The Futures Company

I know most interviews with site founders teeter on the grim line between marketing and hype, but there’s a surprisingly reflective interview with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale in today’s Technology Guardian,.

For those of you who haven’t got time to read it, the headline points are:

• Current turnover is $500m (and growing rapidly)
• The value of having its own virttual currency is that it enables micro-transactions.
• Retention of users is only 10% (they think because it takes 4 hours to get the hang of the place). If they can get that to 40 minutes they think that will rise to 50%
• The business model is less abstract than it appears: Rosedale describes it as: “What we are really selling you is computation. We are selling you CPU core. If you buy a 16-acre piece of land, which is about four city blocks, what you are renting is one processor.”
• They have plans to develop the avatars so they can function elsewhere on the web, outside of second life.
• And in response to a question about whether avatars can commit suicide, he says, ‘Yeah, in fact I think someone’s going to write a great dramatic book about that some day”.

Andrew