Here are a few tremors from this week’s roundup from the virtual frontier:
BusinessWeek – “Moving beyond Second Life marketing, many companies are infiltrating virtual worlds for employee meetings, mixers, and recruiting.” http://businessweek.com/technology/content/may2008/tc2008052_842516.htm
“To save money in these tough times, universities, conference planners and global firms have started holding gatherings for far-flung employees and students in the online world known as Second Life” http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-secondlife10-2008may10,0,2472150.story
“…all those who dismissed Second Life out of hand on the basis of those earlier reports slowly realize their rationale has eroded out from under them.” http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/05/backlash-revers.html
“Today I set a new virtual work record, spending six hours straight in Second Life doing what could be described as work.” http://peterquirk.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/an-experience-of-working-in-second-life/
The employee-centered virtual workplace: “I have started to imagine a workspace where I position near me the offices or desks of people I interact with (or would like to interact with) most frequently.” http://peterquirk.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/the-employee-centered-virtual-workplace/
National Center for Telecommunications Technologies has recently purchased a Second Life Island and are in the process of partitioning and building out… “We believe virtual world use will continue to grow – especially as the price of fuel continues to rise and travel costs grow.” http://ictcenter.blogspot.com/2008/05/virtual-worlds-in-workplace.html
Other good reading I have yet to link (via NWN): Forbes article “How to Spark Remote Learning” and “Virtual Innovation“
In a post on Cisco’s blog this week, Dannette Veale comments on the BusinessWeek article by pointing out that, “Cisco Sales Associate Program (CSAP) at Cisco is using Second Life as a meeting place for their globally dispersed team. The CSAP folks get together in this virtual environment regularly to ensure synergy with their program and to talk about the latest in technology such as WAAS and virtualization. The team is also leveraging the virtual environment for team building activities like global team photo days. This leads to a sense of belonging to something greater than ones self, to a sense of being part of something.” http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds/2008/05/working_virtually.html
Yet, with all of this excitement and positive energy building, I was alarmed and a bit saddened by Christian Renaud’s well-reasoned prediction that Second Life will fade into the sunset in the next 24-36 months. Read more here: http://www.christianrenaud.com/weblog/2008/05/the-future-will.html
We’ll see about that.
