Archive for Blog

The Media versus Marginal Cost

July 13, 2010 No Comments

If you have two companies producing the same product then, over time, the price to the consumer will eventually start to hover just above the incremental price of each additional product. Not the price it costs to produce products — but the price it takes to produce one more product. Say, for example, you have two newspapers ...

Blog, Journalism

Free content isn’t killing journalism

June 29, 2010 No Comments

Another one of our clients — a Wall Street newspaper — shut down publication this month. A couple of staffers were reassigned, the rest laid-off. We lost our anchor client, the client we launched our company with. In the journalism community, it’s common to hear that the problem is with our readers, that they’ve gotten used to ...

Blog

Two paths from DabbleDB

June 29, 2010 No Comments

Over the past few years, my company has become very dependent on DabbleDB, an online relational database run by a Canadian startup — since sold to Twitter. We run our workflow systems, our accounting and billing, our recruiting, and our customer relationship management on DabbleDB. We use it as a back-end database for the China Speakers ...

Blog

Working in the sun

June 25, 2010 No Comments

I do not, normally, consider myself a low-energy person — I am, after all, running two companies (Trombly International and the China Speakers Bureau) and starting a third (Hyperica). But I do notice that my energy flags at certain times — such as when I’m in Moscow. And I’m full of energy in other locations, ...

Blog

Migrating away from DabbleDB

June 12, 2010 17 Comments

DabbleDB, the online relational database platform that our company runs on, has been bought by Twitter. And, according to Dabble’s founders, Twitter has no interest in running a database company — they bought DabbleDB for the brainpower of the team behind it, not for the product. We are promised 60 days notice before the service ...

Blog

How to Become a Shanghai Entrepreneur

March 12, 2009 No Comments

This article originally appeared in Shanghai Expat. By Maria Korolov Trombly I’ve seen a sharp influx of potential entrepreneurs to Shanghai when I was in town the last couple of months. As the U.S. and European economies head south, I guess that people are looking at the growth numbers, noticing that China is still in the positive digits, ...

Blog

I love my work — do my employees?

February 11, 2009 No Comments

My theory is, in China, the higher up you are the less work you do — poor people on farms, in mines work the hardest. If you’re unemployed you scramble the hardest to feed yourself and family. In the US and Europe, the poorest people don’t work at all, get subsidies, the highest-paid people work super ...

Blog

The new scarcity: valuable work

February 8, 2009 No Comments

In the past, wars were fought over resources. The definition of power was the ability to collect a great deal of physical wealth — land, gold, slaves — and order people to work on your behalf to get you more. Two rulers would go to war and the winner would have more of everything at the ...

Blog

A walk down the fake DVD lane

February 6, 2009 No Comments

Back in the old days … 2004 … we had to buy our foreign-language books in hotel shops — and had as many as five different novels to choose from, if we were lucky, right next to the tour guides and “Your first 1,000 Chinese characters” and “Chinese in 1 million easy lessons.” There were fake ...

Blog

Rebranding

January 3, 2009 1 Comment

A Massachusetts court signed off on my divorce last week – after about three years of separation in which my ex and I weren’t in the States long enough at the same time to get it done. This means that, on January 30, I officially become Maria Victoria Korolov again. And I am never changing my ...

Blog
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Sorting Out Sales

Changes to revenue recognition rules may be beneficial but will lead to accounting headaches that new software can relieve.

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We all live in a virtual world

Mike Treder, the managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, recently asked a loaded question: If you...

How can you add joy to your virtual world?

A couple of weeks ago, the ever-insightful Seth Godin pointed out that every new activity has a learning curve...

Does your grid need its own currency?

One of the first decisions a new grid owner has to make is whether there will be an in-world...

Utherverse launches casino for US customers

Utherverse, a proprietary virtual world platform known for its adult content, has launched a virtual casino targeting US customers....

Renting or owning your OpenSim land?

Hosting providers with previous experience in Second Life are bringing some Second Life terminology with them into OpenSim. For example,...

OpenSim prices drop to $10 per region

Correction: Coral Estate regions start at $20, not $10. OpenSim hosting prices have fallen to a record-low, with providers like...

Hypergrid

The hypergrid is like the World Wide Web of 3D worlds. You can create your own world, at your...

Rooms and regions: pros and cons

Business users choosing virtual environments usually focus on particular features — does it support mesh imports? Are there in-world...

OpenSim business roadmap: past, present and future

My company is a small, enterprise user of virtual worlds. Over the past year, we’ve used them for meetings...

Whisper clear as a bell in OpenSim

Tonight’s meeting of the Hypergrid Entrepreneurs Group was an eye-opener for me and several other attendees — well, ear-opener. We...

Whisper clear as a bell in OpenSim

Tonight’s meeting of the Hypergrid Entrepreneurs Group was an eye-opener for me and several other attendees — well, ear-opener. We...

Second Life discontinues enterprise platform

Update: “As Philip has mentioned, Linden Lab has discontinued the Second Life Enterprise development program,” Adam Nelson, Linden Lab’s...

Report: Running successful virtual event takes face-to-face contact

Running a successful virtual event takes face-to-face contact on the part of the team running the event, said InXpo...

CyberCoinBank’s G$ takes early lead

CyberCoinBank’s G$ is taking an early lead over the OMC multi-grid currency from Virwox. Although G$ is only accepted...

Viewer 2 a net gain for OpenSim

The latest versions of OpenSim support Second Life Viewer 2 and, over the next couple of months, grids and...

How to save Second Life’s Teen Grid

The TeenGrid has low traffic compared to Second Life’s mainland, and its primary renters — educators — pay half...

OpenSim grids resume breakneck growth

The top 40 public OpenSim grids resumed their breakneck growth pace this month, gaining a total of 1,139 regions...

Hypergrid economy hits new high

The hypergrid economy continued its steady growth this past month, with a total of 1,091,000 OMC (US $3,775) spent...

Rosedale promises meshes; Teen Grid to close

Philip Rosedale who recently returned to the helm of Linden Lab, gave his first major speech of his second...