Firestorm Viewer Q&A January

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The Firestorm team has not been announcing their Q&A meetings. At least not in such a way that a non-fan-boy would notice. But, a recent post (2/7) announces postponing the planned meeting until this coming Friday (2/15).

The time will be 4 PM SLT. The location is the Firestorm Support Island. These meetings can run long, a couple of hours or more.

Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

Jessica Lyon says, “I expect we will have more solid info by the 15th for you along with some great news!

So our next Q&A will be Saturday, February 15th, at 4PM SLT. We hope to see lots of you there—exciting things are coming!”

This meeting comes the day after the SL Third Party Viewers Developer meeting. So, we may hear some interesting news.

At the recent Beta Server UG meeting the Lindens said again there are projects in the works they cannot talk about. When the Lab is quite this long, there is usually something up. Whether things are slow because Rod is leaving and was wrapping things up, we don’t know. I think the Lab develops plans, short and long term. So, work would not slow or direction drift because the CEO was leaving. The plans would keep everyone moving. A new CEO may change directions and priorities. That might cause a lull in releases, but I doubt it in the Lab’s case.

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Second Life Tidbits 2014-6 #2

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Altberg

There are lots of blog articles about Ebbe Altberg. Inara has a detailed outline of his resume and some of his personal  interests. See: Ebbe Altberg – a short profile. It seems everyone is blogging about Ebbe. None of us have any idea of how well he will do with Second Life™.

Hamlet of New World Notes is planning to interview Atlberg. That may be the first time we get any idea of whether Altberg can get his head around what SL is.

Strawberry

Strawberry Singh has an article up about a free photo studio. See: StrawberrySingh.com Simple Photo Studio (free).

[youtube rPo1w6SrY6U]

Jump over to her blog to get the link to the page in the SL Market Place.

As she points out this is a simple studio. If you have been around  SL for a time then you can do most of what photo studio does with a prim. But, if you are not a builder, it is a handy thing to have and the video is a mini tutorial.

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Linden Lab Official

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Yay! We have an official announcement from the Lab. See: Ebbe Altberg Joins Linden Lab as CEO.

Quote:

SAN FRANCISCO — February 5, 2014 — Linden Lab®, the makers of Second Life®, BlocksworldTM, DesuraTM, and more, today announced that Ebbe Altberg will lead the company as its new Chief Executive Officer.

Most recently prior to joining Linden Lab, Altberg was COO of BranchOut. Prior to that, he was part of the executive team at Yahoo!, most recently as SVP of Media Products. His more than 25 years of experience managing teams that create world-class products and services also includes leadership roles at Ingenio (acquired by at&t Interactive) and Microsoft.

“We remain committed to world-changing innovation from Linden Lab,” said Jed Smith of the company’s Board of Directors. “We’re keenly focused on providing incredible experiences for all of our customers, and Ebbe is the perfect person to help lead our team as we continue to serve and grow our global audience of active users.”

“Linden Lab has long been at the forefront of building experiences that entertain people while empowering them to express themselves and profit from their creations,” said Altberg. “Our customers’ creativity is unparalleled, and I’m proud to join the talented team that serves them. Second Life is now in its eleventh year, and every day, users continue to create more and more amazing experiences to enjoy. Though much younger, Blocksworld has already seen hundreds of thousands of unique user-created worlds shared for everyone to play with. I’m absolutely committed to supporting our customers and helping them become even more successful. There are significant opportunities ahead, and I look forward to leading us into the next phase of growth.”

About Linden Lab

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, Linden Lab makes shared creative spaces that inspire and empower users to explore and share their creativity with others.

For more about Linden Lab, its products, and career opportunities please visit LindenLab.com.

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.