Over the last few days, Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon, and Lab director of Marketing and Communications, Catherine Smith have been in Europe, where Kingdon is reportedly seeking office-space for Linden Lab in Amsterdam. The office is intended to start as a small marketing headquarters for Linden Lab.

At NIMK, Catherine Smith told De Hoeksteen Live! that Linden Lab was planning to launch the new office in January next year.

Linden Lab's marketing efforts for Second Life hitherto have largely focused on placement of speakers at conferences and events, and – prior to 2008 – on minor registration incentive programs. More recently, efforts have focused on the revamped Web-site and assorted press-materials and white-papers.

Phatland (aka Phat Cat's Jazz club) was originally founded by Dilbert Dilweg and Charity Colville, two people who met in Second Life, worked together, fell in love, and forged a successful and lasting relationship in the physical world -- not an uncommon story. Indeed, it seemed like Phatland and its club grew with their romance, up until mid 2007 or so Phatland was one of the single most popular places in Second Life by any reasonable reckoning.

When the couple moved to be with each-other in the physical world, they needed to make some changes in their lives, as one might expect. And that included the sale of Phatland. The sale went through, but not everything went smoothly with Phatland after that, and Dilbert and Charity were banned from the site. Phatland's traffic started to fall significantly. Where there had once been 90 or more users at all hours of the day, soon the site seemed to be a mere shadow of its former success.

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Back in the day, when Kevin Alderman (Second Life's Stroker Serpentine) was selling his hugely successful and popular virtual Amsterdam setting, he hinted that he was moving into a related line of business. Well, we know now what business it is that he's been getting into: wearable, affordable, consumer-grade motion-capture suits.

Frankly, the expensive professional capture systems that have largely been de-rigueur for motion capture for most of the history of the art require a ton of space, huge amounts of computing power, and that you dress like a luge sled pilot that's been infected with evil-alien-mime DNA and is being assaulted by amorous Pythagorean solids. Those days are soon to be over.

Alderman's company Strocap is working on a simple, wireless, wearable motion-capture suit that doesn't make you look any more retarded than the average outfit of expensive athletic gear. You can wear this with regular clothing -- or without it, depending on just exactly what sorts of motions you want to capture.