In Second Life, as in Real Life, there are always 2 kinds of people: the workers, and the owners.  However, what makes SL so different from RL is the ease of transition from being just a worker to the owner.  Your ability to start a business in SL is not handicapped by the same problems that you may face in the real world.

How successful you are is not largely dependent on how deep your wallet is or who you know, but rather by what you know and what you can do.  Basically, it’s up to you how successful you are.  Businesses in Second Life are not so much limited by capital.  There are no expensive manufacturing processes to develop nor do you need an intricate supplier and distribution channel.  Price competition as we know it is no longer a determining factor in who is or is not successful.

What make you successful in SL are your ingenuity and your ability to create a product that has values to others.  Values are no longer determined by the cost of the item, but more by it's looks and functionality.  Let’s take for example the clothing industry.  A person looking to start a clothing line or store no longer faces material quality problems, internal logistics problems, or distribution channels problem that he/she may face in RL.  There are no high startup costs.  You simply sit down on your computer, design the clothes, and sell it, be that you do have to put in some marketing efforts.  But what ultimately determines your success is based on your creations and your ideas, not so much by outside forces.  In that sense, Second Life (or virtual reality for that matter), is truly a great equalizer. 

-Arbitrage Wise

It seems like I have been having a writer's block lately.  I just can't seem to string together a collective thought to put something down on 'paper'.  Hopefully, this first Opinion of many will help jump start my brain.  For those that have been reading my blog, I will now move it to the Opinion section of SLR.

Some of you may wonder why I would buy SLReports.  A short and direct answer would be diversification to protect our customers.  My goal is no longer to simply run a bank or a financial business.  I want to have my hands in as many business sectors as possible.  SL is still a micro-economy where the current barrier to entry in a business is very low, so now is the time to take advantage of it before it becomes higher.  In my previous blog, I've mentioned that I am interested in getting into the advertising side of SL.  Why?  Because there are no dominant players yet, and we all know that the capitalistic world we live in now revolves around commercialization.  We all know that advertising is still in its infant stages in SL.  Look around, there are no primary medium for corporate advertising yet.  No one has presented Main-Stream media an option that is appealing to them.  We all know how everyone feels about these 'ad parcels' that I hear about... not a very appeasing way to satisfy the appetites of mainstream media.

But look again, and focus hard on our ATM's.  You will see that we are trying to develop what I would consider the first Grid-Wide advertising network.  Our ATM's have a farther reach and grab more user attention than most sparsely placed ad boards out there.  So now that we have our foot in the advertising business, the next logical step would be to develop some form of synergy with the web.  That's where SLR comes in.  By having SLR, we can create a package that will be more appealing to potential customers than either of the ad mediums alone.  

Now let's take this thought and see how we can apply it to create a profit.  This is just an example, but let's take this upcoming election.  We have seen that John Edwards and some other politicians have hosted events in SL.  Let's say a politician wants to have an event and needs a way to promote it to attract visitors to their event?  I would say with confidence that given the 14,000+ group members, the exposure they get on SLReports.net, and the immediate ads they can have on our ATM that we can deliver the traffic that they need at their event, don't you?  Now the question is, what will it cost them?

Until next time, may your Second Life be as prosperous as your First Life.

-Arbitrage Wise