The rednosin twitter account made me aware of the excellent addition to the comic relief donation options. That of buying a digital rednose picture. Whilst many of us can bolt a red nose onto a picture that is not the point. The ability donate and join in with the excellent charity that is Comic relief is something we should all do. We use avatar pictures all over the place and you will see twitter full of them next few days. Check out Rednosin Chinposin so see more
So what are you waiting for! It works for Graham Norton :0)
Blue Fusion at Hursley, 2009
One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).
This year was no exception. This is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I choose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).
So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.
I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and remove foreign objects.
There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.
Once again, I thought this was a great event – just amazing creativity on show from the folks at Hursley in coming up with such engaging exercises. I hope the students had as much fun as I did!
Eightbar featuring on Metanomics
I thought that those of you who read this blog might be interested to know I am appearing live on the Metanomics show this coming monday. Whilst I am appearing in my role as Director of Feeding Edge Ltd the conversation will be about how I see the industry going from IBM’s and corporate enterprise perspectives, how eightbar has been something that many of us have a deep affinity for, some talk of 3d printing and maybe a few surprises.
There are plenty of ways to attend, and full transcripts and videos afterwards.
I was at rehearsals for it yesterday and the operation itself is certainly leading the way on Second Life shows.
See you monday.
Virtual worlds and enterprise case study
Dave Kamalsky of Linden Lab (formerly of IBM Almaden) pinged me to point out that they now have a new blog called Working Inworld. Now, I wouldn’t usually repost this kind of thing, but one particular post that caught my eye was the joint IBM / Linden Lab case study on the IBM Academy of Technology events that were held in Second Life. It’s a very nice paper, worth taking a look at for some of the figures and business aspects around how best to make use of these kinds of spaces.
Oh, and there’s an interesting concluding comment:
After holding the Virtual World Conference and the Annual General Meeting in Second Life, the AoT agrees that virtual worlds will have a big impact on business, on IBM, and IBM’s clients. And, the best way to learn about virtual worlds is to use them – which IBM is now committed to doing.
This made me smile… no kidding… some of us have been around in this space for quite a few years now… in fact, I was reminiscing about my avatar’s brief TV appearance in an in-world business meeting 2 years ago, only the other day 🙂
Sametime 3D unifies IM and virtual worlds
In the “nothing new to eightbar readers” column – we’ve talked about this before and it was showed at Lotusphere 2009 – it looks like the Sametime 3D platform is now available for test by selected IBM clients.
We don’t usually “do” press releases on eightbar, but this one is particularly interesting as it develops from trends we’ve talked about here for a long time, and has potential connections to both Second Life and OpenSim. More integration of the 3D Internet / virtual worlds into the enterprise.
Update – here’s some more from Slideshare:
A new era begins
Today is a day of mixed emotions. Today I resigned from IBM having been there for 18 years, 19 if you count my year out from university.
In all that time I have worked with some great people, and felt a tremendous sense of belonging.
Its been quite a journey, both in technical education and in personal growth. It is the extent of that growth and the speed that has not always been kept up to pace with by the system that I worked within.
I started back on green screens in 1990, very quickly moved to the PC’s and client server applications that followed shortly. Over the years the groups I worked with morphed from back office systems to customer facing ones, but in 1997 I made a break from what was traditional IT development. I threw myself into the web and the fantastic Interactive Media Centre. That itself morphed into the centre for e-business innovation but the group of people were known as Blueroom. An ecletic mix of can do people, graphic designers, producers and techies all bundled into one. That taught me that diversity of skills, coming up with ideas on the spot and good old fashioned teamwork for a common cause were what I thrived in.
For me that was the start of who I have become, the birth of epredator if you like.
When I decided that we should look in to the metaverse with Second Life back in 2006 I knew the industry was going to be big, but I was not expecting the evolutionary changes to happen to me. Getting this going turned me into a intrapreneur. The speed with which my fellow eightbars rallied and the spirit of innovation, just getting things done was simply amazing. It is something we should all be immensely proud of.
In leaving IBM I am not leaving eightbar, it is not something that can never really be left. The focus may change but I think we have made a decent enough mark in the history of virtual worlds.
