I have to say, that I do like this advert/infomercial from our colleagues at IBMSocial media.
“Sir are you a frozen chicken?” brilliant 🙂
Author Archives: epredator
Eightbar, an emotional hello
We had a bit of a gathering today on my Hursley island in Second Life. Since mid 2006 I have been providing us as eightbar with a bit of a haven. A place for IBMers and now some exIBMers and guests to call home in the crazy world that is Second Life. As this has always been an unofficial space, just as this is an unofficial blog the island(s) have existed out of a need for community but not in anyway paid for by the community. I viewed it as a duty upon myself to grow the community and provide the islands. I thought we had reached a point where we no longer needed them, and that maybe it was time to free up the hundreds of pounds a month that had been such an important investment.
So, a core bunch gathered to hear me tell the story of Hursley, some of the oldest eightbars and some of the newest. I should not have been suprised, but I was moved, by the waves of support from the gathering and agreeing that we all still wanted this place of history and future to exist. It is something that any of the masses of eightbars woudl have been proud to have been at.
I am not sure we worked out exactly how to pay for this all, but we have so many people that its really a no brainer to cover the costs of 2 islands. There was certainly a willingness and some fabulous donations to get that going.
So why has Hursley and IQ remained so long as our personal island? Well because it was the right thing to do, and now by mass concensus and action, sharing the message with our fellow eightbars it still is the right thing.
Its not a server, its a place, and its our place. We started our tribe in that space and the tribe has even more heart than ever and is quite a force to be reckoned with.
Go eightbar and thank you all who atteneded, who wanted to attend and who will hear the message for the support! 🙂
Some more good news Forterra Olive and Lotus Sametime
I just saw (via an internal blog post props to Luis Benitez and also some other people mailing me) this press release from Forterra
It is the next stages of what many of you may have seen with the integration of some of the Lotus product set from IBM with Forterra
A shout out also has to go to the Ron and the guys are Ambient Performance who are the UK representatives for Foterra Olive.
You will see from the blog post statements like
“Forterra believes the fastest path for large-scale virtual world adoption within organizations is for 3D meetings to be an easy-to-use extension of the existing unified communications tools employees already use every day. Forterra’s integration of OLIVE with Lotus Sametime is the first robust offering in the market to pursue this strategy. When integrated to Lotus Sametime, immersive 3D environments built with OLIVE provide an interactive communications platform that is unsurpassed for collaboration, training, and knowledge management use cases.”
Also Chris states “Most enterprise-grade teleconferencing systems charge $0.10 to $0.25 per person per minute which can equate to thousands of dollars of expense per employee every year”. That is a direct cost to go with my much quoted 9.4 years a week we can waste waiting for telecons to start as we have no sense of presence, and in VW’s we seem to enagage in those seredipitous conversations because we can see people arrive.
Integration with regular business tools, and continued development of this sort is all good news.
It is good to see this as it helps remove some of the confusion/news that I have had to set straight here
iphone augmented reality
As augemented reality is another key strand, and a bit of a main subject for the week I was really pleased to see this video (props to Angrybeth for tweeting this)
With the “demise” of Artag due to a licensing problem there seemed to be little out there for people to experiment, in particular on handheld devices. The phone is a key platform to spread AR as much as it is for location based services.
TED talk with Philip Rosedale
The TED talks are a great series of talks and here we Have Philip Rosedale creator of Second Life talking. I suspect this will generate some interest as TED reaches places and provides credibility for a large number of subjects.
I like the reminder that visual memory is stronger than textual. One of the main elements that seem to catch people by suprise when I refer to “meetings” and people refering to “whex you were sat opposite in hursley house and you said….”. For the metarati this is less essential watching other than maybe for validation, however for those still wavering, who knows a TED talk may just swing it. So spread the word.
Props to Annieok for twittering it 🙂
Virtual Worlds and London 2012 Olympics
After all the intial work at Wimbledon on sports events in virtual worlds I was often asked about the London 2012 Olympics and what it migh mean for them. I wrote a document with some ideas, almost a little dated now but it was November 2006.
After a recent event explaining all things metaverse I was prompted by a note (thankyou J) asking about the implications and potential for 2012 to try and get some more traction on this.
There are lots of people in companies on loan to 2012, but there is also still a good few years to go development wise. So, to capture our thoughts as a community I just set up a PBWiki.
It is here https://virtualworldolympics2012.pbwiki.com/ as an extended open to anyone eightbar project. If you want to come and share some ideas about how we can get people to represent sports events in a richer way, and if it does not cuase you any commercial conflicts and you want to do the right thing, then please come and join in. We have 4 years 😉
So, virtual world, mirror world, augmented reality, gaming, social media, crowd content creation, 3d printing etc, all up for discussing. (yes this really should have been a superstruct type project, but lets try and grab some people into this who dont normally do social media too ;))
* also if I could figure out how the london 2012 website let me blend with it, trackback, or hook in anyway I would !
