22 Billion Minutes

Dean Takahashi interviewed Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab’s new CEO, over on Venture Beat. One comment really jumped out at me. Talking about in-world voice, Kingdon said:

Looking forward to the next 12 months, we are on a run rate of 22 billion minutes

22 billion minutes. How much is that?

We know that Skype recently made a big deal about 100 billion minutes in its first 4 and 1/2 years. Assuming a very tail-heavy curve consistent with their growth, that’s 40 billion minutes a year.

So Second Life users are already generating nearly 50% of Skype’s voice traffic. That is an astounding amount of voice traffic and a great demonstration of how useful high-quality, spatialized voice can be in a collaborative environment.