Massive amounts of news for Training, Education and Events this week, and very little elsewhere with a few notable exceptions. By an interesting coincidence this weekend was the “Virtual Worlds – Best Practices in Education” conference, which people are really enjoying.
Important links:
Archive page of past weeks of Business in Virtual Worlds News
Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, my blip channel, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:
Just a side-note here about the vBusiness Expo: I had been hoping to make a major announcement this week, but we decided to change a few things around and we’re not quite ready yet. Ultimately this will all make the expo more accessible and easier to attend, but at the moment you’ll have to wait. Sorry!
Want to Hold a Virtual Event of Your Own?
Clever Zebra offers event support and white-label services for anyone interested in a branded gathering in a virtual space. Everything from venue setup and hosting to VIP orientation to speaker coordination.
Fundraising Conference Takes on a ‘Second Life’
Grizzard Communications Group holds a session in Second Life that gets transmitted to the real-world event Winning Strategies in Challenging Times.
MBA Students Learn Power Systems in Second Life
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Iowa State University, and Wright State University collaborate to expose business managers and executives to Power Systems.
Panopticon
I just had to link them for this quote: “The essential irony of virtual worlds is that populations seeking to build new lives away from the public eye are moving into an environment that is subject to constant surveillance.”
Gaikai Bringing 3D MMOs To The Browser
The concept: all of the software runs on someone else’s computer, the video is streamed to your desktop, and your keystrokes are captured and sent back as if you’re on the other machine itself. I’d love to see how much something like that costs, let alone how they manage latency!
Avatar Reality Releases SDK For Blue Mars
Ah here we are, actual developments from Blue Mars! We’ve been hearing rumors about this world for awhile that made it sound like something between Entropia and SL, but there hasn’t been anything anyone can actually do with it until now. See the articles for the fancy features that lie in wait inside the SDK.
Today I was doing a little work around Zebra HQ in preparation for the vBusiness Expo, and I came across an interesting problem.
Take a look at this picture. There’s me standing next to a tree.
Oh, but wait… that tree isn’t even on the ground!
As it turns out many of the trees around the island have been like this for months and I didn’t realize it until I took a little stroll through them. For the first time ever I can see the need for stereoscopic glasses for home use, because had this been in real life I’d have been able to tell right away that the tree was floating…
well… except in real life trees don’t float…
you know what I’m going to just go ahead and hit “Publish” on this thing without thinking too hard about what I’ve just said. What the heck. Here I go.
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.
So, let me tell you about one of the coolest nerds ever:
Grace Murray Hopper
Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and by 1941 she was an associate professor. A few years later she joined the Navy and went to work figuring out how to shave a few nanoseconds off of projectile trajectory calculations, which eventually lead her to working on cutting-edge research on the Computation Project at Harvard University. She was an early programmer of the Mark I (only partially pictured below) and wrote some good white papers… but for my money the coolest stuff was yet to come.
In 1949 she got to work on UNIVAC! For those of you unaware, UNIVAC was the world’s first commercially available computer. Not only did Hopper help in the general development of the machine, but she wrote its very first compiler. Before Hopper, the UNIVAC had to be programmed in machine code! God, I’m just geeking out all over the place here… let me catch my breath…
a model of UNIVAC I
Now sure, that’s enough for any self-respecting level 60 Nerd to accomplish, but that wasn’t the end. She kept developing compilers, really pushing for this idea that programs should be written in something that looked a little closer to English than machine. Eventually the CODASYL committee took her latest work, the FLOW-MATIC compiler, and expanded it to invent COBOL. “Who cares about COBOL,” you ask? Here, lemme Wikipedia it for ya:
In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world’s business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually.
So no Hopper, no COBOL. Wow.
Now for something Wikipedia doesn’t mention: she found the first computer bug. Well, she coined the term. Reading between the lines I get the feeling they used to just assume it was bugs getting stuck in the relays, until one day she found a moth smashed in there. She taped it in her notebook with the comment: “The first actual case of a bug being found.”
Was that all? No, but if I told you the rest I’d have to kill you. Or rather… I actually don’t know much about the rest. She kept being pulled out of retirement by the military over and over for projects there aren’t many public details on, progressing up the ranks to Rear Admiral. She died while she was working as a consultant for DEC in 1992 at the age of 85.
What a lifetime of achievement. She was there at the birth of it all. Hell, she helped in the delivery.
Two big changes this week: I tweaked the title a bit (“roundup” was extraneous), and I’ll be starting the “Question of the Week” just for some fun interactivity where you can leave your answer in the comments.
Question of the Week:
How close are we to virtual worlds being as accepted as the web?
(Answer in the comments!)
Important links:
Archive page of past weeks of Business in Virtual Worlds News
Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, my blip channel, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:
vBusiness Expo: Call for Case Studies!
This has already experienced great response, but there’s always room for more. If you can speak to a case study or “how-to”, check this out!
