Thursday, September 18, 2008

22 billion minutes

Dean Takahashi interviewed Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab's new CEO, over on Venture Beat.  One comment really jumped out at me.  Talking about in-world voice, Kingdon said:

Looking forward to the next 12 months, we are on a run rate of 22 billion minutes
22 billion minutes.  How much is that?

We know that Skype recently made a big deal about 100 billion minutes in it's first 4 and 1/2 years.  Assuming a very tail-heavy curve consistent with their growth, that's 40 billion minutes a year.

So Second Life users are already generating nearly 50% of Skype's voice traffic.  That is an astounding amount of voice traffic and and a great demonstration of how useful high-quality, spacialized voice can be in a collaborative environment.

1 comment:

IYan Writer said...

Depends on how they count. I have a feeling that in a situation when one person is speaking to another but 10 are in voice range, LL counts 10 minutes. However, most Skype calls are one-to-one, not one-to-many.