Author Archives: Roo

IBM Virtual Worlds event in London and SL

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As Andy pointed out, some of us spent much of today in both London and Second Life hosting a Virtual Worlds event for European press, which included a rather exciting global ThinkTank session.

ThinkTank#1

We tried to make the day as interactive as possible, and after introductions and a real life discussion in the morning we spent a chunk of the afternoon immersed together in Second Life. It was a good opportunity to run a ThinkTank, in which we invited a wide array of bloggers and thinkers (including Ren Reynolds, Jerry Paffendorf, Adam Pasick and many more) to discuss Virtual Worlds, open standards, and the 3D Internet. Not everyone could make it of course (sadly some suffered from some recent issues with SL) but I think we ended up with 33 attendees altogether, covering a wide array of subjects. I’ve uploaded put the transcripts of the two discussion groups, both Ian’s group and my own.

I am already looking forward to running another one of these before too long. Thanks to everyone who battled with troubled teleportation to make today happen.

In other, but related, news: IBM.com carries a big flashy link to a big flashy piece on Game Tomorrow, starring Jai from the GameTomorrow blog (who, I see, even has his own MySpace page). Pretty timely stuff.

Innovation Jam results

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This years Innovation Jam was the third of IBMs jams. It was mainly web based, with over 150,000 people (IBMers as well as their families, business partners, universities, clients, …) apparently generating over 46,000 ideas.

Of course, as you’d expect, some of the fun happend inside Second Life too. This was a joint effort between IBM’s Virtual Universe Community and the NMC, with the Alliance Navy providing security and joining in the discussion too.

All the ideas generated went into a multi stage selection process, in which they were filtered and refined down, with $100 million in funding to make the top 10 ideas happen.

As was already reported by Reuters (as well as Business Week and, well, pretty much everywhere) this week…

Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Palmisano (right, with his Second Life avatar) is set to visit Second Life on Tuesday, Nov. 14 following a “town hall” meeting with some 7,000 employees in China

The 14th is finally upon us so I thought you’d be interested to hear what happened.

The event itself was a ‘townhall’ IBM meeting, held in an IBM location in China, in front of more than 6,000 employees. Sam Palmisano presented in person, but when he started talking about Virtual Worlds and the 3D Internet, he first handed over to Irving (who recently blogged about signing up to Second Life) whose avatar was surrounded by a decent sized bunch of IBMers from across the world.

Later, Sam’s avatar (samatar?) entered as well, and, nimbly assisted by our own Rob Smart, delivered his message both to the IBM China employees gathered there in person as well as those of us in the Second Life portion of the event. Rob was also joined in Beijing by Holly Stewart and Ian Smith, whose tireless work recently resulted in their being invited to attend (read: be camerapersons and generally make it all work) in person. Huge respect to John Tolva for his tireless efforts in making this event happen too. John has written an excellent post on his blog about the logistical challenges of pulling something like this off.

I didn’t get any great screenshots of the Sam avatar (I hope to add some more later), but here’s a quick grab of Sam and Irving presenting together.

So what are the ‘winning’ Innovation Jam ideas Sam announced? They are…

  • Smart Healthcare Payment Systems
  • Simplified Business Engines
  • Real-time Translation Services
  • Intelligent Utility Networks
  • 3D Internet (building a seamless, standards-based 3D Internet)
  • “Digital Me” (personal content service)
  • Branchless Banking for the Masses
  • Integrated Mass Transit Information System
  • Electronic Health Record System
  • “Big Green” Innovations (new business unit)

You can read the list in full, complete with an explanation of each one, in a recent IBM press release.

As with so much of the recent Virtual Worlds related work, this was a lot of fun to be part of. It doesn’t look like much, but it is a bit of a milestone, and will no doubt increase the internal interest in Virtual Worlds still further.

Because of the timezone, the US employees attending virtually were up late (1:30 AM EST) and those of us in the UK were up early (6:30 AM GMT). While the rent-a-crowd were excitedly waiting in Second Life we were listening in to the event over a phone call and getting gossip from those embedded locally over IM. The atmosphere was tense, but also slightly hysterical due to the late night/early morning/what on earth are we doing nature of the event. Total madness of course, but what else would make us all want to get up at crazy times and dress up in suits?

Matt Biddulph’s virtual 3D printer

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Matt Biddulph, the brains behind the Second Life Flickr screen and the Last.fm BBC Radio 6 hack (which I mentioned here on Eightbar a while ago), has come up with something even cooler. By way of introduction he points out that…

Many people find the creation of 3D models in SL to be rather tricky. This is because there’s no built-in way to import polygon data as a mesh of 3D coordinates from an external modelling tool. Imagine if there was a factory object that could read a list of coordinates and spit out the results straight into the world, like a virtual 3D printer.

