2. The Independent (UK) – Digital disguises: Who do they think they are? “It was a boring corporate job that piqued the interest of the photographer and video artist, Robbie Cooper. “I met a company boss who was divorced and had bad access to his children,” Cooper recalls. “So they met every evening in Everquest, an online 3D virtual world”. Cooper asked the man what he and his children did as they carried massive swords around a land populated by fire-breathing dragons. “They talked about homework, their mother and school,” Cooper says. “I was fascinated by the idea of this really banal but emotionally important conversation going on in this vivid fantasy world.”

3. The Big Money (USA) – Forget Invisible Hands. What About Virtual Hands? “Back in 2008, it seemed like only one thing was certain about the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program: It was a gamble. A really big one. The economy’s problems were unprecedented and the potential remedy untested, which meant that economists could do little more than speculate about how hundreds of billions in bailout money would affect the country’s overall fiscal health. In a New York Times article from February 2009, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was quoted as saying of TARP, “We will have to try things we’ve never tried before.” But, some economists are beginning to ask, what if such broad economic policies could be tested first? Not on living, breathing, tax-paying citizens, mind you, but on goblins, wizards, and intergalactic space pirates.”

4. Washington Post (USA) – Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash. “Dana Moore sells rain. He sells a lot of it, for about a buck per reusable storm. “I don’t know why people love buying rainstorms,” he said, watching his product drizzle last week, “but they do seem to like them a lot.” The attraction isn’t rain, per se, but Moore’s rain, which can deluge swaths of land on command. The rain falls not in Bowie, where he lives with his wife of 37 years, but in the virtual world of Second Life, the Web portal where he also markets snow, clocks, University of Maryland basketball T-shirts, Duke basketball T-shirts (grudgingly), two-story Tudor-style homes, pinup posters from the 1930s and the sounds of barking dogs.”

5. The Province (Canada) – Finding backbone in virtual world. “When faced with creating an avatar, you can bet your mouse that no one is dreaming up their virtual doppelganger. Snoop around the online fantasy front and you’ll find lots of King Leonidas and Zena: Warrior Princess types — not so many Ed Grimleys. It’s a misrepresentation along those lines that is at the heart of the new play Spine, here in Vancouver as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Spine opens with a 40-year-old disabled man (James Sanders) losing his job and his relationship. He retreats to a place he feels the most empowered — the rehab facility he spent time in after suffering a spinal-cord injury. It’s there he meets a much younger and newly injured patient who turns him onto the virtual role-playing world.”

6. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Sometrics Launches GameCoins Platform; IMVU Joins Up. “Today Sometrics announced the launch of GameCoins.com, a virtual goods marketplace and social platform designed to help virtual worlds and online games both grow their reach and monetize. GameCoins.com will feature user blogs and friend lists that allow users to recommend games and virtual worlds to each other. Users will be able to obtain virtual goods and currency for favorite games through GameCoins.com using the Sometrics Offer Solution, an ad offer network. “This is the first time we’re going to consumers directly with our virtual currency products,” said Sometrics CEO Ian Swanson, in a press statement. “Until now, our solutions for earning that game’s virtual currency have lived within the individual games themselves. But with GameCoins we can broaden the reach for all the publishers and games that partner with us. It serves as a hub for consumers, to enable them to share their enthusiasm for a game with others and, while there, discover new games for themselves.”

7. New Scientist (USA) – Amputees could get a helping hand in the virtual world. “WHAT is the best way to for someone to get used to their artificial limb? Put them in a virtual environment. So says Anthony Steed, a computer scientist at University College London, who has been studying how the rubber hand illusion works in virtual worlds. In the standard illusion, a false hand is placed on a table in front of a volunteer whose real hand is out of view, and both are stroked at the same time. After a while people feel a sensation in the rubber hand, even when it is the only one being touched. Steed has now discovered that people relate to virtual appendages so strongly that much of the set-up work normally needed to pull off the illusion is unnecessary in virtual environments. For example, people automatically experience ownership of their virtual limbs, without needing simultaneous stroking in the real world, claims Steed.”

8. Washington Post (USA) – Teleporting to reality: Reporting in Second Life. “Earlier this week, I wrote about the booming economy in Second Life, the online portal where people spend lots of money to outfit their avatars with fancy shoes, nice eyes, long hair, short hair, tight jeans, business suits, bathing suits, and anything else you could buy in Tysons Corner. Although the stuff in Second Life is digital — just pixels on a screen — the materials people buy, and the land they rent to build their houses, seem every bit as real as the place where you are reading this blog. For a reporter, interviewing people in Second Life offers opportunities that sometimes seem harder to come by these days — namely, interviewing subjects in their homes.”

9. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Warcraft row: An industry game-changer in China. “NetEase is a veteran of Chinese online gaming, with seven years of industry experience. So it was stunned when a seemingly straight development path suddenly descended into a dark maze after the company sought government permission to operate China’s version of “World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade,” an online role-playing game enjoyed by millions of Chinese. NetEase eventually succeeded. But along the way, the company lost a lot of money and had to play games with a pair of competing bureaucracies that each sought an upper hand in regulating the online gaming business.”

10. TechRadar (UK) – Blizzard: World of Warcraft unlikely to appear on console. “Blizzard has said that its massively popular MMO World Of Warcraft will likely never arrive on home console. World of Warcraft is currently available on the PC and on the Mac and, according to the game’s lead producer J. Allen Brack there are a lot of reasons why it won’t appear on Xbox 360 or PS3 anytime soon.”

2. CNET (USA) – Real-world woes shuttering virtual world There. “The pioneering virtual world There.com will shut down on March 9, a victim of the recession and the pinch on brand spending that had kept it going long past earlier troubles. The news was announced by CEO Mike Wilson on Tuesday.
The service, which launched in the fall of 2003, was a fully 3D social environment with a sophisticated economy, wonderful vehicles like hoverboard and hoverboats and, eventually, a wide variety of community-created content.”

3. Everything PR (Germany) – Real Baby Dies as Parents Raise Virtual Daughter. “When does virtual game play go to far? The parents of a starved baby may have found out, when their three-month old infant died of malnutrition. The South Korean couple left their baby to starve to death at home, while playing an internet game. The disturbing irony of it all? The web-based game they were playing involved the rearing of a virtual child.”

4. Radio National Future Tense (Australia) – Money – Part Two. “In part two of this series we look at the changing nature of currency. Is traditional state-issued tender now losing its monopoly? And how widespread is the use of alternative currencies – be they digital or virtual, or both?”

5. ZDNet (USA) – Earn 100 points – read: The reverse virutal reality world of the future. “Kevin Kelly, writing on his Technium blog points out a fascinating talk by Jesse Schell, a games designer. In “Design outside the box” Mr Schell starts by explaining out how much money is made by very simple games, such as Farmville and Club Penguin. But its the latter part of his talk that is even more interesting, when he predicts how games will be embedded into our reality through the use of cheap wireless sensors.”

6. Montreal Gazette (Canada) – ‘Avatars’ inspire us to be better people: study. “F ascination with the blockbuster 3-D film Avatar has fans tuning into real-world research indicating that virtual selves can inspire people to lead better lives. Since the release of the film, interest has surged in a Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab study showing that avatars, animated versions of people, act as powerful role models. “It is getting so hot right now,” study author Jesse Fox told AFP on Thursday. “James Camerons’s Avatar movie is out so our website hits have just spiked.”

7. IT PRO (UK) – The chief executive of Second Life thinks virtual worlds will be the future of work. “Second Life is often assumed to be a place to go and kill a lot of time, where your alien-looking avatar wanders the landscape looking for virtual sex. The virtual world is much, much more than that, argues chief executive Mark Kingdon, who believes that people thought the internet was “weird” when it first started, too. At the CeBIT conference in Hanover this week, Kingdon told IT PRO that more business functions would move to worlds like Second Life, for meetings, simulations and more – especially after the launch of more user-friendly systems, like the beta of its new viewer, which allows document sharing.”

8. People Management Magazine (UK) – BP executives graduate on Second Life. “Thirty BP executives are to undergo a graduation ceremony on computer game and virtual network Second Life, after completing a programme at Manchester Business School (MBS). The Managing Projects programme will culminate in the executives using avatars to receive their awards on the business school’s “island” inside the virtual world on Thursday this week. Since those who completed the course are based as far afield as Canada, Angola, Indonesia and Russia, the online event is the best way of allowing them to celebrate their achievement together.”

9. Michigan Radio (USA) – “Inch-vesting” In Detroit: A Virtual Realty. “Jerry Paffendorf is not your typical real estate developer. But then, the people lining up to buy into his project are not your typical investors. He calls them “inchvestors.” Paffendorf’s project is called Loveland. And it’s a hybrid: part virtual and part physical. “What we want to do is we want to build this wild social network of people that’s literally built out of the dirt and the ground,” Paffendorf says.”

