Second Life's genius cuddles up with music giant

Cory Ondrejka, co-founder of the virtual world of Second Life and ex-CTO of Linden Lab has switched roles. No, it's not actually another virtual world, but we're mentioning it anyway, because we know you all love Ondrejka, or love to hate him. Either way.

Ondrejka's moving in with EMI (one of the 'big four' record companies) as their senior vice-president of Digital Strategy. 'It's time to take everything I learned about innovation, community, intangible items, markets, economics, and technology building Second Life and apply it to a much larger arena,' said Ondrejka today, 'There are a million and one difficult problems to solve, but I'm absolutely thrilled about my new role.'

Blame Douglas Merrill, Google's former CIO, whom Ondrejka met at a conference in Singapore.

Ondrejka expects to be bouncing between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London, but is looking to put together a technology team in San Francisco, a super-powered team of people into social, Web, streaming media and mobile development.

While it might surprise some to see Ondrejka not rejoining the virtual worlds industry at this time, he's always loved a challenge, and EMI's digital strategy certainly promises to provide just that.