2008 Interview With Linden Lab® Vice President Business Affairs Ginsu Yoon

As news came yesterday of Ginsu Yoon's departure from Linden Lab®, I reflected on my interview with him, which occured in March, 2008. Some of this commentary can be found in our book, 'The Unofficial Guide to Building Your Business in the Second Life® Virtual World'. Here's the content of the email-interview with Gene (Ginsu) Yoon;

Ginsu Yoon
Vice President Business Affairs
Linden Lab
San Francisco, CA
http://www.LindenLab.com
http://www.SecondLife.com

Sue Mahar
Who has vested interest in developing ‘Second Life®’? – Where did support come from to develop SL™?

Ginsu Yoon
Linden Lab is a privately held company, funded by a group of notable investors including Mitch Kapor, Catamount Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Ray Ozzie, Omidyar Network, Globespan Capital Partners, and Bezos Expeditions.

Sue Mahar
What makes ‘Second Life®’ ultimately unique and full of potential?

Ginsu Yoon
Second Life is a completely open experience, in which all of the content is created by the Residents, who are free to use the virtual world however they wish. Residents can not only create and do whatever they want, but can also monetize that content, thanks to the Linden dollar economy and the fact that they retain Intellectual Property (IP) rights to their creations inworld.

Sue Mahar
Explain what it means to be ‘Open Source’ (OS) and how that impacts the user and global commerce in the grand-scale of things.

Ginsu Yoon
In January of 2007, we open sourced the Second Life viewer, meaning that we made the source code for the viewer software publicly available.

The benefits of OS don’t necessarily directly impact the economy of Second Life, but the OS viewer does affect the Resident experience. For example, because the software was open sourced, a company called Windward Mark was able to integrate its graphics rendering technology, WindLight, into our viewer; we were so impressed with the results, that we acquired the technology and its creators and are including WindLight in the standard Second Life client, improving Second Life’s graphics for Residents.

Another interesting example of the benefits of the OS viewer is what the Electric Sheep Company did with CSI: NY. They used our OS viewer to create their own, OnRez viewer, which was tailored to the new Residents that joined Second Life after seeing it featured in the CSI episode.

Sue Mahar
Explain how the Linden Commerce works – how can it produce USD or any other real currency?

Ginsu Yoon
Linden dollars are used to pay for virtual goods and services in Second Life, and can be bought and sold for USD on the LindeX; there are also a number of third party exchanges that Residents can choose to use. Residents retain the Intellectual Property (IP) rights to their creations in Second Life, which enables them to monetize the content they create. For example, if I create a virtual object, I own the rights to that design and can sell it to you for L$ (which you’ve purchased for USD). I can then take the L$ I’ve earned and sell them on the LindeX for USD.

Sue Mahar
What if I wanted to convert L$ to sterling pounds and then to USD? Do I get a better rate of exchange? What is possible? What is legal?

Ginsu Yoon
Currently, Residents can buy and sell L$ on the LindeX only for USD, but there are exchanges operated by third parties (i.e. not Linden Lab) that may allow Residents to buy and sell L$ for pounds sterling.

Sue Mahar
Discuss the Positive Monthly Linden dollar Flow (PMLF) – how many are actually drawing L$ from their earnings?

Ginsu Yoon
We report the number of unique Residents with a positive monthly Linden dollar flow (PMLF) as a measurement of the number of Residents making a profit inworld, and an estimate of inworld business owners. In February 2008, there were 54,747 people with a positive monthly L$ flow.

Sue Mahar
Why limit groups to 25?

Ginsu Yoon
We realize that this issue is important to Residents, especially Residents who utilize groups to run their businesses.  Group related queries and operations are currently among the most complex of our database operations that happen ‘on the grid.’ The more groups Residents can join, the more complex these queries become - there are more groups, more group-to-agent relationships, and more ‘roles.’ Because of this, increasing the group limit could affect the performance of the grid, so it’s something we need to consider very carefully before moving ahead. While there’s a significant interest in increasing the capacity to join groups, we won’t be able to put forward a timeline for when this may happen until the potential technical issues have been fully considered. We are evaluating the impact on the back end systems of making such an increase and that we’ll let everyone know if we can't offer the increase, given the potential negative impact on performance.

Sue Mahar
Does gambling have a second chance in ‘Second Life®’?

Ginsu Yoon
Our current policy forbids all forms of wagering in Second Life; more details are available in the blog posting announcing this: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/07/25/wagering-in-second-life-new-policy/

Sue Mahar
What is being done to improve the technical bumps and user experience in SL?

Ginsu Yoon
For more info on this, I’d recommend checking out Joe Miller’s podcast on the official blog

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/24/inside-the-lab-podcast-with-joe-miller/
 

 Thank you, Gene, for the commentary. We sincerely wish you well in pursuing new opportunities. 

Written by :

Nasus

 

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