New Second Life CEO

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The About Linden Lab page now lists Ebbe Altberg as the CEO. He has a profile on LinkedIn.

Over on SLUniverse Ashur Constantine posted: New Linden Lab CEO, Ebbe Altberg. Quoating:

Ebbe Altberg comes to Linden Lab with more than 25 years of experience leading teams and creating software used by hundreds of millions of users. After graduating from Middlebury College he went on to work at Microsoft, where he spent most of his 12 years leading teams that created the world’s most popular productivity products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Office.

In 2000, Ebbe moved to Ingenio, Inc., where he headed up product and had a stint as interim CEO. As Chief Product Officer, he lead Ingenio to become an innovative telephony and marketplace company, which was ultimately acquired by at&t Interactive in 2007.

Ebbe then joined Yahoo! in Europe as VP Head of Audience, with responsibility for all consumer-facing products and affairs. After a couple of years he was promoted to SVP Media Products, a group of about 800 engineering and product people that created the Yahoo! homepage, news, sports, finance, and entertainment products and platforms.

Most recently, Ebbe went back to a small startup, BranchOut, where he was the COO and managed the teams building products for professionals such as BranchOut and Talk.co.

Opinion

Mr. Altberg sounds like a corporate executive manager. I don’t see where he plays any games or has any experience with managing software used by gamers. To me this is not a good sign.

The things important to those using office software and the demographic are going to be very different. I am suspecting we will have an account-type running SL. But, I certainly could be wrong and hope I am.

Let’s see how long it takes to find him in world.

Considering his credentials, I suspect he IS the Rod Humble replacement.

Second Life News 2014-6

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Servers

Late yesterday, after 7PM PST, the Deploys post appeared. We did get a server update roll to the main channel today (2/4). Tomorrow, Wednesday, we will get a roll to the RC channels. There’s nothing earthshaking in either of the releases.

Server-Scripting UG 2014-5
Server-Scripting UG 2014-5

The package that made it to the main channel is the one that includes the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) function: llModifyLand(). Inara has more on this change. See: SL projects news 6/1: Server, viewer, SSA and AIS project viewer.

The package going to the RC channels is a package with a crash fix. The package is going to all three channels. And that’s about all we know about. 

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Bits and Pieces of Second Life 2014-6

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Materials – Prim Perfect has an article up on the surprise they experienced  when moving to a new viewer that was Materials capable. In their words: “The difference is stunning.”

If you aren’t running with the Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled, you are missing out.

Exploring Banana Island - 2014
Exploring Banana Island – 2014

In the Firestorm viewers only the BETA version has Materials capability, for now. If you are a Firestorm user you may want to check out the Beta. If you are leery of Beta versions, you may want to try the main release SL Viewer. 

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OpenSim eBook Questions

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Maria Korolov has a post up on Hypergrid Business titled: One-Question eBook Survey. It looks like Maria is planning to publish a couple of eBooks that deal with setting up an OpenSim grid and another on using OpenSim grids.

If you have an interest in OpenSim, click over and place your vote for which you think is a more important and useful book.

I will also point out that OpenSim is a great place for having a test sim. The SL Preview Grid is great for last minute testing just before uploading into Second Life™. For most of us the areas of the SL Preview grid we can use have short ‘return times.’ For some testing that can be a serious limitation. Having a region in an OpenSim grid can give one a permanent base for long term testing. Running a grid on your personal computer is basically free.