Before the Wimbledon frantic time hits I thought it worth mentioning a conference comin up just after Wimbledon finishes. I will be on a panel at the applying virtual worlds and MMO’s conference, talking about interoperability, service orientated architecture(SOA) approaches and where I think things are going in general. The more full invite from Martine Parry is below. Hopefully see some of you there.

Apply Virtual Worlds & MMOs is a 1-day conference within the Visual Web Convention, discussing and debating the future for the visual web and virtual worlds – across platforms, functionality, content and business model. The leading MMO games developers together with leading developers in the virtual world space come together to identify the future opportunities and direction resulting in MMO and virtual world convergence over the next 6-12 months.

Conference speakers at the coal-face and architects of the new Web platform and tools – affecting the way consumers, developers and organisations play and do business – include:

· Bruce Joy – CEO of virtual worlds platform developer VastPark
· Thomas Bidaux – Development VP virtual world games developer Avaloop
· David Solari – VP Online games publisher Codemasters
· Thor Gunnarsson – VP CCP Games (Eve Online)
· Bernard Horan – Senior Engineer Sun Microsystems (the Wonderland platform)
· Rob Davis – CEO Solaris Media a leading developer of casual virtual world games for broadcasters (e.g. UKTV, BBC)
· Justin Bovington – CEO Rivers Run Red a leading in-world brands and media communications agency
· Ian Hughes – Metaverse Evangelist IBM

More at www.viswebconvention.com/pages/schedule.htm
10% discount to all who book online before end of this week. Unlock code is TEN

I have to admit to be rather excited about what we just discovered about the web page on a prim elements in Second Life now. For some reason I had assumed that the new drop downs on land management that let you replace a texture with a web page (as opposed to a video or jpg image from a URL) were simply going to render a flat image of a page. This is the pattern that had been used by third parties and also by some of out internal work in the early days of SL.
I had experimented a little with the new drop down when it went live some time ago, but today I happened to hit a page (in this case our French Open site whilst investigating some Wimbledon options.
The page rendered very well, lots of detail, readable etc, but I then noticed that the clock was flashing on the page. It was changing in real time.
Apologies to all the people who have been working on this, probably blogging to, but I had made an incorrect assumption. The web page is being rendered by the client and on top of that, whilst it cant run flash, it can cope with html and javascript based changes. For those of us on corporate networks it can also render things inside our firewalls as its client side once the URL is set by the land parcel.
Interaction is still a problem of course, but we have ways around that. The ability to get to web information in a shared fashion always seemed to be a killer app. There is so much content out there and people don’t always want to rebuild everything. So in the hunt for interoperability at the data level we also now have some tools to hand in Second Life for interoperability on glass.
To highlight the dynamic nature of this here is a video of twittervision doing its thing in SL.

Vollee is now live in beta and allows you to access Second Life on a 3g or Wireless mobile. I managed to check this out on the train coming back from London. Though it was much easier at home as the London Southampton train has some of the worst phone coverage you can possibly imagine.
It did however work at Basingstoke. I twittered about how rock and roll this was.
The way Vollee appears to work is to be rendering things elsewhere for you and streaming video. Whilst laggy it is amazing to be able to do this and direct your avatar around the place. We have had things like this working on Activeworlds and did a very homebrew version last year at Wimbledon.
This service though, is that, a service. So it will no doubt get a lot of testing from the metarati in the next few weeks.
I cut a short video of Hursley and IQ islands with the Wimbledon build from last year ( something we are looking to update over the next 2 weeks) and then flying over to Andy’s SL rendition of his house that also appears on twitter now.

Anyway I can atleast navigate and see what is going on over 3g or wireless. I have not tried a chat, it will be a bit cumbersome. Of course the people that see me online may not know I am on a mobile. That may be a thing to work on next, a “I am in on a restricted client” message.
Still maybe at wimbledon this year I can work from the roof garden on 3g (the wireless is not great up there)