A glimpse inside the ThinkBalm Innovation Community, 10 days in

By Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

The ThinkBalm Innovation Community went live on August 20th, 2008. Built on the Spigit™ serious game engine InnovationSpigit, the ThinkBalm Innovation Community is focused on work-related use of the Immersive Internet ― virtual worlds and campuses, immersive learning simulations, and 3D interfaces to business applications. This community, made up of bright minds and passionate Immersive Internet advocates, has an opportunity to positively influence the evolutionary path of an emerging technology market, for the betterment of all.

We’ve only been live for 10 days and already more than 70 members have joined. Nearly three dozen ideas in several categories (like technologies, applications of technology, business value / ROI, and future of the Immersive Internet) are percolating in the system. The vast majority of ideas are still in the incubation phase, though two ideas have reached the emergence phase where community members can trade “spocks” in that idea. One of the community’s ideas has already resulted in a deliverable: a list of enterprise Immersive Internet Twitters worth following. Here are just a few of the other things the community has started working on:

• Defining characteristics for a new role in organizations: virtual teams facilitator. We are debating how such a role would be similar or different to other roles that already exist inside organizations, and discussing what the job requirements for such a role might be.
• Discussing the best ways to make avatars work-appropriate. We are debating how important it is for avatars to be traditional- and professional-looking, how realistic avatars should look (should they cross the “uncanny valley?”), and what the most desirable work-specific “emotes” or avatar gestures should be. 
• Defining a list of virtual world platform evaluation criteria. We are putting our heads together to define and refine the criteria enterprise IT buyers should use when short-listing virtual world platform and 3D Web solution providers.
• Building a repository of enterprise Immersive Internet use cases. We are discussing and building up a database of examples of using the Immersive Internet for applications like urban planning, enterprise architecture training, benchmarking, and team collaboration.
• 3D model support and interoperability. We are debating how important interoperability is for 3D models and discussing how the industry can make 3D modeling in virtual environments easier for people.
• Formulating requirements for identity management in virtual worlds. We are discussing identity vs. anonymity in virtual worlds and weighing the pros and cons of identity verification systems.
• Identifying needed features for an immersive presentation system. We are constructing a list of features we’d like to have for delivering presentations and leading classes in virtual environments, beyond projecting presentation slides up on a virtual wall.  
• Creating training sessions for community members. We are creating training materials to help community members learn how to use the Spigit system and optimize their participation in the community. We will deliver the training sessions both via traditional Web conference and in a virtual environment.
• Creating a movie or real-time topic tag cloud that conveys the community’s focus. To date, we’ve been uploading daily topic tag clouds from the community’s discussions to Flickr, and occasionally sending out a Twitter message pointing people to these tag clouds. We’re working on some way to create a movie, mindmap, or some other real-time to show how the topic cloud is changing over time. 
• Documenting and refining a feature wish list for our community site. The community is putting its heads together and documenting a wish list of functionality we’d like to have in support of our activities.

The ThinkBalm Innovation Community presents a unique opportunity for IT managers, information and knowledge management professionals, software developers, and technology marketers to help shape the future of the Immersive Internet. Members get a focused venue for sharing knowledge and getting feedback on their ideas, access to the experiences and ideas of thinkers and doers outside their organizations, and a means of building and enhancing their reputations as Immersive Internet professionals. Membership is by invitation or referral only. There is no cost to members to participate. ThinkBalm also offers technology marketers an opportunity to sponsor Idea Hunts in the community for solutions to marketing challenges, insights into customer requirements, and ideas for product names. Contact us at info@thinkbalm.com for information on becoming a member or for Idea Hunt pricing information.

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

ThinkBalm Innovation Community's list of Twitterers worth following

By Erica Driver.

Twitter has become an invaluable tool for me and many Immersive Internet advocates and implementers. It’s a great way to share information and insights and learn about projects others are working on. The ThinkBalm Innovation Community put its heads together and over a few-day period of time came up with a list of Twitterers we follow. We’ve posted the list on the ThinkBalm Web site. V1 of the list is below. The Principals at ThinkBalm will update this list over time so let us know if you have any recommendations for Twitterers to add or you come across a link that no longer works.

