Jolly Farm is proud to be one of the designers giving away a prize in the first ever “Ozimals First Evah! Photo Contest”.

Check out the information sent to the community via group notice by Candy’s assistant Elizabeth Tinsley!

——————————————————————————————————————-

I have exciting news for all you Ozimals bunny fans! To celebrate the opening of the Ozimals University on Monday, September 13, 2010 we are hosting the Ozimals First Evah! Photo Contest, and we want you to be involved! I admit I never knew that our bunnies could take pictures, but we all know they are amazing creatures so it doesn’t surprise me in the least to know that they have figured out how. Oh wait! I’m confused, bunnies won’t be taking the pictures, but they will be playing the starring role in the pictures you are taking!

We have come up with the following four fun-filled categories to inspire your photographic creativity:

1. Bunny & Me (Family portraits)
2. Best in Show (Bunnies a la carte)
3. Funny Bunny (Most humorous picture. Family Friendly please!)
4. My Bunny’s Favorite Things (Pictures including merchandise from MoO/Ozimals Vendors)

And yes the best news is yet to come! We have fabulous prizes not only from Ozimals themselves but from some of the very talented and generous merchants on the Magic of Oz and Ozimals sims.

Prizes include:
Ozimals – 1 year supply of food (standard – Level 2 or pet – Level 1) for a pair of bunnies
Katat0nik – Exclusive Prize Edition Light Blue Bun Bun Dress & Bunny Ears
silentsparrow – $1000L gift certificate
Jolly Farms – Mad About Bunnies – a Hat of Wonder
Houses for You – Gift Certificate for One Free House of Your Choice
MnM Designs – Great spirit “Suzume” Tree Sparrow
Risusipo Shop – Wearable Trophy Bunnies
Frippery – Bunny Love Mask

So scoop up your bunnies and start clicking away. We can’t wait to see where your adventures take you!

And don’t forget to read the rules for all the details.

*********************************************

Basic rules (The Short Version):

You can submit 1 (one) entry per category for a total of 4 (four) entries.

Photos must be uploaded to the Ozimals Flickr Group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/ozimals/) to entered in the contest.

Each entry should be tagged ‘Ozimals First Evah! Photo Contest’.
In the description of your photograph, list your SL avatar name and the category that you are entering the photograph. If you are entering the “My Bunny’s Favorite Things” category you also need to indicate which item(s) belong to MoO/Ozimals merchants.

The categories are:
1. Bunny & Me (Family portraits)
2. Best in Show (Bunnies a la carte)
3. Funny Bunny (Most humorous picture. Family Friendly please!)
4. My Bunny’s Favorite Things (Pictures including merchandise from MoO/Ozimals Vendors)

*********************************************

Detailed Rules (The Long Version):

The Ozimals First Evah! Photo Contest is brought to you by Ozimals.

1. Each picture you enter in the Ozimals First Evah! Photo Contest must include an Ozimals bunny. Photos should not include other breedable animals.

2. You must be a member of the Ozimals Flickr Group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/ozimals/)

3. Entrants are limited to a maximum of 4 (four) entries total, 1 (one) entry per category. No matter how many categories you enter, you may only win once per avatar.

4. Photos are preferred to be high-res and cannot be smaller than 1024×1024 pixels. Aspect ratio must be square.

5. Post-processing is allowed, but no excessive brush use or artificial borders please. This is about creatively capturing your bunnies in their natural virtual environment, not your Photoshop abilities.

6. Please no signatures on the portraits.

7. Please show general common sense and good taste. Images should be PG in nature. Explicit adult images will be disqualified.

8. Photographs need to be tagged correctly and have all required info (see Rule #9) in the description fields, else your entry will be disqualified.