Of course the question is what next? I left in order to be able to carry on and push this industry further. So in a few weeks you will see the birth of my own company, and I will seek to work and advise, speak and write just as I have done up to now. There are some significant projects that I already need to give some attention too.
There is, as I have told a few people, quite a story to tell on all this. The personal ups and and downs, the formation of our tribe and I suspect I will have to write that book after all. It will probably be called “Who says Elephants can’t Rez” or something similar.
So a huge thankyou and goodbye to all my friends, and thankyou for the support on twitter and see you all on Linkedin
I will also post this on http://www.epredator.com
See you all out there very soon.
***Update Feeding Edge is now live here, my new home
Lecturing MBA’s at Babson in Second Life
Last night I was invited to speak to a very diverse class of MBA students and entrepreneurs at Babson as a guest (Thankyou Linda for the invite). The conversation of course happened in Second Life, and also happened to be around midnight my time. That in itself is almost routine now, though for a change I was using voice and watching for text questions. However what was great was that the subject was not the metaverse itself, though I did throw in some futures like 3d printing and augmented reality. No the subject was the story of eightbar, the steps to get to the point we are at, how despite various things stacked against many of us we just carried on and did the right thing.
***UPDATE @abelniak who was at the meeting twittered that he had this post on his perspective as an member of the class. Once again the power of social media and willingness to share and build is in action.
Also some honest statements about the risk of being a pioneer, and the fear that self organized group can generate in traditional control structures.
I really enjoyed talking to the group, and there were some great questions from some clever minds.
We discussed leadership in particular, and what differs or is the same in virtual worlds. My general answer is a good leader will adapt, those true leaders already in traditional places of power have the emotional skills to lead and inspire anywhere. However the new connected world and removal of local as barrier unleashes the abilities in anyone who wants to lead.
Anyway, a huge thanks to everyone who came along, thankyou for listening, and following up. It became clear to me there is a huge value in sharing this story now, its constantly evolving for me, epredator, eightbar, metaverses, IBM. At any point in time it has things to learn from and things to share.
A teaser trailer – SHASPA
This trailer has just hit youtube. I am sure more will become clear as this project moves on, for now just enjoy.
Mad scientists?
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Just an average day in the Hursley tea bar!
Martin Dix from CurrentCost visited to deliver a bunch of meters for people who had attended Home Camp 08. Whilst he was with us, Andy Stanford-Clark hooked up a (battery-powered) meter to one of his mousetraps to show how it is possible to detect traps going off using the meter – this is the same technique he uses in his automated home system. He also showed the same message arriving in his MQTT broker on his Ubuntu laptop. The table was soon awash with gadgets, wires and tools. I brought along a camera or two, Dale brought along some questions about the software internals of the new devices, and a great time was had by a bunch of geeks over tea…
No mice were harmed during this meetup, but a few wooden coffee stirrers were put through their paces in some vicious mousetraps.
Using ARGs to spread good deeds in reality
A long long time ago… well OK a couple of years ago… a few of us from the eightbar crowd / tribe / collective / [insert group adjective of your choice here] were quite into Perplex City, an Alternate Reality Game from Mind Candy where you had to solve puzzles on game cards related to a parallel world. At the time I was particularly fascinated by the intersection of gaming, virtual and real worlds, and physical / tangible objects and the web.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and heard about a new ARG – in this case they brand themselves a Social Reality Game – called Akoha. It is also card-based, and has a technology / web tie-in.
Akoha is the world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Missions might include giving someone your favorite book, inviting a friend for drinks, or buying a friend some chocolate.
The idea here is that players will perform good deeds or “missions” on the cards in the real world, and then pass the cards on to others who can then join the game by entering the card code on the website. It’s a fascinating idea. There’s a social network element. There’s a physical element (the cards, and the personal / direct social interaction). There’s an online element. Plus, the whole idea is around improving the way we all interact with each other and our environment (I’m thinking Smarter Planet).
I love the idea and I’m definitely going to be following Akoha’s development. It’s in closed beta at the moment but anyone can join by getting some cards… I wonder how widespread it is beyond the US at the moment.