It can be a wonderful things when things come together just right. As an example, I finally got around to upgrading my antiquated cellphone, and I can use my new phone as an MP3 player and a video camera. It makes my life easier and much more fun.

Today, I heard about two other interests of mine converging. This is a much geekier convergence and I’m trying to find out if it too will make my life easier and much more fun. What I’m talking about is the press release announcing Linden Lab Selects StreamBase’s Event Processing Platform To Power Real-Time Analytics And Reporting Throughout the Second Life Grid.

Cool! Will I get to play with that?

Let me go into some details about this. Second Life is a popular three dimensional virtual world. People create avatars in Second Life which they navigate through the world, interacting with objects that others have created there. They use Linden dollars to buy and sell things. I bought a virtual Toyota Scion in Second Life. It only cost L$ 300, and my daughter has greatly enjoyed sitting in my lap as I drive it around Second Life. I have Reuters News Displays that I use in Second Life and I’ve been actively trading stocks in Second Life.

From a business perspective, I’ve been following Streambase for quite a while. They are a Business Activity Monitoring (“BAM”)
<> Business Process Management (“BPM”)
<> Enterprise Application Integration (“EAI”)
<> Event-Driven Architectures (“EDA”)
<> Network and business level Security
<> Real time conformance to regulations, rules, policies and procedures.

CEP embodies principles for creating information system applications that enable enterprises to keep pace with the vast amount of date and information flowing through their IT systems. The goal of CEP is to enable the data contained in the events flowing through all of the layers of the enterprise IT infrastructure to be discovered, transformed into information, understood in terms of its impact on high-level enterprise objectives and business processes, and then ideally acted upon in real-time, thereby reducing decision latencies and hopefully improving Economic Value Added (“EVA”). CEP proactively deals with events created by technologies such as RFID or flowing data streams such a financial market price reporting data or communication system log data. CEP employs techniques such as the detection of complex patterns of many events, event streams processing, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and perhaps most importantly timing. CEP can complement and contribute to other emerging technologies such as service oriented architecture (SOA), event driven architecture (EDA) and business process management (BPM).">complex event processing system where streams of real time data can be processed in a manner similar to how analysts currently interact with databases. One of the strengths of Streambase that I’ve been especially interested in is its use in the financial services industry. They have an adapter to interact with Reuters, and have been used in various trading applications.

So, what will this agreement between Second Life and Streambase really mean? On the one hand, it maybe that Second Life will be using it for internal uses only, to improve performance of Second Life in various ways. Any improvements in Second Life performance are greatly appreciated, especially as the number of people in Second Life continues to grow rapidly.

However, that would be disappointing. It is my hope that a Second Life adapter will be made available to other companies. This adapter could be used to get information in a much more timely way than the email, XML-RPC or httprequest methods that are currently available. A weakness of Second Life integration with external systems is the latency of getting information in and out of Second Life. A great strength of Streambase is information latency reduction. It truly could be a wonderful fit.

What would people do with such integration? One of he two applications that I am most interested in is improved trading functionality. Being able to more easily get quote updates as well as buying and selling of stocks and transferring balances would be of great benefit to trading in Second Life. Streambase already has a Reuters adapter. Tying a Reuters adapter together with Second Life trading information could be very powerful. The head of NASDAQ has talked about opening up an exchange in Second Life. A NASDAQ exchange in Second Life, powered by Streambase sound very interesting to me.

The second application that I am especially interested in is better behavioral marketing opportunities. The experience of Second Life is synchronous and communal. Avatars gather together for events. At these events, they may see advertisements. The ability to track details of who visits your shop or views your advertisements in Second Life can be done to a limited extent using scripting, but the access to the data runs into the problems described above, and creating objects that respond to real time conditions. The opportunities for an innovative behavioral targeted advertising to take advantage of a Streambase adapter to Second Life are truly staggering.

So, what will this agreement between Second Life and Streambase really look like? I’ve contacted people at both Second Life and Streambase and I’m awaiting replies. I will add updates with any information that I receive.