“Tata Teleservices Limited, India’s youngest and fastest-growing pan-India telecom service provider, is extending its hugely successful Suno Dil Ki Awaaz brand campaign into the Virtual World of Second Life with a first-of-its-kind Virtual Talent Hunt. This makes Tata Teleservices the first Indian telecom operator to enter virtual worlds.” ‘Follow Your Heart’ is a platform for amateurs (artists/musicians/photographers) to showcase their talent at the Tata Indicom Island in Second Life from January to March 2009.

(watch video on youtube
(and listen to utterly cute pronounciation of “virtual world”!! ;))

Tata Teleservices’ build is located at the virtual “Bombay” in-between “Bollywood” and the “Bollywood Hills”. It contains a small orientation zone, a party/events area, a gaming zone, exhibition areas for the talent hunt and even a virtual football - as in soccer - field. Architecture is futuristic and well done, but could use some shading baked into the textures.

The whole area is oriented around the “Follow your hart” talent hunt and the “Suno Dil Ki Awaaz” phone network, that “lets you connect with like-minded people and make friends in Second Life using the SDA phone!”.

Prizes for the talent hunt are amongst others an Apple iPod Touch 16GB for best in Music, a Nintendo Wii Game Console for best in Art and a Digital SLR - Olympus E520 for best in photography. There’s also a “Be A Bollywood Star!” star game - which I sucked at, got stuck at the first mission objective after “press start” - with HUD.

Tata Indicom

The “Tata Indicom” island was realised by Indusgeeks, the official press release you can find on their blog. More information at tataindicom.com/sl and at tataindicomsl.com you can login to your account to upload photographs, art or music after registering your avatar at virtual Bombay (SLurl). New residents can get register an avatar at tataindicom.com.

For a “virtual first” - although a talent hunt is not, NBC did so earlier - this is definitely impressive. As far as I’ve seen, no rule states that non-Indian citizens can not join the talent hunt, so let me know if anybody of you does so! :) I only fear that with a limited amount of new registrations, and in-world voting, exactly this voting can be easily spoofed by using alts? Ah well, some snaps:

Tags: corporate, india, indusgeeks, second life, talent hunt, tataindicom

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