When Kyle Polulak was in high school, the Canadian created a company for a project in a business course he was taking. The company, Crystal Studio, began in 1994 and its mission now is to converge virtual experience with real world economics. It is listed on secondlife.com under "developers" as one of the companies capable of providing "start-to-finish management of complex or large-scale projects."
"I've always wanted to push the boundaries of the technology world," Polulak (aka Fox Diller) says.
Recommended by a friend who told him SL might be a game he would enjoy, Polulak joined in 2005, realizing at once the word "game" didn't quite fit.
"For myself, I could see vast regions where micro-communities would participate in large scale communication on a variety of mediums," he says.
CS has also done work in Active Worlds, IMVU and There.com, but nowadays Polulak focuses on SL. "I find those markets not to be as diverse as in Second Life," he says of the other virtual worlds. "Besides I've actually grown a kind of fondness for Second Life and we've decided to focus all of our efforts to pushing its boundaries."
CS, which designed the auction board and scripting for the Big Brother contest in SL, offers a wide range of services with content creation being one of them. However, Polulak says his company doesn't focus on competing with other content creators. Rather, it's more a matter of finding other companies willing to push the limits of SL together with CS. He plans to demo an experiment which cross connects the video game Half Life 2 engine in SL.

CS has been experimenting with real ATM machines in SL. "We're experimenting with a real world tie-in to the Linden economy," Polulak says, "Everyone promises that the Second Life economy allows growth, and I agree, but I find that a very large interconnect would fuel more interesting and prospective projects appearing inside Second Life."

Still in alpha testing, the ATM-project means that real life bank customers/SL-residents, from inside SL, will be able to do standard banking processes, buy or deposit L$ straight into their real bank account and the balance will reflect the transaction automatically.
Polulak says cooperation already exists between CS and at least two international banks, one of them based in Canada. "And we are in communication with a few other banks as well," he adds.
Polulak says the service will be available to residents outside of Canada and the United States. "Second Life is as diverse as the world itself, so we always try to achieve full coverage of our service," he says.
Eventual tax issues will be handled by CS's Chief Financial Officer, Michael Ryan. "He's an internal tax expert and has worked for the Canadian Government as a tax agent," Polulak says, "I hired him to follow all tax rules inside Canada for our own corporate plane, and his expertise comes in with international tax laws issues."

What about anonymity in connection with the money transactions? Will residents' names show up on their bank statement as the account holder the money was transferred from? It seems so, but Polulak assures that CS has a very strict privacy code, and is developing technologies to store private data that could be compromised.