“Hugo Dalgleish” a fellow eightbar member in SL pinged to to say I should come and see his Amazon interface in Second Life. Spookily there were also some posts on New World Notes, and on the Amazon Web services blog about similar ideas.
we could be on the edge of a very exciting development.
Updated: with this bigger article on Hugo and his SL partners work at
Category Archives: Hursley
Second Life Relay for Life Charity walk
I came back from holiday in France the other day so had missed some of the initial coverage of this build such as over at 3dpoint.com. It did not take me long to hit Second Life and see how things were progressing. Hursley Island has grown, lots of builds and lots of people. I did, as per usual though, start to explore the wider world though.
The most impressive, awe inspiring and also touching, is the very large build by many of Second Life’s leading lights for the American cancer society Second Life relay for Life 2006.
I did the entire walk, though only once so far. I bumped into many of the famous Second Lifers, Spin Martin whom I always bump into!, Cubey Terra and Timeless Prototype to name but a few.
Timeless had an excellant build for the UK/London, having been on the real London eye a few weeks ago this made it even more personal for me. Personal experience being the cornerstone of social computing.
Cubey Terra was helping people base jump from the eiffel tower
The whole build has lots of interesting architectural points, experiences and generally has a more Epcot than Epcot feel to it.
My photo blog for the walk can be found here with the slurls to the individual element, but get a pedometer and talk the walk, donate as you see fit.
UPDATE : As Eric Rice has reported the relay raised $31,520.76 USD
We Love Computers Too
It’s a funny time in Hursley at the moment. With lots of people being away on holiday it feels a little empty. That’s not to say it’s been very quiet. The last two weeks have been work experience time in the local area, so there’s been a lot of school age people on site. Being such a big site, Hursley can cater for a lot of of work exp students and it’s a pretty cool place to come and spend a week or two. As you can see from the High Performance Computing office (Emerging Tech’s neighbours), they’ve been making their mark.
It’s also about this time that people on our regular student schemes start to arrive. We have IBM Futures students (aka PUEs), who are taking a year out of education, normally between college and university. There’s also ITs (Industrial Trainees), who are on the industrial placement year of a sandwich degree. Finally, there’s Extreme Blue students who work on a specific project for 12 weeks during the Summer.
These schemes are important to IBM as it’s a good way to get some of the best people in. A lot of people who start on IBM’s student schemes end up coming back as graduates. Roo, Ian and myself all started in IBM as students (though this was a long time ago). It’s also good experience for the students as they work on real projects right from the start and help keep us (slightly) older people on our toes. There’s normally a pretty active student community, Winchester and Southampton’s nightlife does very well out of IBM students. It’s a great way to spend a year.
Hursley’s Melting
Over Christmas we were having lots of debate about the temperature and lack of a cold snap, in the Hursley area. To be a little more scientific about it I climbed out a stairwell window, braved the thorny raspberry bushes and attached a thermometer to to my old office window (now belongs to Roo and Rob). Anyway, it’s been in the shade all afternoon and its still showing a rather pleasant 32 degrees.
Emerging Tech T-Shirts
As well as producing software products, IBM Software Group has a high output of T-Shirts. If you work in Hursley as part of the Java, MQ, CICS, WebSphere or Lotus development teams, the chances are you have one/several/a shop of team T-Shirts. Now, computer geeks like T-Shirts and not being part of an IBM brand, us people in Emerging Technology were lacking in any group merchandise. So, a couple of hours in Flash and a few experiments with Cafepress later and we have T-Shirts.
Check out the full range of Emerging Tech fashions here. Coming Soon… EightBar products!
Hursley Bloggers Meetup
We had a bit of a Hursley bloggers meetup today. There’s now quite a few UK based IBMers blogging inside and outside the firewall. We’re lucky to have a good internal blogging setup and most of the people who now write publicly got to grips with the whole idea in the relative safe waters of the IBM intranet. One of the things we’ve all found from writing internally is that we’ve made a lot of new contacts that we wouldn’t otherwise have made. Apart from that, we talked about Singapore (which I think I should get Hannah to write about here), Blogher, Brian’s growing team and the excessive noise made by the Hursley Cha Bar drink making machines.
More reaction to the baseball in secondlife from Cnet
Cnet has a post saying that MLB.com were suprised at the extent of the positive reaction they got to the homerun derby in Second Life.
I did get taking to someone from MLB.com at the home run derby event in the foyer. The reason was simply we had the same game surname. Potato being one of the less common Second Life choices.
This is another example of a strange trigger for interaction. So we have choice of surname ‘cousins’ we obviously have a whole set of mandelbrots in eightbar, location of virtual land next to other influential land being more important than a catchy URL, newbie greeting and helping because other people helped me when I arrived and being at the same ‘webpage’/3d build at the same time, to simply liking someones work enough to tell them. All very intersting extra things that drive interaction in the metaverse.
Anyway hi to Justin Potato from Epredator Potato.
Baby Linden Second Life in Second Life
After a late night at the SL baseball last night, I had to excuse myself early from the event. I announced to all in earshot that I had to be awake for my RL Wife’s scan on our new baby. This scan is the 13 weeks one. I also mentioned, as people do, that we have a nickname for the baby. Last time it was Herbert/Herbertina. This time I have started calling the baby Linden.
My Regina Spektor cd had arrived that morning too so things were all getting very circular.
I could not resist putting little Linden into Second Life, the baby being our second.
Now this is getting confusing!
I dont think this causes the same problems as Scoble letting his son use second life
Live at MLB second life game
I am currently having a late night session sitting here in a baseball stadium with quite a crowd. There are all sort here Lindens (including Phillip). Cory Edo and Satchmo Prototype and the rest of the Electric Sheep Company. The ubiquitous Spin Martin is in the same section as I am. FlipperPa Peregrine, who happened to be around in London during Wimbledon. Busy at work on the Second Life Community Convention
A few people from mlb.com, including a virtual cousin in Justin Potato (Me being epredator potato) are also present.
Algernon Spackler even managed to get in late.
We all gathered in the shop at the start, looking at the great merchandise. Getting our free foam hands to wave.
So far my L$1000 is well spent. As with all these events its the crowd that make it. Avatar wise we were all fairly well sorted. I dropped my usual predator look to help with any lag.
I am not sure I managed to follow the event, thats just a cultural thing.
They had cute little big headed representation of the players, a live updating scoreboard, three screen to watch the live stream and a well crafted live event. It was low lag, all very entertaining, good conversation, a sense of spirit. Everything a live event should be. As lindens improve the platform you can see how the events will easily get more and more crowded.
Trademarks, and presence in the metaverse
Over at Terranova there is a good article on trademarks in a virtual world. This is something that I have a keen interest in. in particular given the work we have been looking at for Wimbledon. Doing a proof of concept, but as an individual who hapens to work at IBM, partnering with the AELTC at Wimbledon, I was very aware of the risks to the brand values of including trademarks and player likenesses in a Second Life Demo.
Equally in a metaverse environment such as second life, it is not just the fact the logo placement is there, its the fact other people can see you interact with that placement through your avatar. People can sit on things, dance on things etc.
Trademarks guardians therefore have much more to worry about than just ‘being’, they have to worry about people ‘doing’ things with them.