VWBPE 2014 – Ebbe Linden keynotes highlights

Ebbe Linden live at VWBPE 2014

Today Ebbe Linden came inworld for his keynotes speech at VWBPE Main Auditorium between 1pm SLT to roughly around 2:25pm SLT. Over 200 avatars attended inworld with 150+ watching it via Livestream. Questions were asked by Phelan Corrimal and Gentle Heron did a great job at transcribing everything at lightening speed. I thought the keynotes speech by Ebbe was fantastic and very informative indeed. Pete Linden was in the audience which was great. Ebbe spent extra time with residents in the after-party so that’s pretty cool from 2:30pm to 3:18pm SLT.

Ebbe talked about Second Life, OpenSim, TOS, the Oculus Rift, third-party viewers. teen grid, the media and much more. It was very encouraging and most interesting to hear what Ebbe had to say about these subjects. Ebbe was very positive about the future of Second Life and he mentioned that there will be changes to make Second Life more accessible. It’s good to see Ebbe addressing educators at his keynotes speech today.

Main Highlights 

• Terms of Service – “I am working with my Legal Counsel to try to try to figure out how we can make it more obvious – or very obvious – that the creators of the content own the content … we’re working on some simple tweaks to the language to make that more explicit.”
• Branding – “We have an incredible breadth of content creators for all kinds of purposes, and this is kind-of unique with Second Life, and I think it’s incredibly important to support everybody and what they want to do.”
• The Metaverse and Linden Lab – ”There might be some people who might be interested in my position on the metaverse and OpenSim and interoperability, and that whole category.”
• Integrating – “Some of you might be interested in what kind of integration we can do to make it easier for you to use Second Life in the context that you want to use it.”
• Improving Second Life – “And then I think we still have a tremendous about of work still to be done – actually, a tremendous amount of work has already been done; Second Life today is so much better than it was two years ago.”
• Future technologies  – “A little talk about future tech. Many of you have hopefully seen that we are obviously actively developing for technologies that we believe will have substantial mass appeal; Oculus being one.”

Q&As

• Will there be community liaisons with Linden Lab? “I can’t imagine that the things we can technically do … there is only so much that we can do. We need to understand the priorities. Otherwise there will be conversation without action. With a full time liaison, you can think up a million things we COULD do”
• Are communications between LL and content creators important? “Of course. They make this all possible. We don’t do content. We empower content creators to draw in other users to share those that is incredibly important.”
• Do your Agile teams decide what to work on each week? “We want to do more than we have been. It takes a lot of resources and time to engage in that conversation, and that is a cost. Many are not up to speed on the topic, are biased, or are not experienced. It can add a lot of cost to involve everyone in design. We want to be more transparent. We want feedback, to learn from you, to correct things. We learn from watching what you do, not listening to what you say, in general. The customer is often wrong when asking for something specific. When they express a need, that’s right. When they tell us how to meet that need, it’s often wrong.”
• Do you expect a more aggressive positive media campaign?  “I don’t know how much is self inflicted, or dynamics of the market. One good thing, looking back, SL got over-hyped too early.
• Would LL have plans to connect linden $ for the metaverse? “We would love to enable that. It’s a massive undertaking. We want to make safer high volume transactions. There is a lot of work to make BitCoin legal and compliant, and we have done a lot of those things. I totally see us going there, but that’s not short term.”
• Are there any current projects you can share that will make the viewer easier to use and more intuitive?  “Ultimately, in order for SL to grow, it has to become easier to use. It takes too much time to engage and immerse people and make them functional.”
• Are there any plans in improving transparency with 3rd party viewer.  innovations may come faster? “We do a decent job of collaborating with open source, Oz Linden interfaces with third party players. That community adds value to provide other viewers optimum for other audiences. WE can’t do everything for all, those with disabilities, those on other platforms. I think we have a good relationship with the open source community.”
• Do you know about Nebraska? Can SL as a redistributed product be available again? Enterprise “I don’t think we can do that. I want to know what that was trying to solve rather than assuming it needed to be a box behind a firewall.  I don’t think we will do Nebraska again.”
• is there any hope that shared media can be fixed for Mac users? “That sounds like a bug. I don’t know the status of that. I don’t know if the platform constrains us. I will look into that.”
• What tech from HiFi be used in SL? “I hope it will create many advances many can benefit from to move virtual worlds and virtual reality forward. The more new hardware and interfaces, it moves us all forward. Philip and I know each other well. Some of us will visit them in a couple of weeks to see demos. it is early stages”
• Apparently there are some issues with schools in the far east with broadband issues “We are aware that latency increases and impacts performance. Further away from America you have increased latency and reduced sense of functionality. We have an Asian partner. We are testing what aspects cause these issues, we have to create a lower latency tech and we need to push less data over the pipe.”
• You had mentioned that you were looking to allow people to export their content/  Will there be an export flag that will help? “Nothing we are doing technically prevents export. Many get their content out. If you can not accomplish it with our tools or third party tools, or not perms owned by someone else, then it should be possible for you to get it out. Maybe we need to make that more streamlined, we are not preventing it, but we don’t want it to be easy for others to rip people off.”
• There used to be a teen grid.  those who work in k-12 education would like to know more about security to brin in their students “I am aware of the Teen Grid,  there used to be a teen grid. Those who work in k-12 education would like to know more about security to bring in their students.  It is hard enough to make a successful business for adults. In the foreseeable future we will be working on the main grid without restricting what people can do. no teen grid in the near term, we need to make SL more welcoming”
• Regards to plans for the mainland.  what are LL plans there? “I don’t know our goal for the mainland. I haven’t discussed this.”
• Philip said the biggest obstacle to VW adoption is technical.  Is this all there is? “Unless we do something technical, nothing will change. If we have conversations, that won’t be enough to create change. There was an under-investment in user experience. it can be new ways to interface with the product. it needs to go from a minimally appealing product to a product that appeals to hundreds of millions. My dream is to make this something a huge number of people can enjoy and contribute to. this is just the beginning, there is more to come.”
• Based on current trends in the market place, FB and oculus for example, are there messages we should take from this for virtual worlds? “You have to look at those individually. There is industry interest in solving the things we are trying to solve. it gets more competitive, but anyone of us moving the ball forward moves us al forward and Facebook buying Oculus is excellent., They see the future we have all been working on. OnLive third party using our open source technology will make a viewer for the tablet. We do have conversations, we collaborate with all 3rd party teams.”
• How can we contact the Lab the right way to involve LL in our questions? “You can reach out to individual Lindens if you think they are interested. maybe we can think of a place where we can list interest groups and what they are talking about like an interest group catalogue to know meeting times and formats.”
• if you had just 1 message that educators could bring back, what would it be? “We are here. We are willing to listen and dialogue.  We want to talk about the future. The doors are open again. We want to know how to make you successful.  That’s it. I’m here. I’m happy to talk with all of you. I want to learn and listen. I want to make you successful.”