First of all, I love the virtual 3D printer analogy. What Matt seems to propose is automatic creation of primitive objects, such as those used in POV-Ray or Second Life, from arbitrary 3D data. Doing this efficiently is pretty much the unsolved problem in this space at the moment, as nicely summarised by Troy McLuhan in a comment on a 3pointD post earlier this year.

This is something the Prim.Blender project can’t do, requiring you to build with SL-aware prims within Blender instead. My SketchUp hack gets very slightly closer, but in a very crude and limited way (so crude and limited it is still not publicly available, despite having been Slashdotted).

It looks like Matt already has something working. I can’t wait to learn more about this.

Hugo’s Life2Life project in the press

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Hugo Dalgleish and Tabatha Hegel, whose Life2Life Amazon web services project has been covered more than once on Eightbar as well as on the Amazon Web Services Blog, achieved yet more more fame yesterday by appearing in Information Week.

Congratulations to Hugo and Tabatha on this writuep. The article is great. Not only does it cover their project, it touches on Second Life and S3 and also contains a rather interesting quote from Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist (and friend of Eightbar) Jeff Barr.

eHampshire 2006

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I was keynote speaker for the eHampshire 2006 conference at the Guildhall in Winchester today.

Other speakers and panelists included

  • David Lennan (Chief Executive of Work Wise),
  • Peter Knowles (BT’s teleworking Director),
  • Peter Thomson (Director of the Future Work Forum at Henley Management College),
  • John Rees-Evans (Head of Economic Development at Hampshire County Council),
  • Tony Corbin, (MATISSE Project Manager),
  • Patricia Vaz (South East Regional Director, BT),
  • Prof. Glenn Lyons (University of the West of England)
    and more.

My talk was on (guess what?) Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds. I hope I managed to evangelise more than I confused and frightened. πŸ™‚

Some highlights…

  • My ‘Metaverse Evangelist’ title seemed to catch everyone’s attention, and nearly every speaker made a reference to it. I think everyone wants to be an evangelist.
  • It was great to meet Peter Thomson. (My favourite quote from him, which will keep me going through any hard times to come, was “evangelists need faith”.) His very interactive presentation highlighted that the conference delegates thought one of the biggest challenges facing managers regarding home-working is trusting their employees. He also pondered why managers seek to monitor and control employees rather than motivate them to want to be at work.
  • All delegates were given a USB memory stick to take the presentations home with them. It’s just as well it’s a 256MB one, as my image-heavy presentation weighs in at 17MB these days.
  • Peter Knowles from BT said explained why teleworking has such a dramatic effect on absenteeism and sick days “I will hide behind voicemail, working on my email, being 70% productive until I’m better again”. I must confess to doing the same sometimes too, though I have misgivings about the sanity of doing it.
  • Jim Tuckwell, Silver Surfer of the year, was there and thanked me afterwards for the presentation. We chatted about Wikipedia. I want to be the silver surfer of the year when I’m 77.

Interesting facts…

  • 95% of Hampshire’s businesses employ less than 5 people.
  • 70% of businesses in Hamphire use the internet, while only 30% use it to sell.
  • eHampshire’s Hotspots Hampshire initiative aims for everyone in Hampshire to be no further away than ten minutes from a wireless access point. Given that I am currently without wireless at home, I am very much in favour of this sort of project.
  • Patricia Vaz from BT pointed out that a desk costs £10,000 (or £15,000 in London) and BT saves £6,500 for each home worker.

I met a lot of intereting people and heard a lot of interesting things, so all in all I had a great day.

More press for IBM in virtual worlds

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Thanks to both Andy and Kelly for pointing out the piece in the BBC Technology section today.

Since being grossly mislabelled as a chemist last year, I’ve been looking forward to seeing my photo on the BBC website again and a screenshot of my avatar is close enough.

Both the BBC piece and the story from Reuters’ embedded journalist were outcomes of the busy day I had last week.

After Ian made it to El Reg and Rob was in Wired, the press escalation continues. I’m betting Ian makes the first TV appearance though.

Television comes to Second Life

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Both the Electric Sheep Company and Rivers Run Red have made interesting noises about TV in Second Life recently.

The Sheep have an interesting project at the moment called Destroy Television (more details on 3pointD). I managed to get my moment of fame by making a banner and hanging around in front of the cameraperson for a while. That’s me in the Flickr stream…

It's me!

