Christie Wilcox: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs – “ Before domestication, dog’s life was tough, but when people pulled specific wolves out of their packs and began breeding them, we changed everything. There were some traits that made this easy – the social structure of wolves, for example, made them predisposed to belonging to a community. But we opened up a number of genetic traits and allowed them to express variety that would have been fatal in the wild. We not only allowed these traits to persist, we encouraged them.“
Washington Post: Second Life’s Virtual Money Can Become Real-Life Cash – “Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts. “
Cosmic Log: First flight for SpaceShipTwo – “The craft, which has been christened the VSS Enterprise, remained firmly attached to its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane throughout the nearly three-hour test flight. It will take many months of further tests before SpaceShipTwo actually goes into outer space.“
Thingiverse: Gothic Cathedral Play Set – “The Gothic Cathedral Play Set is designed to be modular. Print as few or as many parts as you want. Then assemble them into a configuration of your choosing. The full model pictured here is made up of 20 parts.“
ThinkBalm: ThinkBalm Publishes Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide – “The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present “if/then” scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: meetings, conferences, and learning and training. “
ThinkBalm: Video tour of ThinkBalm’s Distillery – “ThinkBalm’s intention with the Distillery is to replace the boring ole webinar with an engaging, interactive activity, and create an unforgettable immersive learning experience. This is a 9-minute mini video tour of the Distillery lead by ThinkBalm analyst Erica Driver.“
Canviz: JavaScript Library – “Canviz is a JavaScript library for drawing Graphviz graphs to a web browser canvas. More technically, Canviz is a JavaScript xdot renderer. It works in most modern browsers. “
Dave Schappel: Want Entrepreneur Advice Over Coffee? That’ll Be $1,000 – “You pay me $1,000 for up to 3 hours of my time talking with you about entrepreneurship. That will likely be spread over two 1-hour meetings, and another hour of my time making introductions, if I think they’re warranted. If I don’t, I’ll be honest with you, and we’ll spend that last hour working on your plans, or whatever. Then, when you’ve started your company and booked your first $1,000 in revenues, I’ll give you $700 back. “
OnOrbit: Concrete Phase of Runway Begins at Spaceport America – “Measuring 10,000 feet long by 200 feet wide, the runway is designed to support nearly every aircraft in the world, as well as the day-to-day space tourism and payload launch operations like those for Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. The large concrete runway will accommodate returning launch vehicles, fly-back rocket boosters and other space launch and training vehicles.“
Second Life Blogs: Second Life Viewer 2 Beta, Now Available – “We looked carefully at the experience design of other successful social media and technology platforms–such as the web browser, Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter, etc.–and the key elements that enabled them to reach mass adoption. You’ll see much of that thinking baked into new Viewer 2 experience design. Our primary goal was to create a more consumer-friendly viewer–an imperative to bring in a new wave of Second Life Residents.“
Second Life Blogs: Shared Media: Bringing the Web Inworld with Viewer 2 – “Second Life Shared Media, a new Viewer 2 capability, makes sharing standard Web-based media in Second Life easy and seamless. It enables content creators to make more compelling, interactive experiences. Basically, Shared Media brings the Internet inworld. For the more technically inclined, what this means is that you can now put media textures on any prim in Second Life. “
Bunnie’s Blog: On MicroSD Problems – “Sample 6: This is a SanDisk card bought on the open market from a sketchy shop run by a sassy chain-smoking girl who wouldn’t stop texting on her mobile.“
Giulio Prisco: Google Street View in Second Life – “Perhaps with some clever coding we can implement Street View as a fully interactive multiuser metaverse within Second Life, by converting avatar movement (walk, rotate, look around) to clicks and drags on a surrounding Street View display. Sounds doable.“
Makedo: What is Makedo? – “Makedo is a connector system that enables materials including cardboard, plastic and fabric to easily join together to form new objects or structures.“
