The interview took place almost by accident - i was on the way to the third floor bar at the hotel when I ended up on the first floor lobby - ran into John Bates and we struck up a conversation and I offered to interview him on the spot - he bought dinner (that worked out nice since I was hungry).
Here's some rough notes that John made out for me tonight about EntropiaUniverse.com - I asked him to compare it to Second Life so our conversation strayed a little and I need more information to fill in a lot of blanks I have right now.
- EntropiaUniverse.com has a real cash economy backed by US Dollars (John says Linden Labs doesn't have that).
- You can Game Play, hunt and manufacture equipment and objects in EntropiaUniverse.com in a way that's different than Second Life.
- Totally Secure online environment (more secure than most banks, he says).
- Someone created a Virtual Asteroid in EntropiaUniverse.com that sold for 100,000 USD and the person made the money back in 9 months (I guess, by selling the fragments of the Virtual Asteroid) and has had positive cash flow ever since.
- Someone else recently sold 3 shopping malls for 179,000 USD.
- The Investors for www.EntropiaUniverse.com is www.Mindarle.com
John Bates pointed out to me that Entropia is more interested in their users and the revenue they create than in advertiser revenue.
However, there were many questions that John did not know the answers to and he'll get back to me over the next week or so and I'll have a fuller account of EntropiaUniverse.com as in compares to Linden Labs then.
