice provider solutions for the industry. Let's hope their grasp doesn't exceed their reach.

[Via Business Wire]

Ex-Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tokyo-based virtual worlds service firm NGI/3DI, Toshitaka Jiku, has been newly appointed as CTO of Chinese virtual world developer/operator, HiPiHi. Jiku brings quite a bit of experience and education to the table from his time with NGI, and is expected to help HiPiHi position itself and scale to the global market.

As you may recall, HiPiHi has already partnered with IBM to collaborate on both massively scalable architecture and long-term interoperability, and seems to have also gained significant buy-in from US chip giant Intel. HiPiHi is on the move, and has their eye on the world stage. It will be interesting to see if this China-based virtual world can pick up broad international appeal.

Circuit City originally opened in Second Life as a part of the IBM subcontinent. The build there was comparatively modest and not heavily trafficked, but it was successful enough for Circuit City to make a much larger commitment to the virtual world, in the form of four sims, forming an extra-large island, with the help and expertise of IBM.

The island features an orientation area (though a registration portal is still in the works), and some helpful signage. A Circuit City HUD enables you to summon assistance from a staff member, and has a built-in flight assister as a bonus. What might really grab your attention though are prizes!

Two hospitals opened up in Second Life today. Except only one actually did any opening. IBM's Virtual Health Center actually isn't open to the public. Rumors of its opening seem to be greatly exaggerated, and are largely confined to the press-release and coverage by folks who didn't actually try to visit it. We've asked IBM what's up with that, and we're waiting for an answer - so we can't even show you a picture of the place.

So, the more interesting hospital (ie: the one we could actually look at) comes to us courtesy of Cisco, Palomar Pomerado Health, and metaverse developers Millions-of-us. The design of the hospital is exceptionally modern, and the Second Life version of the hospital is - essentially - a model of the physical campus that will be built (by the year 2011) in San Diego, California, all packed with top-of-the-line, medical-grade Cisco technology.

Palomar West hospital has its own Second Life account registration portal, and a video tour. On the whole, the campus is very pretty. It's as 21st century as you could hope to see, without flying cars.

Icarus Studios, an MMO middleware developer specializing in zoneless next-gen MMO platform technology has made the shift to migrate their underlying tech away from widely used open-source SQL database, mySQL, and instead has migrated to IBM's Informix Dynamic Server.

Icarus was able to switch from mySQL to Informix rapidly and apparently fairly painlessly, with Fallen Earth - a post-apocalyptic MMORPG built in Icarus' middleware - running on the new high-performance database systems.

I came across a video today that didn't blow me away technically. The aspect ratio changes throughout, the UI is on, and it might have been edited in Windows Movie Maker. However, I couldn't take my eyes off of this video because it made a difference.

In September 2007, Second Life Insider blogged that Italian IBM workers were using Second Life to protest a proposed pay cut. Little was known about the strike at the time, except that those interested should download a strike kit and carry on peacefully on their own time. In a video released yesterday in multiple languages, they explain what went on, why they did it, and what the results were.

Read on for more details about the strike ...