history: external milestones and context – Page 3

Mobile Business Collaboration

Stearns June 30, 2010 June 30, 2010history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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?

Sent from my iPad

Taking the Red Pill

Stearns March 2, 2010 January 1, 2018history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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.

Virtual Events

Stearns February 14, 2010 February 25, 2013history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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

Vinge Vision

Stearns February 14, 2010 February 25, 2013history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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.

Does this mean we can win the Nobel Prize?

Stearns October 10, 2009 October 10, 2009history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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.)

Where We've Been

Stearns September 30, 2009 February 25, 2013history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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.

The Colony

Stearns September 27, 2009 February 25, 2013history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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.

Under the Radar

Stearns September 21, 2009 February 25, 2013history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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.

Project Collaboration at Intel

Stearns September 20, 2009 February 25, 2013history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

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.

Operations Center +1

Stearns September 20, 2009 February 25, 2013history: external milestones and context, Inventing the Future

David Smith made this video a year ago, showing how you could have:

virtual world objects automatically populated by real world objects;

scripted behavior for those interactive objects that:
- gives realtime display of real world data associated with those objects;
- allows you to control the associated real world objects (like Swayze in “Ghost”);
all while functioning in a standard virtual world in which the participants can communicate with voice/video/text/gesture and spontaneously share apps, etc.