9. Pictures must be uploaded to the Ozimals Flickr group and contain the following information:
- Tag: Ozimals First Evah! Photo Contest
- In the description field include: Full SL Avatar Name, Name of the Category you are entering the picture in, Name of item(s) belonging to MoO/Ozimals merchants if entering the “My Bunny’s Favorite Things” category

10. In order to be eligible for the “My Bunny’s Favorite Things” category, you must purchase & feature at least one product available from the Magic of Oz or Ozimals merchants. *** Use of the demo items will not be acceptable***

11. Entries uploaded after Midnight SLT time on the 12th of September, 2010 will not be entered in the contest.

12. By entering this competition you agree to your pictures being used in future by the owners of Ozimals for any promotional purposes and to the picture/s being on display in world after the competition.

**** Winners will be notified after Sunday, September 19, 2010.

Please notecard Elizabeth Tinsley with any questions.

As posted about in the post on August 26th, Ozimals hired a project manager who we got the chance to meet today and talk to along with Malk and Candy. Today marked the first of what will become weekly community meetings which as of now, will be held every Monday at 12-noon and 6pm SLT.

The purpose of these meetings is to give the community and Ozimals staff the chance to talk, hear about upcoming changes, talk about issues important to the community and maybe even learn things about the bunnies with the introduction of the “Ozimals Oracle”. This weekly installment will be a sort of “how to” with details about how the bunnies work, tips and more in relation to a specific topic (ie Bunny Range). For now, we’ll stick to the topics of today…

This first meeting was quite busy and included a wide range of topics. I’ll do my best to condense them for those who are unable to attend either meeting. Like the meeting, this will be the first of many posts to cover said meetings here at JFO and I will do my best to cover as many of the meetings as I possibly can.

Meet Joel Savard!

Joel is the new Project Manager with an extensive history in professional project management in a number of industries. You can learn more about Joel on his website at http://joelfoner.com/about which includes his resume.

Joel has been on Ozimals staff for a matter of a few days now and has started working with the bunnies although unlike so many of us, he doesn’t have a collection going. I’m sure he’ll become as addicted as the rest of us and that will soon change.

Joel’s main objectives are…

• Add to the Software Development Team – people who are accustomed to professional development in larger scaled systems
• Grow and Deliver reliable products with better testing
• Deliver the need of less patches with less problems with a longer release time in between
• Make code more reliable
• For us: Less hassle, less fooling around with software and technical things and more time to enjoy our bunnies.

Ozimals Oracle – Bunny Range

After our sort of introduction time with Joel, the meeting switched gears and we discussed this week’s Ozimals Oracle Topic – Bunny Range. It’s a pretty basic topic – one that we cover here at JFO on the Bunny Range Page but it’s a good topic for those in the community who needed clarification or maybe didn’t understand range settings at all.

Ozimals has introduced a new FREE “set up target” that you can get at the main Ozimals store (shown at left). It’s basically a set of prims with a nice target on them showing the bunny’s home position, hopping range and breeding range based on the default range settings of 5 meters. Very handy tool! Hopefully those of you who are having “food imbalance” issues will pick up this tool and use it as it will help you understand why you are having an imbalance and will fix the problem for you.

I’m not going to really get into the actual topic of bunny range settings since again, we’ve got a page for that. But I will be modifying the page to include some more information – hopefully make it easier to understand.

As always, people got out of control at the meeting and couldn’t just stay on topic. This always happens and I have to say – it’s incredibly frustrating for the people who need the information of the main topic. It probably doesn’t help that Joel asked for us to shout out some topics we can discuss at later meetings as people tend to bring them up and want to discuss them right now.

Social Bun

We’ve been waiting for Social Bun for quite a while now. Like Bunnyburry, it’s always on top of the list of questions. Today, Malk and Joel touched base with us to help us understand the delays.

Social Bun is meant to be a Community based website that will include “social things” like a friends list, associates list for more business-type connections with different privacy settings, IMs and private message capabilities, event calendars and such. But more than that, Social Bun provides ways to sell bunnies by setting them for sale, providing the SLurl to see the bunny in world and even look up bunnies that match the criteria you’re looking for.

The delay is that Social Bun also planned to include certain types of data that has since been determined to be something that can be potentially exploited – thus loosing focus on the big picture… Fun! So Ozimals has had to take a step back and evaluate the uses of Social Bun which is taking them some time. While Social Bun may be leaning towards being mostly a social networking site for bunny enthusiasts, the pedigree system is still the core of the project and will still be the only way to verify that a bunny has the correct genetics.

