Here is my top list for active real life companies that have a presence in Second Life today during 2011.
Landmarks with SLURLS
- Air France
- ABC
- Amazon
- AMD
- American Cancer Society
- CNN
- Cisco Systems
- Dell
- IBM
- Kelly Services
- Nokia
- Manpower
- Philips
- Press Dispensary
- Siemens Innovation Connection
Many real life organistions and businesses have left Second Life in recent years with their own reasons for doing so. Feel free to comment if you know of any other active RL companies that have a presence in Second Life?. There is a Business section on the Destination Guide for more exploring.
Daniel Voyager 
Thank you for this post Daniel. It is funny that I have always heard that Second Life runs best on nVidia graphics cards. And so there is an AMD/ATI sim but not an nVidia one.
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I’m walking around the AMD sim now. With whirling graphics cards in the sky. The sim is empty of course.
It’s a really nice sim. But IDK if it is as “fun” as a shoe store or a dance club.
I’m just thinking as I type. But I guess, if it’s just their website in 3D – that’s nice – but if you could get ANSWERS here – that would be amazing!
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I’m not sure if you’re restricting this to larger brands or all real life companies, but if it’s all real life companies we’re still there:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/market%20truths/50/185/35/?title=Market%20Truths%20Limited&msg=Visit%20our%20office%20in%20Second%20Life.&u=a3e9cd730827c1102de2141de66234f4
Also see: http://sl.markettruths.com/
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@Xue, you know what I find funny? That they don’t really relate their products with SL..
I would go to the AMD sim if I was able to find out what Performance I could expect with X Graphics card, maybe they could make some sort of benchmark skybox with floating things and teach even newer users how to find out what frames-rate they have and what Frames rate they would have with their new uber shiny Graphics card.
That would make me a client of theirs instantly.
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Hi there, I just want to mention this because I just saw Dell being listed as one of the ‘survivors’. The people at Dell, if you are reading this, do check your visitorship this month, we here at National University of Singapore, have just sent some 300 undergraduate avatars to your island in the last 2 months to explore and learn the cross section of your giant Dell PC in aid of their learning and assessment in a module on the “Introduction in Computing”!
We are planning to do it again in the coming new semester after some pretty positive feedback, so please, don’t you close your doors on all of us in Second Life! 😛
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I think read somewhere – but can’t remember where – that CNN was closing their SL headquarters. Maybe I’m wrong?
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Oh, forgot to subscribe for the comments.
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@Xue: Thanks. I went around exploring the AMD region and the other company regions. I didn’t see anyone in the nearby area and I would of throught there would be more traffic. The regions are nice and builds too.
@Mary: Thanks for the landmark. I’m restricting this to any real life companies that have a presence in Second Life. There are not alot left RL ones to be honest with you because I was looking through some old wiki pages relating to RL companies in SL. There were a few hundred active ones between 2006-2009 and now they are no longer active. 😦
@Alvi: Interesting.
@LividEye: Thanks for the info for Dell. 🙂
@Ricco: It’s uncertain if CNN island will shut down now after reading…
http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2011/03/23/cnn-to-close-second-life-island-cant-justify-the-time-and-effort-of-in-world-meetings/
That’s the latest I know about. 🙂
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Just to clarify, Market Truths is a RL company (see http://www.markettruths.com).
We have also done research on RL companies in SL and tracked the exodus you are talking about. That information is available in these reports:
http://sl.markettruths.com/reports/report.asp?13
http://sl.markettruths.com/reports/report.asp?9
http://sl.markettruths.com/reports/report.asp?5
http://sl.markettruths.com/reports/report.asp?3
Those reports only track the big brands that have had an SL presence (or that residents believe had an SL presence — in some cases companies reported as being in SL were only ever represented by fan generated content).
Anecdotally, my guess is that small RL companies like mine have not exited at the same rate as the big brands (thought that still may happen). The big brands were looking for larger audiences than SL has ever been able to deliver and often did not have realistic expectations about SL either in terms of how many people they could reach or how best to use it. Smaller companies are often less concerned about reaching really huge audiences and more concerned about some of the specific capabilities of SL.
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Big brands make more noise. That’s just how they are – and their comings and goings don’t necessarily indicate a trend for smaller enterprises
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I agree, many people joined SL because of the Big Companies and they got disappointed. Financially it makes no sense to invest so much time and money into a place to advertise that is going to have 2 visitors per day.
A smaller brand could make huge noise in the grid (especially if it’s made to a community of one Geographical Location). I’ve seen that trend with small Boutiques that exist in Real Life that basically look for the users in the grid by targeting events at popular places of that Region’s community and it really works (and they don’t even buy a quarter of a sim)
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Crescendo Design is still alive and well: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Architecture%20Island/32/62/23
Here’s a screenshot of the current presence: http://ow.ly/4nfJw
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Add Mayo Clinic to your list: http://moonletters.com/?p=12999 … the SLurl is at the bottom of the page. Thanks for the listing!
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Fraunhofer Institute of mp3 fame – last press release 2009 – are they still in-world? http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2009/july/second-life-factory.jsp
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Hi Daniel,
Interesting list, but you left out the multi-billion dollar health and education industry sectors. Yes, they are businesses too. http://www.digitaldownunder.org/immersive-internet-australia/focus-on-health/
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The many islands belonging to various military branches (Army OneSource, US Army, US Navy, Royal Australian Navy, US Airforce, Royal Marines, US Marines) are still active and some of them can be visited from Coalition Island Sim, and then there are also several businesses like Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, SAIC, et c which maintain islands where casual visitors are NOT welcome.
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Thanks! 🙂
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another company that still has a sim is Accenture, at least the italian office (Accenture Italia)
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Dental Life is présent on sl ( sim IVOIRE ) and hosts business like W&H, IDC, Gold conseil, Flajolet and more.
And hope it will continue.
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@Louis Platini: Thanks. *makes notes*
@Guillaume: Thank you. 🙂
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After having the concierge line hang up on me five times last night, and then tell me that nothing could be done about my ticket, never mind that we are paying Linden Lab over ten thousand dollars a month for our corporate sims; perhaps I should file another ticket, you will find my corporate behind planted in another venue as soon as we can load up all our crap and haul it to OpenSim. A couple of years ago I suggested to Linden Lab that they should think outside the box, and hire Nordstrom’s head of customer service. Logitech has exemplary customer service as well, for that matter. Since that time we have had lackluster performance, thousands of dollars of unreplaceable inventory disappear and my charter membership was deleted because of a $39.00 bill which I never received. Linden Lab can go to hell.
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