Linden Lab - History

History

The company, founded in 1999, employs numerous established high-tech veterans, including former executives from Electronic Arts, eBay, Disney, Adobe, and Apple. The company's founder and original CEO is Philip Rosedale, a former CTO of RealNetworks, one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World in 2007. In December 2010, the company announced a new CEO, Rod Humble, who controls day-to-day management and operations. Rosedale remains chairman of the board of Linden Lab, with a focus on product development and strategy.

In 2008, the company was awarded an Emmy for Second Life in the user-generated content and game modification category. The award was given at the 59th annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. Philip Rosedale, chairman of Linden Lab, accepted the award.

Although Linden Lab's Second Life platform was not the first online virtual world entry, it has gained a large amount of attention due to its expanding user base and unique policy that allows participants to own the intellectual property rights to the inworld content that they create. The company's name comes from Linden Street, the street it was originally based on. The company's transition from scrappy upstart to success is detailed in the book The Making of Second Life, written by former Linden Lab employee Wagner James Au.

Although many people have assumed that the inspiration for Second Life originated from Rosedale's exposure to Neil Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, he has suggested that his vision of virtual worlds predates that book and that he conducted some early virtual world experiments during his college years at the University of California San Diego, where he studied physics.

Rosedale's strong coding skills eventually resulted in the creation of a video compression technology that would later be acquired by RealNetworks, where he was made CTO at the young age of 27. While at RealNetworks, Rosedale's ambition to create a virtual world was resurrected and recharged by technological advances in computing and his attendance at the popular music and arts festival Burning Man.

With the help of a financial windfall that he reaped from his time at RealNetworks, Rosedale formed Linden Lab in 1999. His initial focus was on the development of hardware that would enable computer users to be fully immersed in a 360 degree virtual world experience. In its earliest form, the company struggled to produce a commercial version of "The Rig," which was realized in prototype form as a clunky steel contraption with several computer monitors that users could wear on their shoulders. That vision soon morphed into the software-based application Linden World, where computer users could participate in task-based games and socialization in a 3D online environment. That effort would eventually transform into the better-known, user-centered Second Life.

During a 2001 meeting with investors, Rosedale noticed that the participants were particularly responsive to the collaborative, creative potential of Second Life. As a result, the initial objective-driven, gaming focus of Second Life was shifted to a more user-created, community-driven experience.

As Second Life emerged into the mainstream, it has been the subject of numerous pop culture references. For example, it found prominent plot placement in 2007 episodes of "CSI: NY" and the U.S. version of "The Office," and has been referenced in the comic strip "Doonesbury."

In September 2012, Linden Lab announced two new products: Creatorverse (for iPad) and Patterns (Desktop application).