As reported in a few places (but 3pointd is where I saw it) Sun is having a press conference in SL.
Its great to see some other major tech companies come into this space. We know there are a few of them out there in various shapes and sizes, its just we have been a bit more public as IBMers over the past year blogging and experimenting with what this all means. I thought we had done the first fortune 500 press conference, but I suppose we had a more direct one to one with each of the particpants over the 2 days, though the event we were showing was real SL interaction across the world.
This is a big area and there are a lot of avenues to pursue. The important point will be, as with the web, open standards.

Well after the hectic coast to coast US trip, and coming back to some amazing pieces of news that seem to indicate that a lot more people in a lot more places are even more serious than we could have hoped for about this whole Second Life/Metaverse explosion, I finally get to write a blog entry on it all.
Its taken 9 months (or 5+ years depending what yI start counting), and there is a way to go but it is certainly is exciting times for the entire industry.
In all of this rush of potential, having bought 2 islands, planning things, seeing events, touring the SL world and blogging about it I had lost somewhere to retreat too. My public first land was a bit too small, and I am letting some friends us it as a sandpit.
I now rent a small plot from Jessica Qin on Austin island.
Its good to be the customer.
I had put a rather bad treehouse up, but tonight I started on my “organic art” project.
I decided not to terraform at all, but use what I had on my plot. So here is the start.

Its a start, going for curves and twists in prims, a nice simple pod to sit in.
Just blending in and chilling.
Next week it all gets hectic again. Off to London continuing the flow of the meetings in the US with as many of the key agencies and people in this whole new business, then lots more meetings RL and SL, calls, and somewhere in all that we get to build on our newest island (once the Alliance Navy have finished their training mission, as I lent it to them as part thanks for attending our 3d Jam )
Hi to everyone I/we met on the US trip. In keeping with the rules of customer confidentiality and business meetings not being blog fodder, it was great to meet you all, and great to meet lots of likeminded talented people.

Over at Wonderland is a great write up of Philip Rosedale’s talk at Picnic 06 a cross media event. Of note are the statistics. These are constantly getting bigger when referring to Second Life.
In a meeting I had this week the statistic was quoted that the Second Life virtual turf is the size of Boston. In this regionally adjusted pitch its the size of Amsterdam 🙂
I particlarly like the quote “We hear a lot of anecdotes about people improving their real lives after having done it first in Second Life.” As someone whose entire job has changed to focus on this very real emerging technology and let me make a lot of new friends and contacts with some very inspirational people inside and outside of the company I work for, I would say i am one of those anecdotes!

Well my international jet setting has taken me form San Jose including popping down to Fishermans Wharf in San Fran, back over the US to Danbury for some great meetings with the IBM Innovate Quick team that Roo and I are part of now as Metaverse Evangelists.
We are off to Somers and Southbury as Roo has just arrived in the US too.
However, today being a Sunday, I took a GPS enabled trip to NY city in my hire car.
I have not been to New York before so I was not sure what to expect parking wise. The GPS did its thing, I aimed at the Empire State Building as I noticed there were a lot of parking garages around.
I passed a convention centre on the way to west 34st. Lo and behold there was “Wired Nextfest” on.
Well, much as I wanted to see the sights, events like this need to be visited. So I did.
It was relevant as well as Second Life appears in Wired in a massive spread this month, and I had been reading Wired at Washington where I was delyed for 5 hours on my way to NY.
Anyway, there were some really awesome things to see there. I dashed around but saw lots of amazing robots includingan Einstein one that walks very spookily and a very human animatronic. A door that opens to be the right size to fit the person going through, an art installation of 50+ nabztag rabbits sponsored by Atari. A VR ball like a giant hamster wheel for people to interact with a simulated world, the virgin space plane, robot football, loads of display that reacted to people in the space, brain ball in action (using brain waves to move a digital ball in a contest of wills), lots of bio solutions fuel, building light. Clever displays, interesting gestrure based military devices, scanning equipment, a bionic suit the works in fact.
I did go to Times Square and up the Rockafeller building so I did not just geek out.
There are some mini videos of things from my little pentax. Very rough and one is not rotated properly.
Anyway the next few days are full on metaverse days and nights including meeting up with some very cool SL people over in New York, more on that later.
It is odd that the all things metaverse help us to not travel, but somehow I am now in jet lag hell becuase of pushing these technolgies so much. Its odd how things work out!