New category
From The New York Times: Cisco’s idea of a “‘collaboration tool’ for business people’ is a Cisco-produced tablet that runs WebEx. “This is a mobile video device for corporate users”. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/cisco-finds-its-tablet/
Interesting, or historical footnote?
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Under a banner that says “make a difference in the world”, there’s a wonderful piece at active rain about using collaborative virtual worlds for Web 3.0 activity in the real estate industry.
I think we made a difference.
We’ve discussed here how collaborative virtual worlds and other technology can be used to facilitate better business meetings while reducing business travel. (See here and its links.) What about when the Continue reading
Our David Smith has long had a vivid vision of ubiquitous computing that has complemented that of author Vernor Vinge. Here’s another step towards making that real.
Almost two years ago, I claimed that virtual worlds could help the physical environment, and it seems that there are now some measurable effects (if arguable as to how to attribute the causes).
Since then, techies of various stripes have been clamoring for technology innovation to also save the economy and the lack of world peace. Now it’s official: we are one of 100 companies slated to do so.
(References, so we can understand two years from now what this title has to do with anything.)
The Teleplace release is a mature application for getting work done in realtime collaboration with others. This makes a good occasion to look at some direct progenitors. The first two are the 1994 Interactive Collaboration Environment prototype by David Smith. The third is a 2007 Julian Lombardi demo of Croquet.
Our company CTO, David Smith, has been the principle architect of Croquet since the beginning. Long before that, he wrote the first commercial 3D game for a personal computer. Here’s some video (made with an actual video camera on old Mac) of how The Colony looked in 1987.
This is five minutes of live demo and eight minutes of discussion at an Under the Radar conference last spring. It is a very info-dense presentation before specialized industry insiders. (There are lots of side references all around to Google and others.) The intense Enterprise and VC jargon is quite meaningful and right, not random bullshit. I am particularly struck by the discussion of use cases like yesterday’s Project Collaboration and Saturday’s Operations Center, although I think the emphasis on high-value uses cases is misleading. (Under the Radar is all about qualifying truly new tech scenarios: high-value or large-new-market uses always get the first attention by the investors. That doesn’t mean that less extreme scenarios are not just as relevant for the people involved in them.) I also like the characterization they arrive at in which hosted/cloud/Software-as-a-Service is equated with repeatable off-the-shelf workflows, while VPN/behind-the-firewall/custom installations are equated with specialized internal crown-jewels applications.
Yesterday I posted an example of a Virtual Operations Center, which is turning out to be one of the classic enterprise use cases for virtual worlds today. Above is a tiny blurb representing another, more common case: Project Collaboration. Not a great video, but in its short 1.5 minutes it touches on how other uses cases such Operations or Training tend to merge into or be utilized within Project Collaboration.
David Smith made this video a year ago, showing how you could have:
