Our private island is a little less secret now

We have been putting on quite a show the last few days. We have been doing press, writer and analysts interviews on why we regard things like Second Life and general metaverse technology as so important.
To underline this importance we had Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger our vice president of technology strategy and innovation at IBM over here in UK from the US. He is a well known figure inside and outside of IBM becuase of his very open attitude to ideas and his smart way of understanding so many areas that IBM works in. He freely admitted that he was put on the track of considering anything related to games technology a few years ago by Hursley’s Chris Sharp.
We put on a show for everyone around having a truly global meeting in Second Life as a backdrop to all our conversations. We had people from India, UK, US, Canada and even Australia, so some people were well into timezone hell.
We illustrated in the actions of the group how we had all taken to the excellant multi gadget chairs by Timeless Prototype. As this lets us indicate we are indeed having a meeting despite the fact that you really dont need to sit down in a virtual world.
We also showed Hugo’s Amazon interface, and Yossarian’s translator.
To show how we energize brainstorms we used a favourite of Idz Ni’s (and now most of eightbar) of the Abramelin Wolfe canon that lets us fire ourselves about the island. This is the equivalent of taking a 3 min break for chocolate in RL.
We also showed onbaording new employees, and the real educational benefits of this environment.
Roo had to dash over to Zurich but popped in to say hi and take some photos.
Me, IWB, Idz Ni and Ada Alfa with a worldwide cast on the screen
Anyway, it was great for us to all talk and explain what we have all been up to to a new audience.
Irving also did some radio and tv interviews, with the tv interview having our backup machinima playing in the background.
All the various write ups and programmes will start to appear. I will post them here as we get told about them or bump into them.
The first one is here by Martin Banks on The Register
So now that is all done I can prep for my trip to Almaden in California next week. I should be there weds thru Friday, then Roo and I have meetings in New York the following week. I thought the metaverse meant less travel πŸ™‚
** Minor update to point to the new blog article on Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s site and trackback

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About epredator

Director of metaverse and emerging tech consultancy http://www.feedingedge.co.uk Former IBM Consulting IT Specialist with 18 years at the company Games player epredator xbox live tag. epredator potato in second life

19 thoughts on “Our private island is a little less secret now

  1. bad timing? the event was in the works for frigging months. f**k sake. seriously – why short change the analysts?

    [Minor edit by Roo. It’s a family show]

  2. I hated to do it, and it’s the first proper swear word we’ve had on Eightbar so I wasn’t sure what to do about it, but I’ve made a couple of minor substitutions to your last comment. Editing other people’s comments is a minefield, so I hope you understand. πŸ™‚

    I’m sorry that you’ve been made to feel annoyed by all of this James. From your comments here, and on your own blog, I can understand why, since some of what you expected to see just wasn’t on offer when you came. The fact that some of us were showing that exact stuff to some press on the same day probably didn’t help either. I can only apologise personally for not being more public about our plans in advance, and for not responding to your blog when it was obvious I was not going to be around for the event. That was thoughtless of me, since I know how excited you are by some of the work we do.

    I do hope we’ll continue to talk though.

  3. James, the work we have been doing in Second Life is now getting more support around the company. I am sure you understand that both the speed of change and the embryonic nature of this it may not have been put in official agendas.
    As we have said all along we are IBMers who happen to be writing about what we see as important at the moment.
    We are more than happy to discuss what we are doing and how this is evolving, but as Dr Wladawsky-Berger indicated in the interviews this is an experiment and we are discovering what we need to consider. We are a big company with a lot of things to talk about all in various stages of acceptance and maturity. It is both the benefit of blogging that we are able to talk about what we do, but also the curse as it at some point has a cross over with ‘offiical’ communications.

  4. Are you acting as eightbar “The postings on this site are our own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.” or are you acting as IBM? Seem like the lines have already been crossed.

  5. Hi ‘i luv blogs’. My honest answer would be neither. The people who contribute to Eightbar do not necessarily represent IBM, but we can’t really be said to represent (or act as) ‘Eightbar’ either, since Eightbar is a blog and not a corporation. We write as ourselves. We are individuals with our own interests, friendships and hobbies, who also happen to work at IBM.

    Sorry if we have sometimes slipped into using plural pronouns such as ‘we’ (see how easy it is? I did it right there). I personally find that quite hard to avoid when writing here, as a lot of us know each other and work together.

    There is bound to be some overlap with what I do personally and chose to write about here, and what IBM does as a company. This might appear to be confusing sometimes. Especially so when the two overlap and what I do and what IBM does just happens to be the same thing. The disclaimer does say “The postings … don’t necessarily represent IBM’s position’s, strategies or opinions”. I guess on a really good day, they might. Not really something to be relied on though. πŸ™‚

    I (and I hope, we) will always aim to write in the first person, as individuals.

    Does that help?

  6. We (as in a royal we) or I fully agree with Roo.
    Eightbar is merely a handle that we use, a nickname for the group of us and our blog and more recently our presence in Second Life.
    The interesting transition is that some of “us” now are full time on exploring the potential of metaverse technologies, and its not a secret so we can talk about it.

  7. Yes that our more public almaden island. We have that, we also have Hursley that is a more private sandbox, and a few others.
    We have a lot of people all loking at all sorts of things.
    Thanks for finding Almaden πŸ™‚

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