10. mad.co.uk (UK) – Social Gaming. “Social gaming is growing fast and brands are eyeing it with increasing interest. But how can they integrate themselves into gameplaying in a way that looks natural to users? With Zynga’s FarmVille now exceeding 76m monthly active users on Facebook and Playfish’s Pet Society exceeding 1m, growth in social gaming has well and truly taken off, a boom further illustrated by gaming giant Electronic Arts’ (EA) recent acquisition of Playfish in a deal potentially worth $400m (£268m). Zynga CEO Mark Pincus predicts that by 2012 there’ll be 500m people involved in social games, which means the opportunities for brands to get involved and reach this rapidly growing audience are also increasing.”

2. Computerworld (USA) – Second Life seeks mainstream adoption. “Linden Lab, which develops and operates Second Life introduced a new beta version of its desktop viewer software on Tuesday, the first big upgrade in many years. Will the new software help bring about a renaissance of the once-trendy service? You remember Second Life. It’s a virtual world, a three-dimensional environment like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto. But it’s not a game, it’s a simulation of a world. You can build virtual buildings and vehicles, create virtual clothes, play live music, role-play as a vampire or cowboy, and buy and sell virtual goods for real-world money. It’s the closest thing we have now to Star Trek’s holodeck.”

3. CLickZ (USA) – WildTangent Targets Social Media Games and Virtual Worlds. “Game-based advertising company WildTangent announced the launch of BrandBoost, a platform that enables brand marketers to tap into the audience for virtual worlds, social media games, and massively multiplayer online games. The Redmond, WA-based company said BrandBoost is already being deployed on several properties, including OutSpark.com, OMGPOP.com and Sony Online Entertainment’s FreeRealms, which already has attracted 8 million registered users since its formal launch last year.”

4. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Virtual worlds pose compliance risks. “The very aspects of virtual world that make them appealing to some enterprise users, such as the collaboration tools, also make them risky from a compliance perspective. These risks include the communication risks of the wrong information getting to the wrong people, inappropriate workplace behavior, and lack of archiving tools.”

5. Los Angeles Times (USA) – Disney hopes kids will take online World of Cars out for a spin. “Walt Disney Co. believes that World of Cars, its new subscription-based online community aimed at boys and based on the Pixar movie “Cars,” won’t get lost in the traffic of virtual worlds. Things are already a bit congested. Some 200 virtual worlds target children under 12. Each competes for a slice of the 10 hours and 45 minutes a day the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that kids spend viewing media, simultaneously vying for screen time against a growing number of portable media players and smart phones that offer their own diversions.”

6. Escapist Magazine (USA) – Are Advertisers Running Away From Home? “The failure of PlayStation Home to capture gamers’ attention may be having repercussions as advertisers jump ship to the more media-friendly Xbox Live. When PlayStation Home made its open beta debut at the tail end of 2008, gamers responded with a collective shrug of disinterest. The world had barely any of the content originally promised, felt empty and lifeless, and offered little incentive to log in more than once. Home’s failure to connect with users may be the reason for Sony’s absence from this year’s Engage Expo, believe brand analysts at Brand Week, when the hardware giant had been promoting the service as the next big thing at the Expo just a year before.”

7. Stanford Report (USA) – Can avatars change the way we think and act? “If you saw a digital image of yourself running on a virtual treadmill, would you feel like going to the gym? Probably so, according to a Stanford study showing that personalized avatars can motivate people to exercise and eat right. Moreover, you are more likely to imitate the behavior of an avatar in real life if it looks like you, said Jesse Fox, a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department and a researcher at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. In her study, she used digital photographs of participants to create personalized avatar bodies, a service some game companies offer today.”

8. FierceContentManagement (USA) – What if content management were 3D? “I recently saw the Michael Douglas/Demi Moore 1994 movie called “Disclosure.” In the movie (which explores sexual harassment in the workplace), Michael Douglas was working for a computer company that created a 3D virtual reality database. The user would put on special glasses and he was literally inside the database with the data. He could walk inside a library of content, interact with it and touch it.”

9. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – No R-rating for games does not compute. “It’s confession time. I have picked up a prostitute in a stolen vehicle and sped the wrong way down a busy highway to escape police. I have accompanied a terrorist group in an airport shooting spree. I have garrotted guards, slaughtered soldiers, decapitated dudes and shotgunned sheilas. But never have I felt the remotest desire to do any of this for real. They were computer games. Yes, I’m a ”gamer”. At 37, I’m a little older than average for a gamer, but not by much. Gen X was the first gaming generation. I can’t remember there not being computer games. I first discovered there wasn’t a Father Christmas when I found a (very primitive) computer game under my parents’ bed, and got it as a present a few days later.”