Bunnyburry

We touched briefly on Bunnyburry. Like Social Bun, it has it’s very own team of developers working on it. And, like Social Bun, we’ve been waiting for it’s completion for a while now. And again, like Social Bun, a few snags were caught that are delaying its official full release.

Right now, Ozimals is looking into the idea of doing away with the Tier system and allowing the community to make 1 purchase per week from any tier. This will make it so we can purchase from any of the current tiers no matter how many coins we may have. So instead of falling into Tier 3, you can still purchase from Tier 1 if you wanted. This isn’t official… they’re currently testing this idea.

But Malk was kind enough to log onto his alt Aeron Constantine and give us a look at the hutches purchasable through the Bunnyburry system once it’s complete!

I took it upon myself to edit the first image as it contained pricing on the box that is likely subject to change. Here’s Aeron showing off the box with the pictures of the hutches (at left). There are 4 colors and when buying the hutch, you get 1 of the 4 colors at random.

There are 2 sizes of hutches. One is a little smaller than the other and more of a collective display while the other is bigger and allows for the bunnies to actually hop inside (it’s also a little higher in prim.. 7 prim vs. 4).

That about wrapped up the important notes to the meeting. There is still another meeting today at 6pm SLT for you to catch. I recommend it.. it was quite informative and it’s always fun to get together with the Ozimals staff!

Sorry for the lousy pictures. Again, still have a broken computer and am borrowing my husband’s.

This is just a gentle reminder in regards to my Bunny Breeds Poster and Bunny Eyes Poster.

There has been an issue brought to my attention that some feel it “fair use” to make use of my artwork as seen on the Bunny Types and Bunny Eyes pages so long as they don’t try to sell whatever they use it for. I am going to outline this clearly…

It is NEVER okay to use these images in any way without my prior consent.

The Bunny Breeds Poster isn’t an original idea. As I state on the Bunny Types page, the concept was first realized by Vinya Mrigesh. I chose to do a more whimsical adaptation and later I created the original Bunny Eyes Poster. I have credited Vinya Mrigesh for his concept in the note card contained within the poster upon purchase, on the XStreet purchase page as well as the Bunny Types page itself. And that is the ethical way to do things.

Having said that, the artwork on my posters is 100% mine. I spent several weeks drawing and shading the bunnies and eyes until I got it just right. I put a lot of work into them and I made it available here for you to see and refer to for free. If you want a copy of the posters for your farm in world, they are for sale.

Buying them doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want – certain permissions of that specific prim are still in affect such as the ability to modify the prim itself (this means you can change the size of the prim within the Second Life grid – not modify the image on it just because you can find the image elsewhere). You may also copy the prim itself (this means you can create a copy of the prim and does not mean you can copy the image itself just because you can find it elsewhere). You may not transfer the prim (this means you can’t give the prim to anyone else just as it means you cannot take the image from the website and transfer it anywhere just because you can find it elsewhere).

Saving the image to your hard drive is theft. You are taking something that does not belong to you. I understand that it’s 2010… most of us have downloaded an image from Google and used it without consent of it’s creator/owner and it’s pretty typical these days. No one really gets in trouble. But this is Original Content – something you can and will get in trouble for if I find out you have taken my artwork.

It doesn’t matter if you tell me “I wasn’t gonna sell it…” you still stole from me.

You still took the actual image.
You are still using it.
It is still in your possession in a manner which I expressed as being against my rules.
It’s on your hard drive where it doesn’t belong.

This is not only unethical, it’s actually ILLEGAL and if I find out that you have stolen from me, believe me… there really are consequences.

I’m sorry to have to make such a post. I can be realistic… I knew it was a risk putting the images on the site. I did so for the good of the community. I have no doubt that there are countless people who have the image saved on their computers. I hope they understand why this is wrong and that they have stolen someone’s hard work.