Irving and Obama – Fantastic Innovation News
Some fantastic news is zooming around the internet right now. A former IBM Vice President and now MIT visiting professor Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger is now on President Elect Obama’s Technology and Innovation Panel.
This is significant because Irving is a great visionary and for us here at eightbar has been a very key supporter from the very early days of virtual worlds. Sandy Kearney was working closely with Irving when we first met and serendipty kicked in.
Irving has been trying things out and blogging for many years too. So we can all rest assured that he “gets it”.
Quite a day given our CEO Sam Palmisano has joined in on an exciting discussion around social media inside IBM today.
(Thanks aneel for tweeting this news in the first place )
Little Big Planet is even more flexible than I thought
I realized stickers could be put on Sackboy, and that using the camera you could make sticker. Hence.
Here is a little epredator, also wearing an 8 for eightbar. That is just a bit of avatar customization but immensly powerful. I am sure we shall see some amazing decorated sackboys.
Little Big Planet on PS3 powered by the co developed IBM, Sony, Toshiba cell processor 🙂 with an injection of eightbar.
Global Entrepreneurship – The end of the beginning
Yesterday I “jetted” off to Manchester to speak at an event sponsored by the MIDAS group. I was up to speak about the future, about virtual worlds, about 3d printing. I also decided to make sure I adjusted a little to speak more about the power we all have as people. Inspired by hearing and being with lots of social entrepreneurs at chain reaction at the start of the week, and really feeling they were kindred spirits, it made sense to illustrate both eigthbars rise, the personal aspects of getting things done regardless of the obstacles and being proud of my community and how we have all come together at the right time both inside and outside IBM.
I know that many people sticking to the status quo, saying things should stay the way they are, saying that we are all idealists in the way we communicate and share to cause innovation to happen across the world will just think its more “kool aid”. Well it might be, however we might just be right.
The web seems to have been able to unleash and remove some of the fear people have had for getting things done. The web now really gives a place for a first step, sharing an idea with one other person, asking one person for help or their opinion. It is those first steps of gathering and affinity that are the most important to break the apathy. It does not matter if its hooking up over a game like WoW or even and shooter on Xbox Live, a chance meeting in Second Life, spotting a twitter on the same subject, a blog post comment or trackback or whatever there is to come next. People are really forming to get traction make connections and take action. For me this is the personal side of creating a smarter plannet, more devices, more connections but incorporating people in that.
After my pitch along those lines there was a barrage of excellant question there was another brillian pitch by Imran Hakim. He was famously backed on the BBC Dragons Den programme for his iTeddy idea by Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis.
Imran talked about how the idea even came about, his brother betting him it would never work. Imran is a real entrepreneur, iTeddy was not his first nor his last business. He spoke very personally about a restlessness, striving to make things happen, not just make money. Our stories were very much the same, one of battling and believing, of making the most of serendipity and contacts. He also shared some insights into just how long a Dragons Den pitch is, in his case 3 hours!
After both our pitches we were both swamped with brilliant conversations over lunch with everyone. I love to hear that people have felt moved, or enthused by what I have to say and that came across in all my conversations.
I also managed to have som time talking to Imran as the hall emptied, and it was a fascinating personal insight upclose with a very successful and connected business person with ideas and drive. Very inspiring I must say.
Thanks to all who attended and got something from this including my IBM colleagues.
Google Lively set to shut december 31st
It is official Google have decided to close Lively at the end of the year. This will no doubt create a great deal of discussion about the future of the virtual world industry, maybe give some nay sayers some ammunition to be negative.
I do feel somewhat sad for those people that were the allowed developers and beta testers who created content, who spent time and effort making things and creating. They now have to make do with video and photos of their work.
Google does of course still have the mirror world Google Earth, which as I have said before we looked at a good few years ago when sat in the Wimbledon bunker and said “wouldn’t it be great to put the tennis scores and rallies on that”. Earth of course also has user created content, the 3d warehouse. It does not have the presence of other people as such.
Lively had the presence of other people, used a plugin in the browser but stuck to the room approach and only let a select few develop on it. This isolationism certainly stopped me from “having a tinker building things”. Yet the more open worlds, ones with UGC, with the ability to see the potential by using the creation tools, they are the effective ones.
Not everyone needs to build, but they do feel they need to have some sort of creative control over the world around them, or potential too. Its an important point and one we proved to ourselves on the Torque metaverse.
Anyway, well done to the Google Lively team for having a go, what you, and we have all learned can make the other worlds better.