SHEPHERD -- Damek Tretiak, an SL resident who brought the slquery.com search engine to SL as a better way to do searches,  has upgraded his in-world kiosk to allow residents to browse for items on CafePress.com.

The kiosk, called the SLQ infoStation, is available for free at the Tretiak Media offices in Shepherd. Search results from the SLQ infoStation are displayed as text and thumbnail images, and don't require use of an external Web browser.   A rudimentary search is available through one of the infoStations located at the SLQ Headquarters.  

The anticipated go-live date for the infoStations is slated for the end of March.  

“We expect to open the search features to a much larger platform, which will include more visual clues regarding category and design choices as well as more defined search pattern,"  says Damek Tretiak, president of Tretiak Media, LLC.

This will also mark the beginning of Tretiak's "design your own t-shirt" feature, which will let  users create a shirt inside SL, then order it in RL. "The idea was to wear your shirt in SL and in RL. We thought this would be a fun way to show off CafePress as well as the extensibility of Second Life and our own SLQ Network.”

Tretiak says CafePress will  allow groups to brand their own infoStations and market their own CafePress shops in SL.  This will allow business to promote their products in RL and in SL.  This feature will begin rollout in June in limited release.

“We'll roll this out in a phased deployment strategy so we can keep the functionality as tight as possible and get some good feedback in the meantime," Tretiak said. "We'd like to follow a fairly rigid quality control process when dealing with any e-commerce related features."

CafePress is known for promotional gear such as T-Shirts, tote bags, magnets, and buttons in addition to a growing publishing business.