The weekend Jolly Farm Lucky Egg Hunt is underway! Search around Jolly Farm (outside only) for lucky eggs that each have a special nest hidden inside for you to buy.The eggs are 99L each and like nests, you have to pick them up after you purchase them.

Eggs come in a variety of colors and the color does NOT in any way depict what is inside of the egg. An example is shown at left.

Some eggs are more common but you have a great chance at getting rares including nests featuring newer traits – Silver Marten, Himalayan, new shades and more! Nests are only hidden outside and it’s Jolly Farm wide!

The hunt will only last this weekend starting from now until whenever we run out! Right now there are about 50 eggs hidden, with more coming this afternoon!

Are you feeling lucky?

If you don’t want to read all of the below as stated by Candy Cerveau, here’s my wrap-up:

Ozimals has hired a project manager of sorts to help them stay on task, get out more consistent responses to issues and the like. This Project Manager (Joel Savard) is helping out with getting everyone organized and on the same page. Hooray!

Coming up are weekly community meetings. This first of which will occur on August 30th at 12 noon SLT and another at 6 pm SLT. At the meeting, current news will be discussed with community questions answered. There will also be a sort of mini-lessons on case and feeding Ozimals bunnies, troubleshooting tips, etc. This is a good chance to meet Joel who will be closely involved with the community meetings.

Here is the full message from Candy…

What’s going on with Ozimals? What are we up to now?

A whole lot actually…Let me explain

Ozimals has had tremendous growth over the past 7 months and that is because of YOU – thank you!

We’ve been scrambling to keep up with everything that needs doing.

We know you want a few simple things (and so do we):

* better, clearer communication.
* more predictable and consistent response to issues.
* solid fixes for problems along with solutions to make the tricky parts of bunny parenting easier.

So… WE HAVE A PLAN!

We have been listening to you and we have a plan for doing better all around so we can support and grow Ozimals. Here are the first steps, and they are already in motion.

1) We have hired a professional project manager. Why? To help us organize how we get things done and make sure they’re getting done more effectively and more reliably.

Joel Foner (Joel Savard in Second Life) has joined Ozimals and will be working with us to improve our internal procedures, guide software development and coordinate with our CSR group and the community. You’ll meet him in world very soon because he’ll also be closely involved with the Ozimals community meetings that we’ll talk more about in just a bit.

2) We are expanding our software development staff. Why? More people can do more things! With more people, we can fix things faster, make sure the fixes work better, and add new cool stuff more regularly.

3) We are about to start a series of regular Ozimals community meetings inworld, held at multiple times to accommodate users in many time zones. Why? So that we have a regular chance to talk “in person.” So we can hear directly from you about things you like, things you don’t, and suggestions you have for us – plus we can share what we are working on and get your feedback!

Ok, this all *sounds* great, but when does it actually start happening?

Surprise… the answer is not “soon”, it starts NOW!

Joel is already hot on the trail of some additional professional programmers, folks who have experience across the software development industry and are keenly interested in Ozimals. We’ll have more news on this when things are finalized.

Ozimals Community Meetings (weekly – open to everyone)

The first meeting will be this coming Monday August 30th at 12 noon SLT and we will have another at 6 pm SLT for our different time zones.

At our community meetings, we will talk about current news, community questions and introduce “The Ozimals Oracle” – quick “How Does That Really Work?” mini-lessons on care and feeding of Ozimals bunnies, breeding and interaction, and troubleshooting tips in areas requested by you. Come by to meet Joel and ask your questions about the future of Ozimals! (We will send out a notice with the location this weekend.)

You have created an amazing Ozimals community. We are listening and working to make Ozimals even better for you. Thanks for your support!

Much <3,
Your Ozimals Team

Be a total Beach Bunny with the Fun in the Sun Ozimals Bunny Pen by Jolly Farm!

Get it In World | Get it on XStreet

13 prim bunny pen with sand, animated water, beach umbrella, sand pail & shovel, beach ball and boogie boards. The perfect bunny pen for your summer fun! 1 prim Boogie Board included as an extra feature.

Pen is Copy/Mod and includes 3 sit poses so you can enjoy the beach with your bunnies! Pen works best with static bunnies.

