Woman makes over $1,000,000 from SecondLife
In just 32 months, Chinese language teacher Ailin Graef has transformed an outlay of $US9.95 into virtual assets worth at least $US1 million in real money.
Originally from China, Ailin Graef moved to Germany with her husband, Guntram Graef, in the mid-1990s where she took up a job teaching Chinese, English, and German.
Anshe's Second Life portfolio includes virtual property assets equivalent to 36 sq km in size. And, believe it or not, there are people willing to pay sums ranging from $US100 to $US1000-plus to own a plot of land in Second Life.
Taking a leaf out of the property developer's manual, Anshe buys large blocks of "land" which she improves, subdivides, and then either rents or sells the smaller plots.
Like real property developers, it's much better for the bottom line when there are a lot of people moving in to the neighbourhood.
And that's exactly what's been happening in Second Life which is experiencing a population explosion of epic proportions.
This time last year there were 70,000 members. Today there are 1.6 million participants who have downloaded the free software and created online personas called avatars through which they interact inside this 3D community.
Anshe, who appeared on the cover of the influential US magazine BusinessWeek in May, is arguably the world's most famous avatar. Now she is also its richest.
Over the weekend, she trumpeted her arrival in this exclusive club of one with a press release titled: "Anshe Chung Becomes First Virtual World Millionaire".
In addition to her real estate holdings, Anshe's fortune is made up of "cash", "shares", several "shopping malls", "chain stores" and "brands" - every iota of it a sequence of binary files residing in a computer's memory.
At the close of trading on Friday $US1 was worth $L274.5 (Linden Dollars).
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