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We are pleased to announce that Daden is one of the first members of the Linden Lab Gold Solution Provider Program for Second Life developers. This means that we will be able to work more closely with Linden Lab to help clients use Second Life, and also that we can gain access to higher levels of support for our enterprise clients. Read the full press release.

We officially launched Datascape today - our data visualisation war-room for virtual worlds. ThinkBalm members have already had a sneak peak - check our Coverage section for Flickr shots and blogs posts, and we should have a video available shortly. Read the press release, or more about Datascape.

David just posted a think-piece and call to action on semantic virtual words. Read it over on his blog.

Our April Newsletter is now available for download. In it we cover PIVOYE, Southampton University and the launch of Daden cays - our virtual business park.

Today we officially launched PIVOTE as an open source project. PIVOTE is an outcome of the JISC funded PREVIEW project we've been involved with looking at learning in virtual worlds. PIVOTE allows you to author a learning exercise on the web, and then play it on the web, in a virtual world (or worlds), and even on your phone. You can download and use PIVOTE for free (its GPL v3 licenced). contribute to its development, or make use of our hosted service. Check out our PIVOTE page for more details.

**STOP PRESS** - Just 7 days since launch PIVOTE has been ported to Open Sim by the University of Plymouth. Details on the PIVOTE site. Thanks guys!

http://ideaperformance.com/2009/01/27/birmingham-and-second-life/

We've just released and put live version 3.3 of our Discourse Chatbot engine, and the linked updates to our Bot Manager and BotIF interface for Second Life.

Key elements of the update are:

• Introduction of an alternate Altair front-end for broader AI support
• A new RDF based knowledge engine
• Improved support for the BotIF Second Life interface and AAML Avatar Action Markup Language
• Twitter support so that bots can report conversations to a (protected) Twitter account

Clients can access the full release notes from the Bot Manager page.

We've just posted a new video to our YouTube channel showing our Halo automated avatar being put through her paces. This is a recording of the demo we gave at the BCS AI Special Interest Group conference in December, and includes a demo of the emotion work we have been doing with the University of Wolverhampton.

Nice report from ThinkBlam on the Immersive Internet. Nice to see we get a mention, and ThinkBalm has previously covered our work on Google Maps in SL.

We had a good couple of days at Virtual Worlds London, saying hi to many people we'd only met in SL, and hearing some good presentations from other virtual worlds people - some great stuff being done by IBM and Northrop Grumman, and Near's London mirror world will be interesting to compare with Twinity's version of the same.

David spoke on the Mirror Worlds panel where issues of building IP caused the most debate amongst the audience but were ducked by the panellists, and Daden also presented on the Linden Lab stand. David was caught by a couple of people for Voxpops - you can see one on education by Leon Cych (from Learn 4 Life) on Seesmic, and we'll link in to the one from BBC Backstage (on mashups) as soon as we have a URL. The conference ended with a wonderful session on ARGs chaired (properly in 2.0 style) by Roo Reynolds. You can check out the Twitter stream from the conference.