• Berci (Bertalan Mesko)
• DrManhattan (Project Manhattan)
• dStrawberryGirl (Chris Hart)
• Epredator (Ian Hughes)
• EricaDriver (Erica Driver)
• Fleep (”Fleep Tuque”)
• Futurelab (Stefan Kolle)
• GoldieKatsu (”Goldie Katsu”)
• GwynethLlewelyn (”Gwyneth Llewelyn”)
• Hackshaven (Eric Hackathorn)
• Immersive (”Immersive Education”)
• Keystone (Jon Brouchoud)
• LaBlogga (Melanie Swan)
• Malburns (Mal Burns)
• Metanomics 
• OnderSkall (Caleb Booker)
• PeterQuirk (Peter Quirk)
• Reubstock (Reuben Steiger)
• RichWhite (Rich White)
• RobinG2
• Rooreynolds (Roo Reynolds)
• SamDriver (Sam Driver)
• Saurili (Suzanne Aurilio)
• Seilerj (Joey Seiler)
• Semper (Brian Regan)
• Slhamlet (Wagner James Au)
• Swords (Jon Swords)
• Ugotrade (Tish Shute)
• Xianrenaud (Christian Renaud)
• Zainnab (Zain Naboulsi)

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

The ThinkBalm Innovation Community has launched!

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

We are pleased to announce that today the ThinkBalm™ Innovation Community went live! The ThinkBalm Innovation Community is a new community dedicated to advancement of the Immersive Internet. The community, built on the Spigit™ serious game engine, is focused on work-related use of the Immersive Internet ― virtual worlds and campuses, immersive learning simulations, and 3D interfaces to business applications. This community, made up of bright minds and passionate Immersive Internet advocates, will have an opportunity to positively influence the evolutionary path of an emerging technology market, for the betterment of all.

We are undertaking this effort as a grand experiment in collaborative innovation and idea sharing. Innovation can come from anyone, anywhere, and the more people contribute the more powerful the innovation machine becomes. Large organizations have figured this out and launched internal innovation communities that extend the responsibility for innovation beyond a select few employees to the entire workforce. However, these communities permit only a single organization to benefit from the innovation process. In contrast, the ThinkBalm Innovation Community allows participants who work for many different organizations ― not just one ― to enrich and benefit from the innovation process.

How The ThinkBalm Innovation Community Works

Through continuous feedback and discussion, ThinkBalm Innovation Community members collaboratively refine raw ideas into clear, vetted innovations from which all members of the community can benefit.

• Community members pose solutions to problems as entries in the Spigit system.
• Other members can vote on or comment on ideas and, once ideas reach a critical mass of member interest, use the built-in stock market-like functionality to “invest” in ideas they find appealing.
• Members earn investment capital through activities like posting and commenting on ideas, winning contests, buying “stock” early in ideas that become popular, and investing wisely in prediction markets.
• In this community, reputation is the most valuable commodity, although participants can also exchange points they accumulate through participation in the community for items listed in the community store.

The ThinkBalm Innovation Community presents a unique opportunity for IT managers, information and knowledge management professionals, software developers, and technology marketers to help shape the future of the Immersive Internet. Members get a focused venue for sharing knowledge and getting feedback on their ideas, access to the experiences and ideas of thinkers and doers outside their organizations, and a means of building and enhancing their reputations as Immersive Internet professionals. Membership is by invitation or referral only. There is no cost to members to participate. ThinkBalm also offers technology marketers an opportunity to sponsor Idea Hunts in the community for solutions to marketing challenges, insights into customer requirements, and ideas for product names. Contact us at info@thinkbalm.com for information on becoming a member or for Idea Hunt pricing information.

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Accenture recruiting in Second Life cost-effectively targets the “Facebook audience”

By Erica Driver.

Global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company Accenture has 180,000 employees and offices in 49 countries and brings thousands of new employees on board every year. As you might imagine, recruitment in a professional services company this size is a mission-critical business process. Accenture is already quite successful with new college grads — BusinessWeek named the company #8 in “Best Places to Launch a Career in 2007.”  To even more effectively reach what the company thinks of as the “Facebook audience,” in March of 2008 Accenture launched a careers island in Second Life. 

