Interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon

Kingdon: A very important strategic objective of the company is to grow our active user base. We see how the in world economy is growing, we see how land mass has been growing, and we see that the changes that we make to the registration process are having a positive impact on our active user base.

That number needs to continue to grow because we believe that the Second Life platform is in a very, very unique strategic position in terms of the development of virtual worlds. We want to make sure that it continues to be a front and center.

So we're very focused on growing our active user base. You just flip that over, in order to grow the active user base, we have to have a stable and reliable platform. We've made great progress on that as well. We've been reducing to fewer crash rates. We've been reducing the hours lost to outages. We're still nowhere near where we'd like to be, but we're making continual and steady progress there. Insuring those two are in lock step is really, really important.

Around that, in terms of growing an active user base and ensuring the platform is stable, we're also very focused on our international markets. We've had a big push to localize the Second Life experience for local markets. That's website registration, keyword, and our helpfuls. We put a lot of effort behind that and have made great progress in major international markets in localizing the experience.

Industry Standard: What are those markets?

Kingdon: The markets where we've been the most focused are the big ones. France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and we're at various stages of completion in those markets.

It's been a really important thing for residents. We put a substantial team in the lab in place and really leveraged the community in some innovative ways to help with translation and localization.

Industry Standard: Now, one market you left out was China. This morning I saw some statistics that said China now has 298 million active Internet users. I know China has its own virtual world, like HiPiHi. And they have some video games which are used as a virtual world platform.

Does Second Life have a place in China or does it require something else that you don't really have?

Kingdon: There's a point in time, it's a bit further out in the future, where we'll add China to the list of strategic initiatives that we're actively focused on. We see it as an opportunity, but today we're not making major investments in the Chinese market because to do it meaningfully, you need people there, you need to probably form a local partnership, and develop the opportunity to localize the experience in a really meaningful way, perhaps even make some fundamental changes to the experience.

That's a market where that's warranted. But we have some closer priorities that we're focused on right now.

Industry Standard: For markets like Japan, Spain, or Germany, are you doing that, where you have local staff?

Kingdon: In Japan, we have someone on the ground that helps with communications and partner relationships. We don't in Germany because that can be served from other markets.

The three centers for Linden Lab are the United States, most of our staff is here, and then we have staff in Brighton, England. We have staff in Singapore and then we have a few people in other markets, but our three core staff areas are in the United States, Brighton, England, and then Singapore.

Industry Standard: Why Singapore?

Kingdon: Singapore because there's a great technical talent in Singapore. The Singaporean government has been very, very interested in leveraging technology investment in their country. They have been very welcoming of Linden Lab.

We've been building our engineering team there, focused on all quality assurance where we also have some developers. It's a talent pool as opposed to a team that's focused on the external market.

Industry Standard: Let's talk about strategic objectives, not for the consumer space, but for businesses and enterprises. What are those?

Kingdon: We talked about the core consumer proposition which is growing the active user base, ensuring the platform is stable. We talked about international expansion. The other area that's, I think, a very rich opportunity is the enterprise marketplace which includes for us government and education, what's called a non consumer.

There are couple of things that we're doing now: The first is we're looking at our hosted solution -- this is the software as a service play, right? We're looking at sharpening that up for the enterprise market based on specific requirement s that they have. We have a roadmap for that market.
We're also developing a behind-the-firewall solution which is something that companies have asked for, for quite some time because there are some companies that want to host Second Life themselves. Obviously there are some security concerns or they have content that they want to develop that's closer for their business or their corporate firewall which makes it logistically easier for them to maintain and manage themselves.

So we have that product out right now in alpha and will be in beta in the first half of next year. That's a really important development for the enterprise market.

Industry Standard: Is this the Second Life Grid that you're talking about?

Kingdon: Well, the Second Life Grid is our hosted solution and we call the behind-the-firewall solution right now "Nebraska," [that] is the code name or working name. It's not the full product name because we haven't named it yet, but Nebraska is in alpha in the market.

Industry Standard: For corporations that are in Second Life, I've seen lots of them in the past. Intel, and think Cisco even has a sim.

Kingdon: Intel, Cisco, IBM, (muddled) we have lots of different companies.

Industry Standard: If you were to identify a couple of these companies that either are the most active or the most creative, what would they be?