Shaping Thoughts

Second Life Encounters 11 December 2006

Here is part 2 of my, supposed to be, regular series on Second Life Encounters (part 1).

Pontiac Island
A couple of days ago, when looking to that gigantic Second Life map, I spotted a place which looked to have specific courses for “things” to drive on. A better look reveiled it was Pontiac Island, part of the six islands in Second Life operated by General Motors.

By the way, the Islands are still very much under contruction by Millions of Us. During my visits I regularly ran into their busy builders.

Things to do:

• drive in carts (quite funny and realistic!)
• test drive the Pontiac GXP (you get a copy of the model displayed and you can test drive for 5 minutes)
• buy nice vehicles like so called “Marteenies”, a scooter-like vehicle.
• ..obviously a lot more when officially opened. A real treat for car lovers!

Location: the SLurl to Pontiac Island

ABN AMRO
Recently, the big Dutch but globally active financial institution ABN AMRO announced their plans with Second Life. Especially in the Netherlands this got a lot of press coverage.

Last Friday, I re-visited the place and got into a nice chat with a group of people, including some insiders and other interested avatars, among them Frans Charming, a rather famous SL Avatar. We especially discussed about what a bank should offer in SL on which I will get back to in a future blog post.

The main location features:

• A business shop (get your bank suit here!)
• A financial center
• Meeting rooms
• A dance floor on the beach
• and some spacious hangouts in between.

Mind that ABN AMRO has 27 sims (!) and this post describes only one, the one that is open to the public.

Things to do:

• get transported on a “helivator” (circle shaped transparent bench that flies you around)
• ...look around…

Actually, the place is not really live, but it will get started in a few weeks. Among the things that are planned:

• organising seminars for specific groups, like starting entrepreneurs (like about “how to start a business”) , students or so called preferred banking customers
• just offering information and a place where (potential) customers can meet
• using Second Life to recruit new employees.

Location: the SLurl to ABN AMRO

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, General Motors, ABN AMRO

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| posted Dec 11, 11:54 PM on Dec 11, 2006 | category: Second Life