You’ve all gone far too long without a new product. And while it was incredibly difficult to make anything new for you while using this ancient computer, I did my best and I hope you still love it.

Get it in World | Get it on XStreet

Introducing the Bunny Pen of Wonder – a Wonderland inspired pen. It’s spooky, fun and only 16 prim! In addition to looking completely awesome, here’s what’s included…

Animated, purple water
Tea Kettle & Cup with animated liquid
Large, Glowing Mushroom
Pocket Watch

The pen also includes 3 fun sitting poses so you can hang out with your bunnies in this Wonderland! Click the glowing mushroom, tea kettle or pocket watch to sit!

There are so many fantastic bunnies sitting at Jolly Farm right now that could use a good home – including Veronica, the Silver Marten Sable who is still looking for a good home. But on to Today’s Special!

Today’s Special comes to us from Lassarina! She’s parting ways with her… brace yourself… this is awesome…

Legendary Matriarch of Vitality – Havana Broken Black w/ Dark Lavender eyes, lop ears and aphotic shade. Okay, not the most gorgeous or rare of bunnies in fur type. But just think about that awesome 5% increase to energy!

Bunny Personals: Adela

Meet Adela… “Hi Adela!”

Female Hotot Twilight with Alexandrite eyes and upright ears (shown at left). This bunny is so awesome and spooky looking!

Adela likes wearing lots of eyeliner, loves heavy metal and gothic styled clothing. She’s a deep soul – enjoys a good poetry reading and drinking black coffee.

She’s almost at 100% love as of this post with all 15 of her gens. Her parents? Get this..

Mother: Hotot Citrine Twilight.
Father: Hotot Onyx Classic.

Other lives of note…
Bonnie: Dutch Blue (F) with Dark Green Eyes, Upright ears in Twlight shade
Fabian: Silver Marten Lilac (M) with Light Pink Eyes, Upright Ears and Radiant shade
Kottyn: Argent (F) with Light Blue Eyes, Upright Ears and Classic shade

Nests of note…
Silver Marten Blue with Citrine Eyes, Half-a-Lop ears and Classic Shade
Silver Marten Red with Light Lavender Eyes, Upright ears and Classic Shade
Himalayan Chocolate with Dark Lavender Eyes, Upright ears and Moonlight Shade
Holland Lop White with Turquoise eyes, Upright ears and Radiant Shade
Holland Lop Fawn/White with Citrine eyes, Half-a-Lop ears in Classic Shade
Havana Black with Diamond Eyes, Lop ears and Radiant Shade
Havana Black with Sapphire eyes, Upright ears and Radiant Shade

Of course we also have Argent, Silver Fox, Castor, Hotot, 1.3 Warrens and more!

Here is the Bunnyburry Item & Price list as posted to use by Candy Cerveau today in the August 21st Ozimals BunnyBytes notecard.

Please take a look and give them your thoughts and any final suggestions on this forum thread.

————————————————————————————-

Tier 0:

(Consolation Prizes for Tier 1 Copper Cargo Ticket only)

Worn Down Plush Toys for bunnies

Tier I: 35-500 coins

1) Random Bunny Nest (also has special sparkle) – 35 coins (no transfer)

2) Bunny Treats pack of 20 – 50 coins (transfer)

2) Energy Drink 10% – 125 coins (no transfer)

3) Nest Dye – Colors (10 uses per color) – 250 coins (4 Colors – Indigo, Pumpkin, Emerald, and Rose) (transfer)

4) Bunny Brush (Interactive item) – 350 coins (transfer)

5) Copper Cargo Ticket – 500 coins ( 75% Chance Gets 1 Tier 0 Item / 25% 1 Random Tier II excluding Silver ticket)
(no transfer)

Tier II: 501-2500 coins

1) Exclusive Bunny Hutch – 501 coins (transfer)

2) Nest Dye + Shininess x10 – 800 coins (transfer)

3) Bunny Nest with increased chance of recessives (also has special sparkle) – 1400 coins (no transfer)

