Interview with Linden Lab's Ginsu Yoon

point of view, they say, 'that ruins it for what we have.'

I think that a more sober perspective is to look at practically any of the examples that we are talking about. There are a couple of technologies, most commonly the world wide web. You know, you had a lot of experimentation, a lot of early adopters, a lot of really wide variety of use cases. And then you saw this become more and more a part of regular consumer, regular daily life, and eventually regular business essential operations.

That's the same kind of evolution that people expect to see in any kind of technology that has broad applicability. But you will always have that rhetoric about how the world is changing, it's different than the early use. I try not to get caught up in the rhetoric.

Industry Standard: Can you quantify how many people or how many businesses are using the Second Life Grid?

Yoon: One of the things that we know we need to improve to service this segment is to really standardize and make corporate-friendly billing and account management practices. Because we don't have those things fully in place, it's really hard for me to count the exact number of businesses. We made a guess among our billing base, and that's as good as a number I have right now. I don't have the kind of data that I would have if we, or I should say that we will have, when we finish deploying these kinds of systems.

It's always been a criticism of Second Life or Linden Lab the company, that we don't know how to handle the enterprise customer. I'll take that criticism as fact. In terms of what people can see. But it's not like we don't understand the enterprise business. We have been a consumer oriented company, as I said, we've been a small focused company, but we as we continue to have success, as we continue to grow, as we continue to get better data about our user base, and where the growth is, and as we are larger company and able to operate multiple lines of business. We are going to do the things that we know have to be done.

It's not like people in this company don't have a background in the enterprise. This is actually the first company I've been at that's been a consumer focused company. All of my previous experience is around enterprise communications equipment sales. It's very different. But I am not the only one. There are lots of people in the company who understand that business, that just hasn't been our business. We're now, we are going to be more showing and telling next year of what we are capable of doing.

Industry Standard: You mentioned one of the things you wanted to tackle was billing for the enterprise.

Yoon: Billing, account names, account management. There's a whole host of things. There's a whole host of things that an enterprise would expect in terms of security and deployment options. Just in terms of collateral around the technology. Customer service, basically every point of the business.

Industry Standard: Of the technologies that you are working on right now, that your developers are working on right now -- not the ones that are in production, but the things that are on the horizon – what excites you the most, where do you see the most opportunity?

Yoon: It's kind of interesting question. I have a general level of excitement and enthusiasm for the whole thing. But that's not the answer that you are looking for.

I guess the way I look at it, there is just this set of commonly known things. A lot of them are not sexy. Who wants to talk about "ooo, account management!" or "they're going to let me do a corporate purchase order,