Linden Lab Goes Shopping, Buys Virtual Goods Marketplaces to Integrate Web Shopping with Second Life

Strategic Acquisitions of OnRez and Xstreet SL Shopping Web Sites to Enhance e-Commerce Functionality for the Virtual World

San Francisco, CA – January 20, 2009 - Linden Lab®, creator of the virtual world Second Life®, today announced a key milestone in its expansion of the Second Life platform: acquiring two Web-based marketplaces for virtual goods, Xstreet SL and OnRez. These acquisitions join several other recent strategic initiatives, including enhancements to the experience for new users, which will enable Linden Lab to reach a broader global audience for Second Life in 2009. Linden Lab is consolidating the two marketplaces on the Xstreet SL platform, offering one online shopping experience for customers and merchants. This will make it easier for Second Life Residents to find virtual goods to purchase and will provide merchants broader channels to sell their products.

The global market for virtual goods is estimated to be approximately USD $1.5 billion a year,* and Second Life plays a significant role in this market. In 2008, Residents of Second Life purchased and sold more than USD $360 million of virtual goods and services. Shopping for virtual goods has become one of the most compelling and popular aspects of the Second Life experience. The acquisition of these e-commerce sites will aid the continuing growth of the Second Life economy by making it even more convenient for buyers and sellers to transact virtual goods and services online.

Similar to e-commerce sites for real world goods, such as Amazon and eBay, Xstreet SL provides an online catalog, where Second Life Residents can browse, purchase and sell Second Life-related virtual goods and services. Just as e-commerce Web sites provide a complement to shopping in real life, Xstreet SL complements how Second Life Residents shop inworld – visiting 3D stores, shopping centers and malls to purchase virtual services and goods from the Residents who created them. Linden Lab will integrate the Xstreet SL marketplace with Second Life, making virtual goods easier for consumers to find on the Web. The enhancements to the e-commerce experience will also drive Residents inworld to collect and use the goods they purchase online, enabling Second Life merchants to further promote their inworld stores. Merchants will also gain additional ways to market the more than 680,000 Second Life goods currently listed for sale online, including apparel, animations, vehicles, buildings and furniture.

"Linden Lab is expanding its footprint in the virtual world industry through four major initiatives – localizing the Second Life experience in key markets around the world, simplifying the 'first hour experience' to broaden consumer adoption, enhancing the platform for enterprise users and building our virtual goods marketplace," said Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab. "Content creators and merchants are pillars of the strong Second Life economy. With these e-commerce acquisitions, we will now be able to offer content creators and merchants an opportunity to substantially improve their businesses, while enhancing the Second Life experience for all of our Residents."

"The vibrant inworld economy is part of what makes Second Life such a compelling experience for Residents," said Jay Geeseman, founder of Xstreet SL. "Just as e-commerce can enhance the shopping experience for real life goods, so it can for virtual goods. With the Xstreet SL marketplace integrated more closely with Second Life, Residents will be able to find goods more easily and shop more conveniently, while merchants will have broader channels to sell their creations."

For the immediate future, Xstreet SL will continue to function as it has with only minor changes. OnRez will remain active for a few weeks to give customers and merchants an opportunity to migrate their accounts and product listings over to Xstreet SL. More information about the transition and future development plans of Xstreet SL is available in the FAQs available here:

Acquisition FAQs

Merchants and Shoppers FAQs

For more information about Linden Lab's strategic initiatives, including these acquisitions, please visit the official Second Life blog at: http://blog.secondlife.com/

* Source: Lindenlab.com

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Xstreet SL Marketplace Sale????

Dear Dana Vanmoer,
Congratulations! An item you have listed on the Xstreet SL Marketplace has been sold! See below for details.
Regards,
Xstreet SL
Now When i read this in my inbox this morning I was rather confused, Xstreet? What the hell is Xstreet? I have never head of it yet they are selling my items from SLeXchange????
So in some trepidation I followed the link and found myself at a site that looks and feels like SLeXchange but is now called Xstreet SL!
It seems SLeXchange has rebranded, (might have been an idea to publicize the notion before actually doing it.) After some research I found a couple of forum posts about the upcoming changes, posted on Sept 10th:
"That's right, we're changing our name! As you can see in the logo above, our look and feel won't change so you won't have to learn anything new or adjust to a different look. The Xstreet brand will cover services similar to SL Exchange for any virtual worlds we decide to work with. The name "Xstreet SL" is specific to Second Life and we'll use different suffixes for other grids and worlds. Different types of services which we have yet to launch will have different names altogether."
The Lindens , it seems are stepping in to help with this grid wide change as there must be thousands of SLX branded items inworld at any given time Linden lab will replace all these textures with the new Xstreet SL ones:
"Because there are so many SL Exchange-branded items in Second Life over which we have no control, Linden Lab has agreed to help us with mass texture replacements. Sometime in the next couple of weeks all existing magic boxes, signs, and terminals in-world should automatically display our new brand."
The question begging an answer then is why? And this is also answered in the first post:
"When SL Exchange was formed it was never intended that we would operate solely within Second Life. "SL Exchange" is a service name owned by Virtuatrade, LLC and the intention has always been to create new service names as we expand into other areas.When Linden Lab announced the changes to their trademark licenses earlier this year, I have to admit - first I ignored it, then I got angry. Over time however I realized that the change presented an opportunity to renew and clean up our brand image and prepare for future business opportunities that we hadn't thought of when starting out."
So if like me you start getting unknown mail or suddenly no longer get mail from SLeXchange (check your spam folder and allow mail from Xstreet) at least you will know why!
If you are worried I would suggest reading the FORUM post to clarify if you need to do anything.

Dana Vanmoer

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Get your new vendors!

We have released our new vendor styles on SLeXchange - click the image above - they can also be found at our main office on Ian Bernard as always they are free and copiable/transferable so you can give them to your friends too.
The older V5.0 vendors are still available and will continue to work these can also be found on SLX and in all our outlets.

Read our newspaper regularly? this is an easy way to get to us.

The new vendors have a sleeker more professional feel and can fit in anywhere - check them out yourself .

Dana

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by Wishedon !

I know that there is no choice as I load the next items photo to slexchange... this is the only show on the block. I want to get the word out more about my items and that means selling them on the web and the place where that can happen in Lindens and Pay pal is SLexchange.com but .........

More in our design section.

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