Thank you so much for the nomination. We’ll seriously consider your recommendation.

Sincerely,
Avarie Parker

This contest presented me and us with the opportunity to get to know these selected people. Prior to the contest, I only had heard of one name. After reading about them, I realized I knew much more.

Sure, there’s hundreds of SL entrepreneurs not on this list, but so what, the nominees are each incredible people, valuable 2008 sl residents, and deserve to be up there. So what if others aren’t nominees… they’ll be other contests.

As Avarie said, thanks for your comment. As you are keenly aware, there are, as you say, actually many many people in the Second Life arena who are operating businesses. In a sense, there are so may that we set ourselves an almost-impossible task to create an SLentrepreneur of the Year award. And I am pretty sure that almost every business owner out there has a wonderful story to tell.

To my way of thinking, the what we most wanted to do with this award was to demonstrate the breadth and passion that people have in creating something for a virtual world. Some folks may make thousands of US dollars, others may make thousands of Lindens. Our aim was not to find the richest or most profitable people but to highlight that people can be entrepreneurial at many levels.

We also wanted to provide our readers with insights into the way such people thought and what they did in order to achieve their goals. We know that 90% of businesses in Second Life fail, so we wanted to show those that were currently succeeding.

This will be an annual event so if you have any suggestions for the 2009 collection of entrepreneurs, we’d love to hear! Finding an entrepreneur is not a exact science, but we rely on people (a) identifying folks and (b) voting.

Hey, if you have ideas for SLentrepreneur, just IM me in-world and we can have a chat over a virtual coffee; I know an entrepreneur not on the list who has a wonderful coffee shop…

You seem to confuse Entrepreneurship with generating high revenues. I can only speak for myself of course, but in the last 18 months I have worked hard to build my translation agency from a 1-man-show offering 2 languages to the largest and by now oldest translation agency in SL. I worked hard to not only cater to my high-profile reference customers, but also to give small business owners and even private clients the best possible treatment. I worked hard to be able to buy out a competing agency and provide their translators with work when the initial owner wanted to abandon the business. I worked hard to be able to afford to work for free for charities and good causes (while still paying my translators their regular fees).

Yes, I do not make “big bucks” – not in RL terms, and probably not even in SL terms. But I worked hard to run an ethical and fair company, offering high standards and being open to a broad spectrum of clients.

For me, that IS entrepreneurship, even though I can not quit my daytime job and life off SL.

Where are the real business makers like Desmond Shang or the high revenue creators.

This holds little credibility with the list published above.