Business meetings: a lesson for teachers?
The latest from SLENZ covering the IBM Case Study, the Trade Promotion Management Associates meeting and some risk analysis.
Want to Hold a Virtual Event of Your Own?
Clever Zebra offers event support and white-label services for anyone interested in a branded gathering in a virtual space. Everything from venue setup and hosting to VIP orientation to speaker coordination.
Whitehall defends ‘fantasy world’
“The (UK) government has hit back at claims it is wasting taxpayers’ money on a virtual reality website.” As it turns out they’re quibbling over £12,000 a year. Oh brother!
“It is not Webkinz. It is not Neopets. It is not a virtual world,” said Chief Executive Jeremy Lewis. “It really takes the most unique and compelling elements of all of those.”
Paradigm shift. Taking it to the next level. Outside the box while redefining the box. Win-win situation. Synergy. Pushing the envelope. At the end of the day, it is what it is. Games just got interesting. Ok I’ll stop now.
Linden Labs Thinks It’s The Sex That’s Keeping Businesses Out Of Second Life
Well we saw this coming. As soon as Linden Lab tried regulating sex, someone was going to make an ass of themselves with another “Second Life sucks cuz I don’t know anything about what’s going on there.” Hey Carlo, here’s a helpful tip: it’s “Linden Lab”, not “Linden Labs”. Newbs newbs newbs…
Burning Life 08 Redux
Burning Man in real-life is the ultimate sociological oddity. Burning Life no less so. Kudos to Dizzy Banjo for the nice work on the machinima:
Did I miss an important story? Got feedback? Leave a comment below, or email me at info [at] calebbooker.com
I’m trying to think back to where I first heard of Twitter. Drawing a blank. Can you remember?
This set me on a mission to find my earliest tweets and see if maybe I had mentioned it. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the very first one, almost two years old:
Funkifying the universe.
10:24 PM Jun 13th, 2007 from web
Yes. Of course I was. *Ahem*
Shortly after that I tweeted: “Blogging on Metaversed.com/onder/blog about how stupid Twitter is,” but of course, like I said, that was almost two years ago. It’s still there, and so am I.
Of course, around the same time I was writing articles about how Second Life was doomed too. (It’s also still around, in case you were wondering.) This is part of the reason I stopped blogging professionally, leaving the hype machine and opting instead to actually do something out there through Clever Zebra.
It’s incredible to see how things have changed in that time. Now, I’m not going to go on about how fast it’s all grown since its birth as a side project in March 2006. Here’s the founder to tell you about that if you’re interested:
What’s fascinating to me, though, is the evolution of the professional community surrounding these technologies. Everywhere you look the discussion has become “how do we use this”, rather than “this is stupid, this won’t work”. While there are still bloggers and journalists out there who continue to play “build them up and knock them down,” the long view is becoming the prevailing one.
We remember what happened with Google, YouTube, and even those weird nerds-only things called “websites”. It didn’t really matter how people felt about them, only whether or not there were enough people using them to make it worthwhile. Let the press say what it wanted. The question was, and has always been: is there a large enough user base to make it worth paying attention to?
So that’s industry stuff…
On a personal level though, I’ve been in nostalgia heaven. An old tweet led me to an entry I’d totally forgotten about entitled “Don’t Drink and Blog” with this little gem:
don’t make Dan Hunter tired or you’re banned. I’m pretty sure they’ve already banned turkey and warm milk. You could be next.
Wow, I haven’t even thought about those guys in ages! I was a lot more… ah… “feisty” back then apparently, randomly tweeting bits of fury and joy as they occurred to me without worrying too much about whether or not anyone understood what I was talking about.
By August of 2007, however, things started to come together. I started to really apply Twitter as a tool, with links to articles, comments about events, and things like this little gem:
From the geek meet: “Wild sex orgies in 140 characters or less?”
Liveblogging! Little did I know at the time that this was to become one of Twitter’s most important uses.
Now, you’d think I’d have become a big Twitter guru or something but that just didn’t happen. By the time August of 2008 rolled around all I was using Twitter for was to post the “Song of the Day”. You see, I was still foolish enough to actually worry about what people said. At the time, they said: “Oh Twitter, it’s just a fad.”
Something in August of 2008 must have really hit me about how wrong that was, though, because that was the month I began to really leverage it properly. I also decided that month to be a lot more careful about separating hype from news, and began the Business in Virtual Worlds News Roundup.
I’m at 1,682 updates now which, honestly, is a horrible under-usage for such a long period of time. Twitter plays a role in my daily life not just to update others but to keep an eye on the general trends of the day. In a sense, it’s as critical as my news reader.
Year 3 of my Twitter usage will be far more studied, to be certain! I’ve been pouring through research papers on Twitter, watching what the pros do, and experimenting on my own. I wonder what I’ll say about it in August 2010?
