Azure Islands

Thanks to the respondents on my previous blog post regarding Azure Islands being transferred to metaverse services limited I've been able to piece some parts of the puzzle together. For some people, this is going to be a painful experience but in the wider scheme of things, there's no need to man the lifeboats.

Now putting things together, Tyche Shepherd reliably informs me that Metaverse Services Limited are part of Anshe Chung's empire, this means the tenants will be in good hands. Anshe has has been around for a long time and if she's taking on an estate the size of Azure, it looks as if she plans to be around for quite a while longer. Tyche also has impressive stats:

"it comes at a time when about 85% of all Azure Island full regions were moved on to the new Class 7 Servers. These servers are currently running 8 mainland full regions each. As of yesterday the 141 Azure Island full regions hosted on Class 7s were still running 4 to a server.  Aside from the VWBPE regions and 20 or so other full regions, no other estate has been moved to Class 7s yet."

Tyche also commented in the SL Universe thread where this issue first came to my attention: "ACS leaps from 6.3% of private estates to 7.5% " Someone with those sort of holdings isn't go to look to take the money and run.

The Azure Islands website also has a notice up about the change:
{ Read more }

Fresh from the rumour mill comes the rumour that something is happening to Azure Islands. Over at SL Universe in a thread about Pathfinder leaving, Nika Talaj says:

"But this brings up the question of Azure:

We’ve got some fairly big news for the residents of the Azure Islands, as of March 16th, the Azure Islands will be transferring from us, over to a new management team run by Metaverse Services Limited."

This doesn't half bring up the question of Azure Islands, who are Metaverse Services Limited for a start, is it Anshe? Is Adam Zaius getting out of Second Life completely or is he just taking a different direction? I know he's been busy with OpenSim and maybe that's taking up too much of his time now but this is a rather shocking rumour to be going around. Maybe some Azure Islands tenants will be able to shed some light on it, as I said this is fresh from the rumour mill so maybe everything is fine and the wrong end of a stick is being grasped.

At a recent office hour Jack asked someone if they really believed there was such a thing as a FIC and there was much mirth, is there or isn't there? We don't honestly know. However there has been past history of people being tipped off about policy decisions and now we have the odd sight of the message of the day you see on login advertising land for Azure Islands:



The message reads (in case you can't see it) "Looking for the perfect place to call home? Azure Islands has scenic land for you. CLICK THIS LINK"
 I am not sure why this has happened, how it has happened or what deal Azure Islands have with Linden Lab for them to promote their company on the login screen. How effective is the message of the day? I mean it's a clickable link that doesn't look clickable but I have seen no announcement anywhere saying residents can get their advertising out on the message of the day screen.

A post on the XStreet forum from Ann O'Toole tipped me off about this, so I fired up Second Life and yup, there it was, an advert for Azure Islands. What's going on here? How much does this cost and why haven't people been told about this advertising angle? Personally I doubt I could afford such advertising, although as I've seen no announcement I don't know the costs.

I'd really like to know what is going on here.