January 11th, 2010 by Caleb Booker
In creating and running a wide variety of online events over the last few years, one thing has remained consistent: people undervalue information directly in proportion to how convenient it is to acquire.
Ask yourself: if the meeting is easier to attend, was the meeting just as worthwhile? More? Less?
Oddly enough, since most of us instinctively equate sacrifice with worth, many feel that spending four figures on a flight and blowing a few days of work off to attend a meeting will be more beneficial than saving ourselves the time and money and absorbing the same content in our office. This despite all survey and testing evidence that says online meetings are just as beneficial and enjoyable. Still, can you blame people for “going with their gut”?
This is why I think NMC is making the right move with their SL Pro! conference, to be held in Second Life February 23-25. They’re going ahead and charging $99 in real-world dollars to attend virtually. By charging a real-dollar amount to attend they’re creating a perception of value in the content.
I wouldn’t be surprised if paid attendance online events started to become a lot more common in 2010.
January 6th, 2010 by Caleb Booker
We had two big setbacks in the virtual worlds industry these past few months.
Metaplace closed its doors due to some low numbers. Personally, I think this was a case of having built for tinkerers first, rather than creating a bunch of games and then saying: “You can also tinker!” The gratification was seriously delayed. They’ve gone into hibernation in order to create “something great”, which was their approximate tagline the last time they tried to hype their brand before launch.
Forterra Systems is also in trouble. They laid off half of their staff, and are saying things like: “We haven’t decided anything. It might be acquisition, further partnerships, further investment from investors, or organic growth over time…” which is possibly the scariest language a corporate leader could ever use. Again, my two cents here: they were narrowly focused on military and emergency response training, and had killer AI. Then, over the last year, they started announcing compatibility with SCORM and a bunch of other standards only corporate trainers care about. This moved them from their core competency, simulation, into competing directly with training companies. Bye bye niche market…
Meanwhile, to the shock of the entire world, Second Life lives! I’m about as “platform agnostic” as a person can get but I have to admit that Second Life got my recommendation as the platform of choice many times this past year for two very simple reasons:
- Its cheap to build in.
- It can basically be forced into whatever shape you need.
That’s it. I mean, it’s horrible in many ways that other platforms are fantastic, but the bottom line is the bottom line.
We’ve had our illusions properly shattered. Geniuses can fail, hacked-together products with bad customer service can win, and the “economic downturn” didn’t destroy the planet.
Now what?
Well, now we have a bunch of recently laid-off technologists wandering around in a slowly recovering economy trying to figure out what their next move is. The two companies I mentioned set loose a small hoard of brilliant people in a world where developing costs are at an all-time low, there are more niche markets than you can shake a stick at, and the world is just begging for a truly unique idea.
Here is my one and only prediction for the new year: 2010 will be the year of the entrepreneur.
Does that sound like you? If so, drop me a line. I’d like to hear about it.