10. USA Today (USA) – Author: Librarian, cybrarian appreciation is ‘Overdue’. “Bryan Hissong is 31, happily married, and the father of a 2-year-old named Olivia. He seems quite content with his life.
But Marilyn Johnson, who is not his wife, loves him and has said so very publicly. It doesn’t matter that she has never met him. Hissong is a librarian. He doesn’t look like the clichéd librarian of old. He favors plaid shirts and is sporting a beard on his babyface — but that doesn’t matter to Johnson, either. She’s well aware that librarians wear many disguises these days. Often they’re pierced, tattooed, punk with bright blue hair. She loves them all.”

2. Venture Beat (USA) – Online firms and toy companies clash over kids virtual worlds. “For many years toy and video game companies have been battling each other for the mindshare of kids. Toy companies have strong products targeted at children from pre-school up to about second grade, when they turn 7 or 8. Then, at about age 8, video games start to replace traditional toys. The typical business model enables video game companies to license their products to toy companies to generate additional revenue. At the same time toy companies have been offering more interactive toys to reach the slightly older child. Media companies like Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney have effectively found a way to provide programming for both the younger and older kids and license their properties to toy and video game companies who in turn use their networks to market back to kids. After Disney bought Club Penguin for $350 million plus earn-outs in 2007, a wave of kids virtual worlds copycats materialized.”

3. CTV (Canada) – The world’s most expensive island – online. ” What is the most you’re willing to pay for a virtual item in a videogame or virtual world? Five, ten dollars? How about $26,500? That’s the amount David Storey, a 27-year-old graduate student living in Sydney, Australia, paid for a virtual island, the “Most valuable object that is virtual,” according to Guinness World Records. It’s easy to write off Storey, who goes by the name “Deathifier,” as a geek gone wild, but he now owns a million-dollar empire. Storey runs Amethera Treasure Island, which he purchased in the virtual world Entropia, as a rare game preserve and taxes hunters on his land. Storey says the taxes bring in more than $100,000 in real money per year.”

4. San Jose Business Journal (USA) – Xulu Entertainment provides real opportunity in virtual worlds. “Xulu Entertainment Inc. is developing a high-definition software platform for virtual worlds and gaming. It includes tools and libraries that professional developers as well as users can apply to create extreme realism and physical interactivity. Xulu’s simulation-driven software is built on an open framework and is designed to exploit the processing power of recent PCs. It is extendible to mobile devices and multiple operating systems. Xulu plans to launch an online entertainment destination to show early adventurers and developers what types of activities it will support. This will include sports, gaming and social activities. The first commercial release is planned for the end of this year.”

5. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Richard Garriott’s Portalarium Aiming At A More Mainstream Second Life? “Today Richard Garriott, former part-time astronaut and founder of Origin, announced his latest company: Portalarium. Portalarium, according to the site, was founded in September 2009 to develop and publish ” online social games, virtual worlds and related services and products.” There’s not much to the company publicly yet, but its initial release is a Torque2D-based plugin for Windows PCs (Mac support is coming in Q2 2010) allowing developers to work within social networks, but outside of traditional Flash-based environments. The Portal Player is currently in beta testing with Portalarium’s first title, Sweet @$! Poker, on Facebook. Virtual worlds are on the way.”

6. VizWorld (USA) – Scientific Research in Virtual Worlds. “When I began this series of investigative reports on Second Life, one thing I was really looking forward to was to see just how much “science” was going on in Second Life. I wanted to know is the majority of what happens inworld Social or Academic? The reality wound up being more complex than I originally thought, being heavily influenced by the perspective of who I was speaking to. Some people said science was everywhere, while some people said it was a nonexistant community. After several weeks of digging around I’ve come to some conclusions, and I share them here.”

7. The Independent (UK) – Control freak: Will David Cage’s ‘Heavy Rain’ videogame push our buttons? “Nothing so complicates a child’s relationship with his parent as the death of a sibling, and when we first see Shaun Mars and his father Ethan alone together, it’s plain that they are struggling to navigate the hostile unfamiliar territory in which they find themselves. Deprived of his co-conspirator and protector, the previously effervescent Shaun is monosyllabic and sullen; Ethan, meanwhile, is barely able to function. As the camera follows the pair into the cheerless house that Ethan has moved to since his marriage ended, there seems little reason for hope. But once they are home, it is soon clear that the bond between them has survived this terrible assault – that, in fact, it is the only thing keeping Ethan from falling apart entirely. He makes his son a snack. He asks him how his day was. He helps him with his homework. He feeds him a healthy dinner. And, eventually, the faintest echo of their former happiness becomes audible. When Ethan tucks Shaun in at the end of the evening, the future doesn’t seem so grim.”