There are limited details so far about Rivers Run Red’s project, so I’m looking forward to hearing more about it.

Tired and croaky: busy day yesterday

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I’m tired and slightly croaky after a long day yesterday. As Andy already pointed out, much of it centered around NMK’s My So Called 2nd Life conference at 01Zero-One, right in the middle of Soho.

Once it got underway, the speakers were:

  • MMOs: where are they now, and where are they heading? – Michael Smith
    Michael (the CEO of Mind Candy, the makers of Perplexcity) spoke on MMOs (including Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, Second Life, Virtual Laguna Beach, etc. He also talked about ARGs (Alternate Reality Games)  and tangible stuff. Afterwards, we chatted about the growing phenomena of tangible web things. If Perplexcity is a tangible virtual world it’s interesting to see Moo‘s Flickr cards (I see they’re doing Skype cards now too!), The Friday Project which brings websites to print, Fabjectory‘s 3d-printed avatars as a growing trend.

  • Collaborative and innovative working inside virtual worlds – Andrew ‘Roo’ Reynolds
    That would be me then. I explained the impact virtual worlds such a Second Life are having on business and how some companies are already using them to work collaboratively on a global scale. My (by now fairly well-practiced) talk on what virtual worlds are and why IBM cares was just as informal and conversational as ever. I pretty much managed to forget that there was a gaggle of press in the room (Reuters, BBC, New Scientist, …). Hence, Adam from Reuters got some pretty choice quotes which sounded (at least to me on the first reading) frighteningly casual. πŸ™‚
  • The artistic, creative & entertainment opportunities inside MMORPGs – Esther MacCallum-Stewart
    An academic (but interesting) overview of MMORPGs. She pronounces MMORPG “more-peg”, which is a new one on me. I’d like to see a copy of Esther’s slides, as there was some really good theory about what makes MMOs work.
  • E-learning business opportunities inside virtual worlds – Gauti Sigthorsson
    Gauti, while enjoying Second Life, does not think it can be used for e-learning. Apparently it’s too hard and the barrier to entry is too high (“it’s a gated community due to its resource intensive nature and the skillset required”). He has a point with this stuff, and it was an interesting counterpoint to the more gung-ho speakers (e.g. almost all of the rest of us).
  • Business opportunities inside Second Life for creative industries – Justin Bovington
    Justin (Rivers Run Red) shared some of the history of business and marketing in Second Life, along with some of his interesting projects. Vodafone, Penguin books, Duran Duran, BBC, Adidas, Reebok, … quite a list. Justin said two of the major milestones of Second Life have been the BBC event (“the Woodstock of Second Life”) and the Reuters office. Both of these events have been responsible for driving up the population of Second Life very quickly.

There was then a Q&A panel session, in which we were joined by Jim Purbrick (Babbage Linden; the only full-time Linden employee in the UK). As you can imagine, Jim got a lot of questions. πŸ™‚ He said some very encouraging things about Open Source, and opening up the client (and eventually the server). Adam’s Reuters piece covered this pretty well too.

I met a lot of interesting people, got to know some people a bit better. Thanks to NMK for inviting me; I really enjoyed myself. Today I am croaky and barely have any voice left. Probably a good thing so I can shut up for a while and catch up on what I was missing having been off the net for a day. πŸ™‚

Reuters brings news from inside Second Life

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As of today, ‘Adam Reuters’ (Adam Pasick) is Reuters embedded journalist in Second Life. Keeping regular office hours at the virtual Reuters building, Adam is their virtual bureau chief.

Reuters’ island, created by The Electric Sheep Company, is impressively realistic. Having been heavily influenced by their real-life presence in Times Square (NYC) and Canary Wharf (London), it’s great fun to spot the details from their real-world locations. There’s a news HUD (Heads Up Display)to take away too, which is really worth a play.

More coverage at 3pointD and secondlife.reuters.com.

IBM Virtual Block Party

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Thanks to Peter Finn for pointing out this recent press release about the Greater IBM block party – an alumni event running tomorrow.

On Thursday, October 12, 2006, IBM is holding a first-of-its-kind Alumni block party in the virtual world of Second Life … The virtual block party is part of a larger IBM program called the Greater IBM, designed to maintain connections with IBM’s network of alumni around the world.

…

Hundreds of IBMers — across its services, global business consulting and IBM research labs — have been working together in Second Life for more than a year. Their focus is on applying synthetic world and game-like universe techniques to real business and social applications.

Exciting stuff. Keep an eye on the Greater IBM blog for more details too.