New World Newsfeed: Linden Lab's Former CFO Jumps to Blue Mars

I got rumors of this last night and his LinkedIn profile confirms it: John Zdanowski, Linden Lab's former CFO, is now consulting as a CFO for Avatar Reality, Inc., the Honolulu-based company developing Blue Mars, an upcoming 3D world with a user-created content aspect -- i.e., fairly direct competition with Second Life. Formerly known among the SL community by his Second Life avatar name, Zee Linden, where he earned begrudging respect for dealing with vehement Resident anger over various policy/pricing changes with patience, honesty, and humor, Zdanowski left the Lindens last March. Blue Mars has been in development for a couple years (I first wrote about it back in early 2008), and in closed beta since this year. With Zdanowski's management background, it will be interesting to see what other Blue Mars developments are also in store.

Comments

[Lizzie Lexington]

Interesting...I have been logging in to Blue Mars quite often lately. It's quiet but I enjoy it.

[Tristin M]

Now this is an interesting development ;-)

[adec]

Interesting move... and I have been following Blue Mars, but don't see it as 'fairly direct competition with Second Life'.

The difference is always the lack of user creation. The avg user can't create 'their' world in Blue Mars, they're at the mercy of city developers... together with the terrible navigation method, massive PC spec needed, its not competition..

just sayin'

Adec

[AnnOtooleInSL]

Zee cared. Was sad to see him go. Hope he is doing well.

[Exosius Woolley]

I signed up for Blue Mars too... downloaded the huuuuuuuuge installer, and it failed to run... on all five machines I tried, including the one at work. That PC allows me to turn the graphics settings in SL all the way up, and still get 30 fps... well, it could not handle running Blue Mars either. I am curious, Lizzie Lexington, about your configuration. I think perhaps Blue Mars' hardware requirements may be well out of reach for most people.

[Fogwoman Gray]

You might try again in the next few days.

[Corcosman Voom]

If I recall his statement when leaving the Lab correctly, he said what he enjoyed was getting the company financial system in good working order. This makes sense as a situation that would appeal to him more than operating an existing system.

@Exosius - I run BM with a 'nothing special' off the shelf mid level HP desktop that's almost 3 years old.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I hope Blue Mars is a massive hit. If it competes head-to-head with Second Life, good! SL will have to pick up the pace of innovation.

Personally, I'm holding out for a 3D virtual world with a sophisticated suite of integrated modeling tools. Ideally, it would be something as easy to learn and use as Spore's building tools, but ramp up from there to surpass the top commercial packages in feature set, flexibility and ease of use.

I understand it's a tall order. But I don't think it's an impossible one.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

As Hamlet has said on here recently the way to mass-market VW adoption is to make it accessible from popular tools and platforms. Blue Mars is much further away from that than SL - and apart from being marginally prettier seems to have little extra going for it.

I think that John Zdanowski will have his work cut out for him but hope he can plough his way through the financing that will be needed to make Blue Mars profitable in the long-term.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Hitomi points out an important caveat here.

In any case, BM has never been a contender for education. A few schools might get a city and be vetted as content creators. But we can barely run SL on students' machines. We'd have to set up a high-end PC lab and enable students' access to it after hours so they could complete work...this is harder than it sounds at most schools I know.

So, um, no thanks BM. Not at our campus, and we've still got a lot of spare change in this down economy.

But then all of the slick BM (gotta love that abbreviation) promos I've seen focus on business and social users, not we measly educators :)

[Mel]

He was the one who was responsible for the homestead fiasko in second life, hope they will not hire him!