8. Federal Computer Week (USA) – Feds look for their avatars in 3-D. “Many agencies have staked out so-called islands on the virtual world Second Life, but now the government wants software to build and host a virtual world of its own for collaboration, training, simulation and analysis. The Agriculture Department plans to award multiple contracts under a program to develop a fully immersive, persistent 3-D experience in a virtual world populated by avatars that can be customized to resemble real-life users, according to documents published on the Federal Business Opportunities Web Site.”

9. Mediaweek (USA) – Study: Women Social ‘Gamers’ on the Rise. “The increasing number of women who play games on social networks do so with a regularity normally associated with hardcore gaming. But according to a recent study conducted by the lead generation firm Q Interactive, most women don’t associate themselves with a gaming lifestyle like the PlayStation and Xbox lovers do—and don’t care for the label “gamer.” According to executives at Q Interactive (which owns CoolSavings.com), the study was conducted in January among 770 women who were likely to be familiar with online gaming and virtual worlds. It found that while 36 percent of respondents said that they play games on sites like Facebook and MySpace, 54 percent of those who do so admit to playing social games every day. Not surprising to any Facebook user: The most popular social games were identified as Mafia Wars and Farmville.”

10. TechCrunch (USA) – Moonshoot Raises $6.6 Million To Teach English Through Online Gaming. “Moonshoot, a startup with that aims to teach English to children globally through an online gaming experience, has raised a total of $6.6 million in funding led by Alsop Louie Partners and TL Ventures.The startup is also announcing that Tom Kalinske; former CEO & Chairman of Leapfrog, President of Knowledge Universe, CEO of Sega of America, and CEO of Mattel; is joining Moonshoot as Executive Chairman.”

2. VentureBeat (USA) – New Zealand’s MiniMonos raises $550,000 for kids virtual world. “Virtual worlds aren’t exactly fashionable these days. They went through a hype cycle when everyone predicted that we’d all be living virtual lives in online worlds like Second Life. Now our expectations of them are more down to earth — but new virtual worlds continue to pop up. MiniMonos is the latest. The Christchurch, New Zealand-based company has raised $800,000 in New Zealand dollars ($550,000 U.S.) for a virtual world for children.”

3. Inside Higher Ed (USA) – ‘The Warcraft Civilization’. “Virtual worlds have been making headlines in higher ed for a number of years now. From The Sims to Second Life, all-encompassing video games have caught the attention (favorable or otherwise) of faculty and administrators as well as students. But it’s safe to say that few have explored virtual realities with the fervor of sociologist William Sims Bainbridge. Bainbridge — who is currently co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation and adjunct professor of sociology at George Mason University — spent over 2,300 hours (that’s more than a year of 40-hour work weeks, if you’re counting) playing World of Warcraft as part of the research for his latest book, The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World (MIT Press). Bainbridge spoke to Inside Higher Ed via e-mail, discussing what he’s learned from and about virtual worlds — and the vast potential they offer for future research.”

4. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Zynga To Buy Social Gaming Developer Serious Business. “In just two-plus years, social gaming is proving to be a lucrative business for Internet start-ups, particularly for the largest maker of these games, Zynga Inc. The San Francisco company, founded in 2007, has put some of the $180 million it raised in December to work, acquiring smaller and younger rival Serious Business Inc., also backed by venture capital. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Zynga, whose popular games include “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars,” is the oldest in the nascent social-gaming industry and also the largest with more than 235 million monthly users. The company is reportedly generating upwards of $250 million in revenue per year. It also develops games for Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPhone. Its two biggest rivals are Playfish Inc., which was acquired by Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS) for $300 million in November, and Playdom Inc., which a day later raised an unusually large $43 million first-round of venture funding. Playfish was founded in 2007 like Zynga and has more than 49 million monthly active users, while Playdom, which has said it’s profitable, was formed in 2008 and boasts 25 million monthly active users, according to Appdata.”

5. Psychology Today (USA) – Cool Intervention #2: Virtual Reality. “Get ready for Avatar-meets-Xbox-meets-Freud’s-couch as techies like USC’s Skip Rizzo usher psychotherapy out of the 1980s and into the information age. Just in time to become one of the Ten Coolest Therapy Interventions. When it comes to technology, psychotherapy has woefully trailed the other sciences. Biology, physics, chemistry, engineering and other “hard sciences” pounced on each technological advance to squeeze every last kilobyte of data from the research. For years their supercomputers thundered away while psychology gingerly tapped at a Commodore 64. Geophysicists studied paleomagnetism using an arsenal of techno-gagetry and we hand-scored Rorschachs with our trusty slide rule and abacus. In a field that takes pride in its progressive thinking, psychology was largely comprised of Luddites. Until now.”

