Top entrepreneurs inspire Glyndwr University students to tap into business opportunities in Second Life

Second Life, Facebook, You Tube and Twitter provide vast and as yet untapped business opportunities, young entrepreneurs will be told in Wrexham this week at the first ever pan-Wales virtual business conference.

More than 100 budding businessmen and women attended the event at Glyndwr University on Thursday 25 February.

The conference, which was part-funded by the Welsh Assembly Government, heard from virtual business experts and top young entrepreneurs.

John Lester, Operations Director at Linden Labs, founders of Second Life delivered a talk on opportunities in the virtual world from the United States via a video.

While Lucian Tarnowski, winner of the 2009 Enterprising Young Brit Award in the Global Category, and Hermione Way, founder of internet video site Newspepper.com spoke about their online business successes.

Matthew Draycott, Enterprise Associate at Glyndwr University, said the event aims to inspire students to think about the opportunities which virtual worlds and the social web offers them for business.

He said: "The conference is a bold statement about Wales’s commitment to innovation and enterprise – and we are leading the way here at Glyndwr University.

"Social media is very much part of students’ and everyone else’s lives – you’d be hard pushed to find a student who doesn’t use Facebook, Bebo or Twitter. We use these socially but we don’t always understand the business opportunities that they allow.

"The potential for running a business in virtual worlds or on the social web are fantastic and we want students in Wales to start making more of these opportunities."

Other speakers at the two day conference, which ran until Friday 26 February, included Amy Louise Matthews, a Glyndwr University student who has been running a successful retail business in Second Life, and Denise Oram, Senior Lecturer in Computing and Ethics at Glyndwr University who discussed some of the ethical issues around running virtual enterprises.

"It was a great event," added Matthew. "We’ve had students coming from around Wales, plus academics from Universities across the UK. E-entrepreneurship is an exciting field and I’m sure the conference has sown the seeds for a new wave of successful virtual entrepreneurs here in Wales."

The Virtual Enterprise Conference ran from Thursday 25 February to Friday 26 February 2010 at Glyndwr University’s Wrexham campus.