4) Happy Stump 4% ( On Click Texture Change ) – 1800 coins (no transfer)

5) Silver Cargo Ticket – 2500 coins (75% Chance Gets 1 Tier item / 25% 1 Random Tier III excluding Gold ticket)
(no transfer)

Tier III: 2501-18,000 coins

1) Nest Dye – Radiance x40 (Low / Med / High) – 2501 coins (transfer)

2) Love Potion 100% – 4000 coins (no transfer)

3) Nest Dye + Sparkle! x40 – 8000 coins (transfer)

4) Gold Cargo Ticket – 10,000 coins (75% Chance 1 Tier II item / 25% 2 Random Tier III excluding ticket)
(no transfer)

5) Special Rare Bunny Nest Exclusive to Bunnybury! – 18,000 coins (no transfer)

The Bunnybury System works as follows (more detailed instructions later):

You deposit coins into your vault through the menu on your bunnies and nests.

The number of coins you have in your account determines the tier you can purchase from. You can only purchase once a week.

Each week you can make purchases from the appropriate tier based on your coin level when you first interact with the vendor. As you spend coins, you may drop into the lower tiers and you can buy from those tiers in the same session that week.

Straight from the Queen of Bunnies herself, Candy Cerveau dishes out some delicious treats!

Greetings Bunny Friends! Well, there are quite a few things to cover in this edition of Bunny Bytes, so let’s “hop” right in shall we?

First, I’d like to say thank you to all of the bunny owners who have exhibited great patience with us over the past month or so. We are very grateful for your support. For those who have been frustrated, we truly understand your position and we want to apologize. We understand that we borked it good. There’s no doubt that we have stumbled a bit, made some mistakes and frankly had a pretty spectacular episode of growing pains.

Malk and I have clearly seen that we need more quality people on board to help us keep Ozimals working as it should be and also to help develop some of the cool ideas we have planned for the bunnies plus other plans that have been stuck in development. There reaches a point where no matter how dedicated you are, one person (or two, or even three people) simply cannot do it all. We’ve taken the step toward hiring an expert in project management and quality control to help us restructure how we do things as a company. There are some big changes coming for Ozimals, changes that will benefit the people that matter the most to us – our customers.
At the Second Life Community Convention we made some great contacts that will really help us get to the next level in product stability and support. Our goal is to keep Ozimals at the quality level that you have come to expect from us. We will do our best to make that happen as quickly as possible!

On that note, Ozimals is hiring! We need people who are interested in being greeters in the store and also customer service representatives *especially* during the Euro time periods. We will be posting a link to a web application form early next week for interested residents to apply. If you love bunnies, have time to devote to a job in SL and think you would be well suited for a position with us, keep an eye out for that link and submit an application!

(Excerpt removed by Sookie Slafford in order to make it its own post due to importance)

The Bunnybury system is completed; all that is remaining is the testing of the vendors. The vendor system has been alpha tested and will be going into beta sometime next week. Once the vendors have been fully beta tested and any bugs found fixed, the program will launch. Our goal is the middle of next month at the latest, but preferably earlier.

The Food Reward Vendors are also completed and have been alpha tested. We are looking for people interested in beta testing these vendors now; please file a ticket using the “Beta Test Application” subject if you are interested in helping us test these. (Note: this is just testing the vendors themselves and they will be delivering empty prims, not actual food – sorry!)

Ozimals Orientation and Ozimals University (OzU) are complete and should have their grand opening the second week in September. We think this will go a long way towards helping new people – but bunny owners can also probably learn a thing or two from going as well You will get free gifts just for going through the Orientation and there will be diplomas from the University! If you are interested in being an Instructor for OzU, please file a ticket using the “OzU Instructor Application” subject and Flitter Moonwing will contact you with more information.

SocialBun is in the last phase of alpha testing and we will be setting up a web application form for beta testers. We will send a notice with the link to the form early next week along with the job application link.

Keep watching for a notice early next week for a Flickr contest organized by Flitter Moonwing and Elizabeth Tinsley with some really nifty prizes!

Much <3 from your Ozimals Team