THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

International Coordinator Yuki Saeki and I have now relocated to Tokyo, and will be frequently traveling back and forth to China. Obviously, I have quite a few things to catch up on. If you have plans to be in Japan or China, please let me know. There’s a cold Yebisu or Tsingtao beer with your name on it.

October 10 and 11 - San Jose

I moderated a panel at the Virtual Worlds Fall conference in San Jose, California about the Asian market. Yuki joined in, along with our partner Naoyoshi Shimaya, CEO of Metabirds in Tokyo, writer Wagner James Au (Hamlet Linden), and Jeffrey Pope from Sun Microsystems. We fielded a variety of great questions from the audience before quickly running out of time.

Major lesson learned: Asia is a large, diverse region and a subject not easily summed up in an hour panel!

We met many fantastic people and companies working in virtual worlds and social media. Thanks to everyone who attended and stopped to chat with us.

October 17 and 18 - Tokyo

Yuki and I attended the Virtual World Summit in Tokyo, Japan last week and had a great time. There was a fascinating mix of educators, corporations, entertainment providers and developers present. It’s encouraging to see Japan getting so involved in the advancement of virtual worlds and new technologies.

Major lesson learned: You can never bring too many business cards to a Japanese conference!

Extending Partnerships

In addition to our ongoing partnership with virtual world developer Metabirds in Tokyo and our expanding partnership with the virtual world platform HiPiHi in Beijing, we’re finalizing details of a new partnership with 3Di in Tokyo.

3Di is part of ngi group, major investors in such exciting projects as mixi and HiPiHi. 3Di has recently released Movable Life, and announced its new open-source virtual world platform Jin-sei. We’re extremely excited about this partnership and how it will extend our work with Metabirds and HiPiHi — and will announce the details shortly.

Much more to come!

When was the last time you got to fly into a party with a Maxim Top 100 girl? Well, that’s what we did last night! To celebrate the launch of the 12Avatars.com calendar contest, Callie Cline was on hand to help us kick it off.

12Avatars.com is a great idea from our friends at Apollo Interactive, who said, "Why don’t we find the most beautiful avatars in Second Life–and do a printed calendar of them?" We said, "No, that’s a terrible idea, we have no idea why you’d want to do that."

Not really.

So here you go–a few shots from the launch event last night. We’ll be taking submissions via our interactive photo booths until September 16, and the calendar will be ready to go on sale by the middle of October.

You can enter here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tellus%20IV/210/220/27

More photos on our Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/centric/

The kicker? The printed calendar is the only one that costs. The virtual version will be distributed free in Second Life, and 100% of the proceeds from sales of the printed calendar will go right back to the distributors or to a real-life charity of their choice.

Thanks to all who came to see us!

Almost missed this: Ken Brady quoted by Business 2.0 on starting an office in China (as in, you know, the physical world, in case you thought we only did virtual stuff these days):

Ken Brady’s Wisdom

That’s all, nothing more to see here, move along.

You want wacky, huh?

You want cutting-edge?

Okay. So here you go. Beyond the Land of Video Podcasting, beyond the Social Media Space, beyond even Virtual Worlds lies a whole new universe: lifecasting.

Some of you already know justin.tv. Four months ago, he began broadcasting his life, 24/7.

Yes. You heard that right.

"But . . . you gotta be kidding me," you say, comfortable in your Nielsens. "Nobody would watch that."

Well, not only are a whole lot of people watching, Justin’s bringing on new streams from new lifecasters all the time. One of those streams is Alphageek.tv. Alphageek is, well, dedicated to covering the Lifestyles of the Cutting Edge, the Opinions Which Will Shape Our Future, and other Matters of Great Import as Relates to the Ongoing Change. Their first interview was with Chris Pirillo, and it pegged Justin.tv’s rateometer pretty hard.

Now they’re going to Gnomedex. Which is where we come in. Centric is sponsoring them. So don’t be surprised to hear our name mentioned as they prowl the halls, lunch with the next great luminaries, and pub-crawl with the alpha geeks of our world.

