This week, Linden Lab awarded two projects with the the first edition of Linden Prize, to recognize their achievements in making Second Life more practical for the real world (you can see a strong message here, can't you?).
One of them, Virtual Ability (just for note, the second one was Studio Wikitecture), is a non profit [...]

Virtual Worlds News has published recently two news strengthening Sulake's presence in the world of - virtual worlds!
The first one announces that Sulake is thinking about porting it's newly released Bobba to the PC platform market. In an interview accorded to Gamasutra, the company's CCO and co-founder Sampo Karjalainen said that the virtual world, currently [...]

Tokyo based 3Di released yesterday 3Di OpenViewer, the first commercialized browser-based viewer for OpenSim applications.
The press release states that the main features of the software are :

View and interact with 3D virtual worlds inside of web browser
Easy integration with existing web services
Designed for ease of use; navigation requires only the mouse
Supports“Internet Explorer”

Not too much info, [...]

Second Life bloggers published numbers regarding the volume and some statistics about the inworld economy. It is very well known that virtual economies have become rather serious subject of studies, and from this point of view the data exposed might surprise you. In any case, here they are :
User-to-user transactions within Second Life total $350 [...]

A really old news, took time to bubble up. It's all in the title : VastPark announced they started writing a plugin that will allow hosting of their IMML documents on OpenSim servers.
What does this mean?
OpenSim is a widely accepted free 3D (virtual world, in our case) application server. Up to now, all the protocols [...]