Shep Korvin - Blog is the new Black

BidBox Powers the Cherry Blossom Festival

I'm still alive, Honest!  ...and busy working on fantastic new Lucky Designs type stuff to be released in the (hopefully) non-too-distant future...

However, just to keep this blog ticking over, I thought I'd draw your attention to the RFL "Cherry Blossom" Festival, currently underway in the Virgin Island sims. Lucky Designs is supplying the auction equipment (BidBox, Yay!), and you'll currently find a vast selection of art, clothing, animations, kenetic sculptures, and even a rather sizable chunk of real estate(!) up for grabs.

The auction is set in a very pretty & peaceful cherry blossom park ... so if you find yourself at a loose end, go and take a browse - you never know, you might land yourself a bargain!

All for a good cause...

[Click for SLURL]

Lucky Designs powers The Cafe Society Valentine Auction

The Cafe Society held their Valentine fundraiser this week, at the Rainbow Ballroom, Masterpiece Island. Lucky Designs provided the auction systems for the event, and dozens of top content creators supplied exclusive prizes.

This was the Cafe Society's first experience with Lucky Designs BidBox systems, and event organizer Luicee Babii reported that the event was a *huge* success, with the BidBox array coping admirably with a frenzy of fast and furious last-minute bidding. The auction raised in excess of L$125,000 for the American Heart Association - more than twice the total raised at the Cafe Society's previous fund raisers!

For more info about the BidBox "Charity Edition", check out this earlier post.

(photo courtesy of Luicee Babii)

Numbers...

Just been adding some stats up. Thought I'd reproduce my findings here, for the curious...

Total number of prizes given out via 3rd generation* Lucky Chairs, grid-wide, since their release in July:

2,066,642 

(or, in other terms, an average of 9,657 "lucky letters" are claimed every day....)

Number of bid box** auctions won (since the system was launched, 1 year ago):

487,082

So.... put together, that's over 2 and a half million user interactions with Lucky Designs Content clocked up since I started measuring usage.... and that's only based on two attractions! (unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight to put user metrics into the likes of MobVend and "What's in the Box?" - doh!)

Still, pretty impressive audience figures, IMHO :)

 

*Only 3rd generation chairs are included in this total - earlier chairs didn't include a networked odometer, so I can't track those. The actual number of prizes given out by _all_ lucky chairs in SL will be significantly higher.

**Charity auctions are excluded. The "charity edition" of bidbox doesn't link into the LuckyNet advertising network, so isn't reflected in these stats.

Bidbox powers Dreams Community Fair 2007

Just a quick plug for the Dreams Community Fair 2007, who are currently running a *huge* Bidbox-powered charity auction to benefit the American Stroke Association.

This is probably the largest-scale Bidbox auction yet attempted, and there's some wonderful artistic works under the hammer...

"Drama Frogs" has to be my favourite (and the bidding was only at L$250 when I checked - bargain!).

Want to see what else is up for grabs? Check out the Dreams sim... and don't forget to bid generously, it's all in a good cause!

((I know... I know... that's 3 charity posts in a row. Don't worry... I promise I'll be back to my usual evil capitalistic self soon...))

BidBox powers Hair Fair Auction 2007...

Lucky Designs is proud to announce its participation as technology provider for the grand charity auction at the 2007 SL Hair Fair. SL's top hair designers have collaborated on a series of unique one-off “coterie wigs”, which are being auctioned to raise funds for this year's featured charity, Locks of Love.

Locks of Love is an organisation which provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children who are suffering from long-term medical hair loss. Hair Fair '07 will be running an assortment of events over the next week to raise money for this worthy cause... please give generously!

The auction is being run on a set of Charity Edition Lucky Designs Bidboxes (though my sponsorship logos seem to have fallen off during shipping *cough*) ... and the hair designs - which you can get a better look at on the Linden Lifestyles preview piece - are already attracting a lot of attention... Sabrina's favourite - "Emily" - has already broken the L$50k mark, only 24 hours into the event!

