An online "virtual garage" has been opened by musicians to showcase and perform their music to a worldwide audience in Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual online world where users create characters called avatars. The world has its own economy and currency among its 13 million members.

A group of musicians have bought a plot of virtual land and opened the virtual garage to perform "live" shows.

IBM is to become the first company to host private regions of the Second Life virtual world on its own servers.

Linden Lab, which created Second Life, is aiming to open up the virtual worlds in a new direction for those who want to use it for collaboration and tele-conferencing.

Employees from IBM will be able to use the public areas of Second Life and also have access to private areas which will be hosted behind IBM's corporate firewall. In the private areas employees will be free to interact with other workers.

Researchers claim to have created an artificial intelligence (AI) with the personality and traits of a young child in virtual world Second Life.

The team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute used complex modelling and AI techniques to construct "Eddie" – a four-year-old boy who thinks and reacts in as human a way as computer simulations have yet achieved.

"The apps, frankly, are endless," Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department, said.

Security experts have suggested that hackers could exploit a glitch in Apple's QuickTime software to steal users' in-world currency in the Second Life game.

According to the San Jose Mercury News technology blog, IT experts Charles Miller and Dino Dai Zovi have found an exploit that could allow hackers to strip Linden dollars from Second Life residents. This money could then be exchanged for physical currency.

The problem stems from Apple's QuickTime software, which is used to display videos in Second Life.