The after party

Huge audience numbers with no region crashes.

Regions packed during Ebbe Linden keynotes

Ebbe Linden highlights summary  (order = oldest mentions at top with new mentions at bottom)

• “We’ve made a mistake”, taking away education discount.
• “We do not want to steal or profit from your content”
• “We’re not trying to lock you in, getting content in and out of SL should be easy.”
• “Current terms may indicate that we want to profit from your content, without benefiting creator, and that is not our intent.”
• “We don’t want to lock in content. You should be able to export to other environments.”
• “We need to make this easier for normal consumers to use.”
• “This is a challenge for a small company”
• “I lean to making it easier to use before focusing on interconnection.”
• “We have a lot of work ahead, but a lot has been done, it’s better than 2 years ago.”
• “There is still a lot to do in subcomponents of SL. Most are not great”
• “Nobody else has an environment this open and where users take it where they want to take it”
• “The GDP inside SL is hundreds of millions of dollars”
• “If there are groups not qualified as an ed institution by our current rules, they don’t have credentials, maybe we can explore this.”
• “The general communications with you and us had deteriorated before I got here, from what it was years ago.”
• “We want to be more transparent”
• “We want feedback, to learn from you, to correct things”
• “The customer, when they express a need, that’s right”
• “When they tell us how to meet that need, it’s often wrong”
• “Ebbe and the conversion rate of people staying with SL isn’t great”
• “You have to be determined to make it through on your own.”
• “We are ready to take it to the next level”
• “Nobody else is this far”
• “We want to make safer high volume transactions”
• “There is a lot of extra eyeballs on this space because of what is happening with bitcoin”
• “What that offering would look like, a virtual currency that goes out of SL, that’s another step”
• “Ultimately, in order for SL to grow, it has to become easier to use.”
• “We can’t go mass market as we are today”
• “Nothing we are doing technically prevents export. Many get their content out.”
• “There was a policy that Linden avatars being inworld, They could always use alts. That policy has been removed.”
• “I could have a whole army talking to all the special interest groups”
• “If the community has things to do, if they want to invite us to participate, today you will find more people”
• “It needs to go from a minimally appealing product to a product that appeals to hundreds of millions”
• “I know we can solve this. My dream is to make this something a huge number of people can enjoy and contribute to”
• “We are here. We are willing to listen and dialog. We want to talk about the future. The doors are open again.”

Wow, that was a great keynotes speech by Ebbe Linden. Check out my snapshots of Ebbe Linden keynotes speech here on my SL Flickr stream. What did you think of Ebbe Linden keynotes today at VWBPE 2014 ?