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The Archives
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12.20.09Is Forterra Headed for Acquisition? Layoffs ReportedHot of the Twitter stream this morning, Erica Driver of ThinkBalm reports that Forterra has laid off 60% of its workforce and plans to sell off its remaining assets. Rumors of trouble at Forterra have been making the rounds for months now, and I first heard of this at the Engage Expo in San Jose. But they were just that: rumors, and today's tweets don't seem to be matched by a substantial news source. although Erica herself is about as good a source as they come. One apparent Forterra employee (or satirist maybe) tweeted the following: "To Forterra's detractors, Merry Christmas. ...
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10.30.09Living in Nebraska: Virtual World SmackdownLinden Lab will launch its 'stand-alone solution for enterprise' next week in San Francisco and we'll get all the details about how companies and schools and secret government agencies can run their own little mini-grids behind firewalls and wear suits and ties or naval uniforms while reviewing PowerPoint presentations. The folks over at 3DTLC cornered Amanda Linden on her recent Second Life blog post about work avatars, which I think was meant to leverage the Gartner data and say something along the lines of "hey, other people are taking avatars seriously for work, isn't that great?" but became a community pile-on ...
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09.30.09The Power of -In: Second Life’s Dynamic Web InterfaceWhen it comes to whether business will adopt Second Life instead of, say, Protosphere or Forterra's OLIVE, we can talk feature sets and look at nice shiny corporate builds all day, but as I proposed yesterday, the advantage that Linden Lab has over all of the competition isn't what THEY can do, but rather what content creators can accomplish. The challenge, I proposed, is whether the Lab can engage, support and build an ecosystem of developers who collectively will be able to build a marketplace of ideas, applications, content, and services. Whether the Lab can pull this off is partly ...
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09.29.09Virtual Worlds for Enterprise: Feature Wars in Forterra, Protosphere and NebraskaRoughly in conjunction with the recent Engage Expo, Forterra and Proton Media announced new platform features that will be compelling to enterprise (businesses and other institutions) who are interested in virtual worlds for meeting, training and collaboration. I was particularly in love with what Proton Media did with Sharepoint integration: aside from the fact that any kind of integration with enterprise systems is a good thing because it demonstrates that virtual worlds can be part of a broader information architecture, the way they handled in-world documents was appealing. With the launch of 'Nebraska' by Linden Lab a month away, the feature ...
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02.02.09Change Comes to Washington, and I’m a Week Late: Virtual Worlds inside the BeltwaySomehow Washington and innovation seem like strange bed fellows to me, but there I was last week talking about mirror worlds at a conference hosted by In-Q-Tel for a mix of civil servants and spies or whatever, and found that they asked the kinds of questions that I've been asking and never quite answering: stuff like "what will it take to make the metaverse ubiquitous" or "what does it all mean to human identity". And what felt even stranger to me was that inside the Beltway they actually seemed to "get" virtual worlds, or this little self-selected crew did, and there ...
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01.14.09Virtual Worlds: White Paper Measures the BenefitsA white paper released by Forterra summarizes the experiences of Accenture and ACS Learning Services using their "3D Sandbox" virtual world training tool. The sandbox was created by The Masie Center and Forterra Systems. This white paper starts with a useful summary of the corporate advantages of virtual collaborative environments, the major five being: - Practicing until perfect - The integration of gaming situations - The blending of learning with social contexts - The preponderance of fun - The fact that Millennials - the future corporate workforce - want to use the technology. The paper then presents a cost analysis, and shows that virtual world ...
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