Cosmo Lush

Vegas, baby. Ask any self-respecting geek what’s the hottest thing in this town and it isn’t lap-dancers or crapshoots but gadgets and gizmos. Las Vegas is the venue for the gadget squad’s annual get-together, the Consumer Electronics Show. This year’s was the biggest ever: 150,000 specialists from all over the world in town for a week in the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center, with almost 3,000 exhibitors displaying their wares. Televisions, computers, hi-fis, cameras, in-car entertainment systems, robots to make the tea: you name it, if it’s new and shiny, you’ll see it first at CES. Only Vegas could host a show on this scale.

My name is Cosmic Finucane. I have lots of money, a body to die for and I’m building my dream house on an island with an ocean view. At least, that’s my alternative persona — sadly, a far stretch from the real me. He inhabits the internet’s hottest new phenomenon, the virtual world of Second Life. Cosmic is an ‘avatar’ — a computer-generated 3D human lookalike who makes friends, throws parties, goes shopping and has the potential to help me earn real money. Launched by San Francisco-based Linden Labs in 2000 with backing from the founders of eBay and Amazon, Second Life is now hitting the big time. Its population has just exceeded the million mark and it is receiving increasing real-world media attention.

France’s crusade against Anglo-Saxon incursions into its culture has entered cyberspace. To the list of alien influences the French establishment is determined to resist — ranging from words such as ‘weekend’ and ‘cheeseburger’ to radio broadcasts of British pop songs and hostile cross-border takeover bids — have been added two American giants of the internet: Google and Apple. This year President Chirac has announced two publicly funded initiatives to create French replicas of successful Google enterprises, while across the Seine in the Assemblée Nationale, French parliamentarians have passed a Bill potentially driving a stake through the heart of Apple’s iTunes music business.