Finally the word is out: this May we’ll be holding the next vBusiness Expo! For those of you unfamiliar, this is an enterprise-focused learning conference held online in virtual 3D spaces.
The first one was in Second Life, the second in Forterra’s OLIVE. We’ll be making more announcements over the coming days, including exact dates (roughly it is the first 2wks in May) and a call for event partners. As usual you can expect some surprises too!
Now, normally this would be the part where one would put out a “call for papers”, but that’s not what we want at all. We’re more interested in hearing from people who can tell us about their experiences.
Does this sound like you?
Have you used virtual worlds to solve a real business problem?
Do you work directly for the organization involved?
Can explain how you did it in just 12mins?
We want to hear from people working in enterprise, education, learning, meetings and events and simulations.
Submit Your Proposal in One Easy Step
Email nick@cleverzebra.com with the title or subject of your talk. That’s it, we’ll work out the details from there.
This was the week of non-news news. There were more stories about nothing of significance than I have ever seen. I’ve done my best not to post any of them. I may have failed here and there. Apologies.
Oh, and for those of you who had been celebrating it on Saturday, I hope you had a happy Pi Day!
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:
Worlds.com CEO: We’re ‘Absolutely’ Going To Sue Second Life And World Of Warcraft
Yes, Worlds.com is actually filing lawsuits over ownership of the concept of virtual worlds. No, Worlds.com is not making any friends anywhere on planet Earth. Yes, there are more opinions about this whole thing than you can shake a stick at… no point in augmenting the pile with mine.
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.
Training and Education
Second Life a tool for teaching in 3-D
University of Western Ontario does some Psych classes in SL. Nice overview at Canada.com, but I’m mostly linking it for the picture of these photogenic fellas. Smile!
Webcam Brings 3-D to Topps Sports Cards
Ok, that’s a pretty cool gimmick. I might even buy some baseball cards this year. Haven’t done that since I was a kid!
Gaming
SOE Introducing LiveGamer RMT Service To Vanguard
So basically, you can now buy yourself the super-powerful character and equipment you always wanted with a little USD. Anybody have word on community backlash here?
No, There Were No “Terrorists”
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) drops the whole notion of terrorists in virtual spaces. See the official report (PDF). I remember being completely baffled by all of these people warning of terrorists in virtual spaces back when it was in vogue to scream “everybody panic”! Glad its over.
I recently caught this bit of brilliance from presentation expert Olivia Mitchell. In her post How to Present While People are Twittering she did a fantastic job hitting the main reasons an audience talking amongst itself can be an amazing thing:
Benefits of the back channel to the audience
It helps audience members focus
The audience gets more content
Audience members can get questions answered on the fly
The audience can participate
The audience can innovate
You don’t have to be physically present to participate
You can connect with people
You can do something else
What about the speaker?
The typing means you’re provoking interest
Your colleagues can answer questions for you
You’ll get immediate feedback
They won’t fall asleep
See the full blog post for details, as well as a follow-up including feedback from the comments. She also expands into some great ideas on how to manage the backchat – manage it or it will manage you!
How this fits in with Clever Zebra‘s virtual events is pretty obvious. Every event we’ve ever run has had backchat built right in: the speaker in the virtual world uses the voice channel, and the audience uses the built-in local text chat from the same environment. We’ve even experimented with fielding questions from the audience this way, although on that end we find people tend to want a private aside with the moderator instead of asking publicly.
Your best bet: build backchat into your event strategy. Don’t let a tool this powerful go to waste!
Grace McDunnough blogged today about Sirikata, an BSD licensed open source platform for virtual worlds aiming to come out in Alpha in the next few months. This is a project from Stanford University, and if you’re a developer you can already download the code.
Take a look at the teaser video. It looks pretty good! (Videos scale to full-screen quite gracefully.)
The plan is to not only to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, but they’re also doing the smart thing and creating fully featured sample implementations.
Techie Only Section
In this video Daniel Horn and Ewen Cheslack-Postava gives a high level overview over the Sirikata system architecture. Recorded at Stanford University January 29th 2009.
As part of our preparations for the next vBusiness Expo I’ve been spending a little time tying up loose ends from the last one we held in OLIVE during the summer of ’08. As I went through old screenshots I saw the crowds of people, panels, presenters, etc.
It was these three images, however, that stood out from the rest:
This was taken on the second day just after a session. A few of us ended up gathered at the bottom of a staircase and had one of the best conversations about the future applications of virtual spaces I’ve ever been a part of.
My avatar is the one without a nametag, but it sure is nice that OLIVE allows us to use our real names. Thanks to R Davies, Eilif Trondsen, Michael Cohen, Dan Gillette, Anders Gronstedt, Stephen Wright, and Steve Mahaley for a mind-expanding time that day.
Here’s another impromptu meet after a session. Robert Gehorsam, President of Forterra Systems, is out in the lobby here fielding a number of questions about where the company is going and what OLIVE is capable of doing.
I was actually running an errand at the end of the day when I happened to run into this fellow here on the stairs. As it turned out he had really needed to get in touch with us all day but just didn’t quite have the opportunity, so he flagged me down as I passed and we caught up.
Our guests want two things from our expos:
Learn something useful.
Network with like-minded businesspeople.
The presentations speak for themselves: high on case studies and how-tos, low on opinions and advertorials. The pictures above, however, really answer the need for business networking. Without even really building “discussion areas”, these side conversations and connections were being made throughout the entire expo.