(P.S. auction snipers beware! - as with our standard bidboxes, any last-minute bids will invoke a 60 second auction extension... these goodies really _will_ go to the highest bidder - you have been warned!!)

Auction SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/hermit%20heaven/9/108/...

Offer: Free Bidboxes for Charity use!

My BidBox "micro-auction" system got released a few weeks ago... but I was going through one of my useless non-blogging phases, and totally forgot to mention it here. Anyway... the system has been gradually gathering momentum amongst early-adopters, and I've recently had quite a few enquiries from people who would like to use BidBox to operate auctions for charitable causes (especially with the 2007 Relay for Life looming on the horizon).

To this end, I've made a new "charity" version of the BidBox - which I'm making available free of charge for non-commercial use at fundraising events. The bidbox differs from the regular version in only a couple of minor ways. Firstly, it displays a floating "CHARITY AUCTION" sign above the box, so that people don't cheat and use these things for commercial purposes (if you see anybody doing that, please let me know!!!), and secondly, the charity version is only usable for a limited amount of time - they're hard-coded to expire once the related event is over, so that (a) the user doesn't have to mess about returning them to me post-event, and (b) I don't have to worry about a bunch of freebie charity bidboxes escaping into the shady after-market of commercial exploitation...

Anyway, if you're running a charity event, and you'd like to use the bidbox system as part of that event, just drop me an IM with your event date/duration, the charity (or relay for life team) that you're supporting, and the number of BidBoxes that you'll need, and I'll sort something out :)

And for those of you who just want a bidbox for good, old-fashioned, commercial profit-making purposes... they're on sale at Lucky Designs, for the bargain price of only L$250 a unit! ... if you want to see them in action, check out the "Who's using bidbox?" sign in the store - it's updated with a real-time feed of all the (commercial) bidbox auctions taking place around the grid!

LapGirl Remixed

*gulp* - has it really been more than a month since I updated this thing? Oops.

So... what have I been up to? Well, I totally re-built LapGirl Boutique, due to the fact that one of my neighbours parked a butt-ugly barrage of advertising hoardings right outside my front door. (nice? not!). I guess she did me a favour really - it's been more than a year since my last rebuild, and things have moved on a little in terms of SL store design since then. As such, the new store goes for a more realistic look than the previous version. Well... realistic to a point; I've got lots of funky themed areas in there...

The front cash desk. My new pet theory is that the more you make your store look like a real store - in terms of furnishings, ambiance, structure, etc - the more likely you are to tap into people's real-life conditioning to want to buy something when they find themselves in an environment like that. Of course, I've got no way to really prove this great piece of thinking unless I build a control copy of this store somewhere else, sans cash desk.... but nevertheless, it's a great cod-psychology excuse when people ask me why I wasted so many prims on a cash register.

(oh, yeah... about that cash register... Iris recently pointed out that the display panel makes it look like I stole it from a gas station. Oops. That'll teach me to examine the goods more closely next time...)

Nutterfly's "Ink Fairy" tattoo range now has its own store-within-a-store. I had a lot of fun theming this area. And before you ask... that's a tattoo gun on the counter top, not a sex toy!!

Are we the only Lingerie store with a built-in dungeon?

(the vampire hot-tub was one of the first things I ever built in SL. It's got a pretty neat particle effect if you hop onto the "virgin" pose-ball. Try it!)

Test-drive area, complete with stripper pole.

Go on.

You know you want to.

Now... this is interesting (pay attention!) - I'm field testing my new "micro auction" system in this corner. It's simple - just pay the relevant box to make a bid. The box holds onto your payment until either (a) somebody else makes a higher bid (in which case you instantly get your money back),  or (b) you win! ... in which case you get the contents of the box. Auctions recycle every few hours - the idea is to have a constant stream of short, low-price "micro auctions". So far, it's proving really popular :)

Expect to see retail version of this system in the Lucky Chair store very soon....