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Category
Business in Virtual Worlds
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09.07.08Virtual Goods Worthless? Now wait a minute…Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, a contributor to the Industry Standard, writes a pretty spot-on refutation of her colleague Jordan Golson's claim that the volume of virtual goods sold on Facebook and its ilk will not be a serious contender to advertising revenue. Aleo-Carreira cites the example of Electronic Arts, who gave up the battle against the pirating of its FIFA soccer game in South Korea and chose to give it away online for free. Rather than making EA's bottom line suffer, this hurt the pirateers tenfold, and the company started to sell online customizations like outfits and enhancements starting at $1.60 a ...
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09.06.08IBM and Business Collaboration in Virtual WorldsIBM presented a demo at the VW08 conference of integration between Sametime Instant Messaging, user authentication, and virtual meeting spaces. The following video shows it in action, and it's a very compelling demo of how virtual worlds and collaborative applications like LotusNotes will integrate. Virtual worlds not as destinations for collaborations, but as mini applications built within collaboration processes. Brilliant work.
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09.06.08Communications Expert Vouches for 3D WebShel Holtz, who has been in corporate communications for 30 years, recently wrote a post expressing enthusiasm for the coming 3D Web. Holtz recognized the marketing failures in Second Life from the past few years, but rather than dwell on the negative, he writes about the many organizations and individuals that continue to use Second Life for innovative means: a toy designer, an architecture team, a video display company, and a people mover company. He also cites a Business Week article that outlines various startups and entrepreneurs in SL. Holtz then concludes with some sage advice for companies: Don’t ignore virtual worlds; ...
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09.06.08Even in VWs, Teens can get credit cardsExperian, one of the world's leading providers of financial service and assistance, has teamed up with the 3D-game application developer Caspian Learning to create Creditability in Britain. This serious game for teens takes aim at educating them on, hmmm, racking up debt I guess. Creditability walks teenagers through the various stages of financial management. Using a virtual environment, kids can learn about money, borrowing, and spending. The advantage of the virtual environment is that the students walk through four different environments: university, a shopping area, TV studios and a village. Challenges are presented in each area which teach the value of ...
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09.06.08Recruiters peg Second LifeAccenture, one of the world's largest recruitment agencies, has opened up a careers island in Second Life, according to ThinkBalm's Erica Driver. Again, this use of Second Life is about streamlining cost and setting up as many in-world recruitment meetings as possible (Accenture is in 49 countries). The advantage is that more people can meet with recruiters online, and the company has simplified the process within SL to make it much easier for internal recruiters to use. The Accenture island looks pretty much like a traditional office, which means it is using SL as a brand extender. And Accenture, by ...
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09.04.08Metaplace and Second Life Head-to-Head: The Future of Virtual WorldsAt a panel on the future at the Virtual Worlds conference in Los Angeles, Raph Koster joined Ginsu Yoon, VP of Business Affairs at Linden Lab. Oh, and Corey Briges of Multiverse who spoke that venture capital "spaces" talk that seems to go on and on without a real point other than to get another product plug in, and Michael Wilson of Makena Technologies who made the compelling point that virtual world companies should stop reinventing the wheel and look to the wider Web for solutions to things like social networking and security and stuff. But the perspectives of Raph and ...
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09.03.08Online Games (Should) Feed into Corporate SoftwareRecently, a kid in North Carolina named Blake Peebles dropped out of high school to become a professional Guitar Hero player. Sound short-sighted? Well, if you ask a few corporate consultants, it might not be such a bad move if Mr. Peebles is looking for a future at IBM. Well, perhaps Guitar Hero is a stretch: but there is a growing chorus of consultants and corporate employees out there who are touting the collaborative innovation of MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft as a massive suggestion box for big business collaboration, according to the MHT Journal. David Laux, a global executive at ...
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08.30.08Virtual Worlds Riding a New WaveSocial Technologies has launched a magazine-style overview of virtual worlds which, confusingly, they call "World O" and offer their own set of predictions and possible paths to a ubiquitous metaverse, cautioning that the hype of yesterday will be followed by more grounded initiatives tomorrow: "As was the case with e-commerce in the 1990s, the initial popularity and hype surrounding World 0 led many companies to rush into virtual worlds without first creating solid business plans. As companies learn from their mistakes and gear up for the second round of innovation and application, it is likely that investment flows into World 0 ...
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08.29.08Metaplace and Second Life: Platforms, Community and Getting it RightSecond Life and Metaplace ran on parallel paths this week, each of them promising enhancements to the community communication tools - just wait for it, they say, all will be good. I hadn't paid attention to Metaplace in a while - the promise of an April Beta was pushed back as they readied the platform, tested, improved, built out the back-end and moved offices. I hadn't paid much attention to the Lab either, their silence had that sort of strange, possibly intended effect of making me not care so much - silence could be good, silence could be comforting, and since ...
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08.26.08A Mesh of Chips: Rendering Virtual Worlds and Saying Goodbye to the Second Life Prim?I've been gorging on chips lately, and it feels like the time I went to the UK and discovered that the 'crisp' can be a meal - where I'm from you have sour cream and onion and BBQ and a few others, but over in England they pack a feast into your typical bag of crisps - think roasted chicken flavour, think beef with horseradish, or for all I know think curried goat with a side of rice and peas. So when I got a taste of AMD's new Radeon card, it was like getting a taste of a bigger buffet ...
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