Some business/non-profit activity in Second Life: Child Right & You (CRY) has established is presence in Second Life, and IBM is expanding its virtual business center for India in the virtual world. CRY has opened an office (Map and location), alongwith its UK and US partners, looking to create a global virtual community of child rights advocates - including organizing brainstorming sessions. In order to raise funds, their lego blocks-like office has products like greeting cards, gift articles and stationary products, that virtual citizens can purchase for use in Second Life. It’s been developed by Indusgeeks.

On IBMs front, they’ve expanded their business centre in India, reports ET. The business centre will have live avatars based in India (China and Japan get dedicated pavilions) who will help customers buy hardware, software or services…however, signing of contracts, payments and exchange of information won’t take place on Second Life.

I’ve been interested in Second Life ever since I read this on Henry Jenkins’ blog - but never took out the time to explore. I finally signed up today, to try and find the CRY office (believe it or not - just to take a screencap for this post). The signup was quick, the virtual world client was just around 34 mb. Movement in the world was mostly smooth - not affected much by bandwidth constraints - it’s working fine on my 256kbps connection. The software does eat up a lot of memory, though. Second Life is a completely new environment for me, and I’m like a fish our of water right now. I quite like flying, though. I finally (finally!) managed to get off the orientation island, and the software crashed while on Help Island. Any tips for a newbie on Second Life, in case any of you are active there? More Second Life updates later.

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