Saturday, October 27, 2007

Kelly in Second Life another sign of the emerging services economy

Also over on Second Life Insider today, Akela Talamasca--who so kindly blogged my book and this blog this morning--has an interesting post about Kelly Services, the gargantuan employment services company opening up an island in SL.

The reason it's interesting--and relevant to the subject of this blog and my book, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life--is that it is the latest example of services being perhaps the next great segment of business in SL.

Not that I'm endorsing Kelly's entry into the virtual world. Not at all. I don't know anything more than I read on Akela's posting.

But I do know that when I was researching the last chapter of the book, The Future of Second Life Entrepreneurship, I reported on the prediction of Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka that services will be the next great in-world business opportunity.

Ondrejka, who knows a little bit about Second Life, talked in a lengthy interview for the book about the idea that integrated voice will make it possible for individuals or small organizations to set up shop in SL and provide things like translation services or customer service for real-life businesses.

We're not seeing a lot of this yet, and of course, Kelly's no entrepreneurial venture. But while the world is wondering how Fortune 500 companies are going to make a go of their six-figure SL builds which are designed around some sort of interactive "experience," many of which are failing--often because of poorly conceived ideas or manifestation--a new breed is going to realize that where SL really excels is in putting people together.

And so services could very well be the next big thing.

You can read more about it in Chapter 11 of the book. I hope you'll check it out.

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