RETURN ON TECHNOLOGY: Ignore virtual worlds at your company’s peril
This month, a 17-year-old boy in the Netherlands was arrested and charged with stealing furniture that doesn’t really exist, from a hotel that can’t be visited. He perpetrated his crime completely online, in a social networking Web site known as “Habbo Hotel.” By scamming other residents of Habbo Hotel, he obtained passwords that let him lift the virtual furniture out of others’ rooms, and into his own. In Habbo Hotel, you have to buy furniture with real money, so the…