Where will this lead? We don’t know yet. Consider this another grand experiment on the edge of change . . .

HiPiHiの最新バージョンに、コンテンツ創造システムが追加された。さっそく試してみたところSecond Lifeユーザーが慣れ親しんだインターフェイスをベースにしつつ、HiPiHi独自の新機能を盛り込んだ形となっていた。

 SLで見慣れた赤、緑、青色の矢印もしっかり採用されている。

テクスチャ編集機能にも、色、素材、Full Brightオプション、透明度などが設定でき、基本的にSLで採用されている機能は全て備わっていると言って良い。現時点でサポートされているテクスチャ形式にはJPG、TGA、PNG、DDSがある。

4.　オブジェクト自動配列機能：X, Y, Zなど好きな軸に沿って複数のオブジェクトを自動的に並べてくれる。

全体的な感想としては、SLに比べてHiPiHiのコンテンツ創造システムの方が視覚的にわかりやすく、バーチャルワールド初心者には優しいのではないかと思う・・・もちろん中国語がわかればの話ですが！嬉しい新機能もついてきて、SLに慣れたユーザーでも十分楽しめる作りになっている。

The newest HiPiHi client includes a content-creation system which adopts some familiar features from Second Life and adds a number of its own very useful features. The basic interface is similar to that in Second Life. For example, buttons for default shapes - like a box, a cylinder, a sphere, etc. - are almost exactly the same. Check out the image below:

The colors of the three arrows below representing orientations of objects are also same - X axis for red, Y axis for green, Z axis for blue.

Tools for selecting and adjusting textures in Second Life are duplicated in HiPiHi - color tint, material property, full bright option, transparency. Texture formats supported are JPG, TGA, PNG, and DDS. If you’re already a Second Life user, the interface will be pretty intuitive. There are also some features unique to

HiPiHi that many Second Life users have always wanted:

1. Undo/Redo function: You can go back and forth between each step.

2. Clone stamp: You can place copies of objects consecutively by checking the box that allows cloning.

3. Buttons for Copy/Cut/Paste/Link/Unlink objects. You don’t need to memorize shortcut keys; just click on buttons with nice little icons representing their functions. However, advanced Second Life users might prefer having the shortcut keys they are already familiar with.

 4. Object alignment function: Objects can be automatically aligned along a desired axis by selecting those objects and clicking on "align along X (or Y or Z) axis."

5. Secondary surface pattern: In addition to basic textures you apply to objects, you can also add another texture underneath or on top of them to give objects a combination of textures. In this picture we applied a "stone" pattern on top of the Centric logo. You can also adjust the intensity of this secondary pattern.

Overall, these content-creation tools should be easier for beginners to use than those in Second Life - unless you don’t read Chinese! The new functionality is a very welcome addition.

So, Ken and Yuki met with HiPiHi in China a few days ago, and opened a door into an entirely new virtual world.

HiPiHi has been described as the "Chinese Second Life." And, in many ways, that’s an accurate description. We’ve been poking around in the closed beta for a while now, and we’re really excited about the possibilities. With user-generated content and a real economy, it has the same features that have propelled Second Life to the top of the charts in Western virtual worlds. But HiPiHi also has some really neat plans that I’ll let Ken talk about in another post.

Because I’d rather talk about the opportunity for brands:

Imagine being part of HiPiHi from the start–imagine being there when it opens this fall. We think this is an amazing opportunity Get started now, so you have time to explore. Time to integrate. Time to become part of the world. So, you’re a seamless part of HiPiHi when it launches this fall.

Does this sound like a pitch? Well, it is. Centric is the first Western development partner for HiPiHi. This completes a round of strategic moves we’ve been making to become a true Asia-Pacific virtual world and social media developer. We have a formal reciprocal relationship with Metabirds, a leading Japanese Second Life developer. We’ve opened offices in Shanghai and Tokyo. We created a panel for Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 on the international impact of virtual worlds. And we have the language and business skills to make it all work.

So. Interested in the newest way to get in front of a potential audience of 1.3 billion people? Talk to Centric.