6. Mashable (USA) – Glitch: Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield Explains His Ambitious Online Game. “Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and five other former Flickr employees are joined by one Digg alum, one games expert and several freelancers in Tiny Speck, a company that’s working on an online game that has a shot at rebooting the stagnating massively multiplayer online game genre. The 2D game — called Glitch — incorporates beautiful illustrations and cutting edge game mechanics, but its most interesting features are its social aspirations and the lessons it learns from the web that its founders mastered at their previous gigs.”

7. Gizmodo (Australia) – Apple Patent Shows A 3D Virtual World For Buying Their Goods In. “There was a time, before Avatar, when 3D meant crummy virtual gaming. A recent patent granted to Apple shows they are (or were) considering a 3D virtual Apple Store – a more welcoming way to shop for Apple products.”

8. The Sunday Leader (Sri Lanka) – Avatar As America’s Political Unconscious. “When one watches James Cameron’s Avatar one is tempted to dismiss it as a special effects film with a very traditional plot. After all, what is new about a story that tells you about a hero, Jake, a paraplegic war veteran, who leads a resistance against bad Americans? The film uses some hyper-romantic version of primitivism to talk of a better world. The simple, nature-connected natives are good; the technologically-advanced, materialistic Americans are bad. The bad Americans want to conquer the resources of the planet Pandora, and when the natives get in the way of this they must be pushed out or exterminated.”

9. TechCrunch (USA) – In English-Crazy China, 8D World Teaches Kids To Speak In Virtual Worlds; Lands A Deal With CCTV. “In China, learning spoken English is giving rise to a huge and growing market. For instance, in addition to English classes in public schools, parents send their children to about 50,000 for-profit training schools around the country, where English is the most popular subject. Instead of American Idol, on CCTV, the national government-owned TV network, they have the Star of Outlook English Talent Competition. This is possibly the largest nationwide competition in China. Last year, 400,000 students between the ages of 6 and 14 took part in it.”

10. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Weopia Launches Dating Virtual World. “Virtucom announced the launch of its entrance to the virtual worlds space today: Weopia, a virtual world aimed at bridging the gap between meeting someone through an online dating service and then meeting in the real world. Unlike Utherverse, which looked to partner with sites like Flirt.com, Weopia stands alone–something that may be an extra hurdle in the way of users downloading the software. It sounds, though, like Weopia envisions itself as related to other sites: users pick the person they want to chat with in the virtual world and share a link to their private space rather than mingling with strange avatars. Matches occur elsewhere, and meetings occur in Weopia.”

2. CBC News (Canada) – New online payment system takes cash for virtual goods. “New startup company Kwedit Inc. is making it easier for users of free online games like Farmville who don’t have credit or debit cards to pay for the virtual goods sold in such games using cash or third-party payments. The California-based company on Thursday launched a payment system called Kwedit Direct that allows users in the U.S. to pay for their digital purchases after the fact by mailing in cash, paying the bill at a 7-Eleven store or getting a friend or family member to pay on their behalf through a social payment network called Pass the Duck.”

3. Gamasutra (USA) – Sci-Tech Firm Buys Forterra’s OLIVE Platform For Virtual Training. “Several weeks after Forterra Systems reportedly laid off almost half its staff and rumors of a possible acquisition began to spread, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) has revealed that it has purchased Forterra’s On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment (OLIVE) product line, including all names, trademarks, and licenses. Neither Forterra — formerly a spinoff of still-in-operation virtual world There.com — or SAIC disclosed financial terms for the purchase. OLIVE enables clients to deploy persistent and secure 3D virtual environments where users can collaborate, train, learn, and interact in real-time with avatars. The software platform supports virtual world implementations in healthcare, financial services, energy, transportation, retail, government, and higher education markets.”

4. VentureBeat (USA) – Vivox raises $6.8M for voice chat for online games. “Video game voice-chat provider Vivox is announcing today that it has raised $6.8 million for its business of providing voice services for online games, virtual worlds and social networks. Vivox ustomers include CCP Games, Electronic Arts, Gaia Online, Hi-Rez Studios, Linden Lab, NCsoft, Nexon, Realtime Worlds, Sony Online Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast. While others provide voice-over-Internet-protocol voice services in games, Vivox focuses on providing a managed service.”

