Category Archives: Events

Events.

Innovation Jam results

Posted on by

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?

Tired and croaky: busy day yesterday

Posted on by

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™‚

Bloc party

Posted on by

Last night I attended the GreaterIBM bloc party in Second Life that was mentioned a couple of days back. It was great fun – and testament to the hard work that the organisers put in to making it a success. Here are some pictures of what you may have missed.

The attendees begin to arrive at the SkyPOD.

arrival

Exploring.

exploring

The audience ready for the start of the formal presentations.

audience

epredator during his presentation.

epred

Chatting at a breakout session.

breakout

New Media Knowledge – “My So-called 2nd Life” conference

Posted on by

NMK are a UK based not-for-profit set up as an information hub around digital media and they run some lovely (and very affordable) events.

Darren pointed me at one recently, entitled My So-called 2nd Life. I was planning to attend, so I’m delighted to report that I was recently asked if I would speak at it. It’s in London, it’s not until the 24th October and it’s ridiculously good value, so I hope to see plenty of friendly faces there.

Hursleywood

Posted on by

It’s all getting a little Hollywood around here.

As Ian wrote, he appeared on The Register yesterday. On the same day, Andy Stanford-Clark (who is no stranger to the small screen) also made a full page spread in The Telegraph, talking about IBM’s Innovation Jam. I also happen to know there are more media apperances on the way for other Hursley people… Anyone know a good agent? πŸ™‚

Analyst Briefing

Posted on by

Having just got back from New York I came in to Hursley this morning wondering why everyone was looking a little smarter than usual. It turned out we were meant to wear “business casual” (whatever that may be) for an analyst briefing. Analyst briefing? Hmmm, that rings a bell…

Rod Smith did the keynote and then we were in groups of four to talk about customer projects. All of us in my group (Dave B, Graham B, Rob and myself) were suffering a little from jetlag so I hope we made sense. Still, it was good to see James there (I’m pretty sure visitors can get a guest ID for wireless in the house, so not sure why they didn’t sort one of those out for you, some live blogging would have been cool).

Sometimes with these things, I think it’d just be easier to talk about stuff we’re thinking about, rather than having a day long structure, but then maybe it’d be complete chaos. It’s also a shame Ian and Roo weren’t about to show some of the cool Second Life stuff they’ve done. Anyways, I think it was pretty useful for us to get some different perspectives on some of the projects we’re working on and hopefully the analysts got something out of it too.

The Darren and Roo Show: Gala Dinner

Posted on by

Last night was the Institute’s Gala Dinner, the bit where people dress up, there’s eating and even a little dancing. The meal was nice, Roo and I got to catch up with some people we knew from giving a previous Emerging Technology pitch. After the meal there was some live music by The Sun Band, who were pretty good. I liked their varied set list, a little bit of The Kinks, some Blondie, The Bangles and some Curtis Mayfield. Live music is always so much better than having a DJ.

sunband

Some of the entertainment was definitely provided by this IBMer who turned out to be a bit of a mover. I think he had a good 20 years on his partner. He started off fairly slowly, just like everyone dances, but suddenly he was spinning and throwing her all over the floor, it was actually fairly impressive. She could obviously dance too, but did looked exhausted afterwards. I’m not sure who either of them are, I’ll try find their names today.

dancing

It’s pretty cool to see people’s hidden talents coming to the fore and it seemed to get everyone else up on the dance floor, though some of us weren’t given much of a say in the matter! Anyways, it was fun, just need to prepare our presentation for today now.

The Darren and Roo show: Day 1

Posted on by

We’re still in Nottingham, enjoying the first full day of the IT Specialist Institute, 2006. Since we’re staying in the University halls, the rooms are not quite hotel-quality, but definitely not bad. Probably the worst bit (for a 6’4″ freak like me) is the small bed.

The breakfast was great though, as was the opening presentation from Sudhir Chardha, who presented on innovation and the GIO (Global Innovation Outlook). We are not giving our presentation until tomorrow afternoon (2 – 3pm if you’re attending the Institute and want to attend). Today we’ve been mainly hanging around underneath Darren’s very cool posters, chatting to people, demonstrating Second Life and talking about why Virtual Worlds are important.

Darren and his posters

There has been a fairly steady stream of conversations. We’ve also managed to add two more people to our (probably not very comprehensive) list of over 100 known IBM SL users who can access Ian’s island.

Darren and Roo on Tour

Posted on by

Roo and myself are currently in Nottingham demonstrating and presenting on Second Life for two days. It’s the IBM IT Specialist’s Institute, a yearly internal get together for people in the IT Specialist profession. Attending the institute is often used as a reward, but it’s mainly about increasing your social network and learning about other things that are happening in IBM. As well as the two days of presentations and demos there’s usually (I’m a bit of a veteran of these things) some entertainment, a nice meal and a few free drinks.

Roo and I were feeling a little peckish last night when we arrived and weren’t too confident in how filling the evening hog roast snack was going to be, so we headed off to the local town center to find some food. There wasn’t much open, it’s a student area and we’re well into Summer vacation now, but we did manage to find a Subway. So here’s Roo posing for our first Institute photo (I’m sure there’ll be more).

subway

Roo and Darren On Innovation

Posted on by

Yesterday, Roo and I went to New Place to talk to a group of IBMers about innovation. It was quite odd for us to be back at New Place, both of us had spent two days there in the olden days (1997 and 1998) for our IBM assessment center, to see if we were good enough to work here.

We found the easiest way to talk about innovation is just to give examples of how we work and projects that we’d worked on that we thought were cool. Picking User Generated Content as our theme we showed the trend going from user generated content to user generated applications (mashups) through to user generated universes (Second Life) and how projects we’ve worked on fitted in to these areas. We also talked about how we all have stuff that we’re interested in that we end up spending a lot of our personal time on and occasionally one of these ideas will take off and we can convert it into a proper funded IBM project. Also how we’re very much into trying things out and not worrying too much about if they’ll come off or not.

Of course, Roo’s Second Life demo stole the show. To people who haven’t seen it before, it’s something that always grabs their attention and Roo has become a real expert in explaining the idea and how it relates to IBM.