OnRez is a proud sponsor of a new design competition being organized by the Ewing Fashion Agency. Official Rules Here.

The basics:

Designers must enter brand new items in the competition. There are multiple categories. Each category has a unique tag associated with it. Designers wanting to enter the competition must list the item for sale at OnRez (it’s free!) and tag their items with the appropriate tag to let us know that they are entering the item in the competition.

Winners are chosen based on which item generates the most revenue between December 8, 2007 and January 6, 2008. Grand prize is L$100,000 and other benefits. There are also prizes at the category level.

See this page for all the details!

This Thursday we will hold the next Second Life Entrepreneurs Gather. We are going to try to channel the future and discuss SL’s economic outlook for 2008.  We will look at some recent statistical trends around Second Life, debate growth prospects for next year, and take the temperature of the attending business folks.  If you are a Second Life entrepreneur or just interested in the topic, we welcome your attendance.  The event will be at Noon Pacific Time at the OnRez Event Center.  The official event notice is here [link].

We have been working hard to improve the reliability of the Shop OnRez ecommerce service, with one particular area being the successful delivery of orders.  There are numerous reasons for why a delivery might fail — Second Life could be having grid trouble, the seller might have picked up the dropbox by accident, and there are quite a few scenarios where avatars will not receive an inventory transfer.  We continue to try to work around all of these issues.  We have had a number of spells where delivery failures were at unacceptable rates — early August and early November in particular.  The graph above shows the last two weeks, and we are glad to see that we have recently been able to drive failure rates below 3%, although still not without some difficult days.

We do not consider 3% in any way acceptable, and will continue working on ways to drive that metric lower both internally and in discussions with Linden Lab.  Second Life as a robust platform still has a ways to go, but there is no reason why we should not be able to get to 0.0001% failure rates with effort on both sides.