5. NPR (USA) – The Technology Paradox: It Separates But Unites. “In filming at the IBM offices in Westchester N.Y., we were astonished to find the huge, slick office park almost deserted. We learned it was a byproduct of the fact that so many IBM employees telecommute from home or hotels. In fact, now, IBM is shifting a significant portion of their internal meetings into virtual worlds like Second Life, giving their employees another excuse not to come into the office. A couple of those employees told us they find virtual worlds like Second Life to be much more human and intimate than video conferencing or phone calls. A group of avatars sitting around a virtual conference table can share a joke, grab a virtual cup of coffee or divulge a virtual secret.”

6. Security Director News (USA) – Virtual worlds on the horizon for security. “Virtual worlds and augmented reality are not just the stuff of the gaming world anymore. “A lot of this technology isn’t as futuristic as we think, it’s upon us now,” said Frank Yeh, senior security and privacy architect at IBM, who delivered the keynote address at TechSec Solutions Feb. 1. Further, there’s tremendous potential for this technology to harness data in new ways and really change and improve the way physical security systems work, he said. Want to do facial recognition using your iPhone?, Yeh asked. You can download an app, called TAT, which does just that. It not only recognizes faces, information about the person appears in dialog boxes floating around that person’s image. How about attending a “virtual meeting” with colleagues who are located in cities around the world? Yeh showed a demonstration of Cisco’s Telepresence, which he called “a phenomenal technology” that will save businesses money be allowing them to “tranport bits not bodies, in the future.” One of the coolest things about telepresence technology, he said is that “it offers you things that you can’t do in a face-to-face meeting.”

7. The Escapist (USA) – Virtual Egg Sells for $70,000. “The hidden virtual worlds out there never cease to amaze, with virtual items and property in MMOG Planet Calypso selling for enormous amounts of money. First Planet Company, a subsidiary of MindArk that runs MMOG Planet Calypso, has announced that an in-game item called the Atrox Queen Egg recently sold for $69,696. That’s in real dollars, not virtual currency. I say again, and this is not a joke, somebody bought a virtual egg for $70,000.”

8. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Arbopals, Infinite Spaces Developing Tree Virtual World. “Arbopals and Infinite Spaces, the Virtual World Design Centre at Loyalist College, have partnered to create a tree-themed virtual world for kids aged 5-10. The site is now in beta, and the company has promised to plant a tree for every avatar created in the virtual world’s beta, up to 1,000 avatars. “Every kid these days is an environmentalist,” explained Peter O’Brien, President and CEO of Arbopals. “I have a daughter who is 13, and she, like all her friends and everyone from the age of about 5 to 20 is a real environmentalist. They understand global warming, they get that the world needs help, they understand the importance of trees and how trees clean our air and water. If anything, the kids are even more enthusiastic about the environmental hook of Arbopals than their parents.”

9. Information World Review (UK) – The wonders of a virtual world. “Want to look round the Egyptian pyramids or view Stonehenge from any angle? Well, there’s an app to do just that. No, it is not an iPhone application but a freely accessible interactive website called Heritage Key. Historians, archaeologists, academics, researchers and anyone interested in exploring ancient civilisations and monuments from the comfort of their homes now have a web-based resource to let them do so. Heritage Key, from Rezzable, offers visitors a 3D reconstruction of historical sites, excavations and monuments. Users can join live online lectures, ask questions, post on discussion boards and conduct their research.”

10. The Daily Star (UK) – Doctor Who Enters Computer Game World. “THE BBC is turning Doctor Who into a computer game. Bosses want to cash in on the show’s huge popularity by taking the Time Lord into the new market. Until now they had held off from making a game based on the show, only allowing the release of the Eidos game Top Trumps: Doctor Who in 2008. But Dave Anderson, head of multi-media development at BBC Worldwide, said: “We are having discussions about a variety of ideas around Doctor Who that are complementary to each other rather than in competition, including boxed product console games, virtual worlds and other experiences.”

2. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Business virtual needs. “When most people compare virtual worlds, they do so from a technical perspective — how many concurrent users, what kind of interface is being used, what data standards are supported. Too often, however, general business requirements are overlooked. This is a pity, because from a technical perspective there are few differences between the various virtual world platforms, and the differences that do exist are likely to vanish over time as users demand these features and vendors add them to their offerings.”

3. Inc. (USA) – Should You Stake Your Claim in a Virtual World? “A basic but sturdy tenet of social media is to go where the people are. So if virtual worlds like Second Life have lost some cultural cache to the likes of Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook what’s the point of getting involved? In short, setting up your own avatar, or even an in-world space for your company can save you money and maybe even get that eyeball play your marketing team has been gunning for. For starters, just because virtual worlds are no longer a media darling doesn’t mean they emptied out overnight. “I think it’s trending slowly but inexorably upward,” says Michael Wilson CEO of Makena Technologies, which runs the virtual world There, when asked about the number of people using virtual worlds.”

