{"id":2482,"date":"2006-08-05T12:38:30","date_gmt":"2006-08-05T12:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2482"},"modified":"2006-08-05T12:38:30","modified_gmt":"2006-08-05T12:38:30","slug":"starwood_enters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2482","title":{"rendered":"Starwood Enters the Virtual Hotel Business"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.3pointd.com\/20060804\/starwood-hotels-checks-into-second-life\/\">Mark Wallace<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Steve Rubel jumped the gun on this news so I&rsquo;ll feel free to blog it too: Starwood Hotels is building out a version of their new Aloft hotel brand in the virtual world of Second Life as a way to attract future customers and presumably get some feedback about the brand&rsquo;s features before it hits the physical world. (It is not meant to be a functional hotel in SL, I&rsquo;m told.) The SL project is being constructed by the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), who are also blogging the process along with Aloft execs.<\/p>\n<p>I like the idea of virtual hotel rooms being on view in SL. (How great would it be to be able to check out a bunch of rooms in your destination city before you booked a trip?) I&rsquo;m more excited, though, about the fact that Aloft and the Sheep are blogging the process of building the project. This is something I wanted to do a while back at the Second Life Herald, but found it hard to find a builder who&rsquo;d put up with being annoyed by my questions while building. The Sheep&rsquo;s solution is great: get a talented builder who is also an articulate speaker and writer to do the job. Fortunately, they have SL resident Cory Edo (the real world&rsquo;s Sara Van Gorden), who is both. The SecondCast crew interviewed Cory recently, which is how I know she&rsquo;s articulate. Her builds speak for themselves.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Wallace: Steve Rubel jumped the gun on this news so I&rsquo;ll feel free to blog it too: Starwood Hotels is building out a version of their new Aloft hotel brand in the virtual world of Second Life as a way to attract future customers and presumably get some feedback about the brand&rsquo;s features before [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,39],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}