4. Computerworld (USA) – Augmented reality: Pure hype or Next Big Thing in mobile? “Augmented reality technology is getting a lot of attention these days — particularly the use of AR with smartphones. The idea is that by using certain software, you can turn your iPhone, Droid or other smartphone into a virtual heads-up display. Aim your phone’s camera at a shop, restaurant or landmark, and information about the place, such as hours of operation, reviews or directions, appears on the device’s screen as graphics floating over the image of the place. Dozens of developers of mobile augmented reality apps are banking on AR becoming the Next Big Thing in the mobile market. Indeed, a recent Juniper Research report predicted that annual revenues from mobile AR apps will reach $732 million by 2014, up from less than $1 million in 2009.”

5. Macworld (USA) – Onverse offers free-to-download social MMO. “If you thought there could be no social network more time-consuming than Facebook, you were wrong. Onverse, launched in beta last June, brings social networking into 3D, then spices it up with avatars, interior decorating, and mini games you can play against your friends. Best of all, it’s completely free for Mac users to download. Designer Steve Pierce, a Sony Online Entertainment design manager behind EverQuest II, brought Onverse to life with four other artists and engineers on a “shoe-string budget”, creating a virtual world that he describes as “much more of a game environment than many of our chat-only competitors.”

6. The Christian Science Monitor (USA) – ‘Avatar’ reality: It’s just a show, people. “In my continuing quest to remain slightly behind the times, I saw “Avatar” in 3-D several weeks after its release. Don’t worry: You won’t hear me breathlessly reporting that it is really cool. Half the planet already knows that. Nor am I going to get into its meaning or metaphysics. Yeah, I was bothered by the villainous former marines. I have marines in my family and respect them. The noble savage, white savior, and eco-worship were also a bit much, but most plays and movies are controversial if you choose to see them that way. I mean, “Mary Poppins” was about a nanny with magical powers who was blown in on the West Wind. Did anyone check her immigration status? Fairies and love potions figured prominently in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Just saying.”

7. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Facebook Credits Coming Soon To FarmVille. “Players of Zynga’s smash hit social game FarmVille will soon have the option to pay for virtual goods with Facebook Credits, according to sources close to TBI. The new payment option may debut in FarmVille as early as this week. With many other virtual worlds, including Habbo, spreading to Facebook, the roll out of Facebook Credits could present a lucrative new monetization option.”

8. News Observer (USA) – Virtual looks and feels almost real. “As Mushtaqur Rahman floated to the rafters of Duke Chapel, it was easy to forget that he was neither in a church nor off the ground. “Feeling rather angelic right now?” asked Rahman’s colleague, William Rice II, as both men peered through oversize 3-D goggles at the virtual chapel being projected above, below and all around them. Rahman and Rice are engineers with Parsons Brinkerhoff, one of the world’s largest civil engineering firms. They had come to Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering on a recent morning to experience a cube-shaped virtual reality theater called the Dive, or Duke immersive virtual environment.”

9. The Wall Street Journal (USA) – Zachary Quinto Has No Time for Tomfoolery. But For Those Who Do, There’s Star Trek Online. “With the success of World of Warcraft, videogame publishers have been looking for new virtual worlds to offer to videogame players. Next week, there’s a new option with the release of Star Trek Online. Developed by Cryptic Studios, the game will allow fans be the head of their own starship as they travel the universe and battle rival ships and seek out new civilizations. Zachary Quinto, whose role as Spock in J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” movie received a shout-out during this week’s iPad presentation, serves as one of the voices in the game.”

10. Computerworld (USA) – Apple iPad: Will it run Second Life? “As a Second Life enthusiast, I really want the iPad to run Second Life. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t. As my friend Wagner James Au points out on the blog New World Notes, the iPhone already has a couple of rich, text-only Second Life clients, and the iPad now has the horsepower and screen size to support Second Life graphics. Moreover, as a Second Life enthusiast I want to see more people use the service. The existing software client is a major barrier to widespread Second Life adoption: It’s hard to learn. And it only runs well on desktops or powerful notebooks, while the world is adopting smartphones instead. The iPad has the potential to solve both those problems: Touching and tilting the iPad would provide an easier interface for Second Life than mousing and keyboarding. And iPads and other tablet-netbooks are going to become very popular pretty soon, as Apple sells iPads by the millions and competitors jump in to grab some of that action.”