The island features fairly traditional-looking reception and meeting spaces designed to “feel like Accenture” and effectively represent the corporate brand in a way that is appropriate in Second Life. Accenture uses the island to network with prospective employees, answer questions job candidates have, and meet candidates that recruiters couldn’t easily get together with otherwise (e.g., students in universities Accenture couldn’t visit on a road show).  The Accenture Careers island also offers a series of interactive games to engage peoples’ minds (e.g., memorize as many details about a complex picture as you can, or calculate the counterbalance required to catapult your avatar onto a landing pad) or encourage teamwork (e.g., balance your avatar on a disk while not knocking other avatars off their disks). Signage is available in six languages. To help Accenture marketing and HR folks easily leverage the island for their recruiting and networking events, the project team developed and distributed “how to” tools, templates (e.g., for marketing communications), and best practices information.

Many groups at Accenture had been dabbling in Second Life since the fall of 2006 – like Accenture Technology Labs, the Accenture Media Agency in Milan, and recruitment marketing teams in both France and the U.S.  The Global Recruitment Marketing team, another early experimenter within the company, began to see a pattern in all the little successes and took the lead on assembling the necessary funds and talent to launch an island that could be used company-wide. In late July I spoke with Suzan L. Raycroft in Accenture Global Recruitment Marketing, who shared some insights into why Accenture considers this investment a success so far:

• The centralized investment in the Second Life island paid for itself after 5-6 events. While the company doesn’t disclose the specific results of its marketing programs, it has found “a decent number of” hires through events held in-world. The investment in the island paid for itself after just 5 or 6 networking and recruiting events. (See the related ThinkBalm article, At Microsoft, cost of virtual events about 1/3 the cost of traditional events.) If you think about recruitment at Accenture taking place in 49 countries, and each of these countries using the Accenture Careers island rather than building its own, the cost savings really start to stack up. Also, recruiting becomes more standardized across the regions as people start to use the same materials and processes. 
• A critical success factor: a multi-faceted support program for internal users. Accenture has found that most recruiters are not yet comfortable going in-world, finding the candidate they’re supposed to meet with, escorting him or her to a private table, and having a successful text chat. So Global Recruitment Marketing put a lot of effort into making it easy for recruiters to use Second Life. The team holds meetings, calls, and tours with recruiters and created a guide on how to sign up in Second Life, create an avatar, walk, sit, chat, etc. The team sends out regular emails featuring best practices and alerting recruiting staff to new programs or tools. The department’s internal portal has a section dedicated to Second Life where the team posts what countries have done, results, what worked and didn’t, etc.

Accenture, like many other companies, has high hiring targets for tech-savvy people. Candidates display at least a modicum of technical skill if they can create Second Life accounts and relatively professional-looking avatars, find their way to the Accenture Careers island and the specific meeting location, and communicate with the recruiter via text chat or voice. And Second Life allows Accenture to interact with a geographically wide pool of prospective employees. Digital metrics provider comScore found that in March of 2007, 61% of active Second Life residents were from Europe, 19% from North America, and 13% from Asia Pacific. 

While not a replacement (yet, anyway) for traditional recruitment techniques, Second Life as a recruiting and interviewing tool is a great enhancement for Accenture. In essence, the company is pre-qualifying its recruitment leads by ensuring that candidates have the needed technical skill and gaining insight into personal style and communication and social skills once a candidate reaches the island. And Second Life allows Accenture to leverage its global resources, recruiting and interviewing around the globe and around the clock.

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Information work is going immersive

by Erica Driver.

When someone says “enterprise collaboration platform” or “office productivity suite,” I’m sure the last thing that comes to mind is virtual worlds. Instead you might think of software from vendors like IBM and Microsoft, maybe even Cisco and Google – that offers a vast and more or less integrated array of features to help people communicate and collaborate, produce and share office documents, and publish Web content. Likewise, when you think about virtual worlds what comes to mind is probably not business documents, meetings, eLearning, or project collaboration — but maybe Habbo Hotel or World of Warcraft or some fringe group activity in Second Life.

Well, hold onto your seat because the next few years are going to be a wild ride. Tomorrow’s Immersive Internet-based information worker software platform will provide a place where people will network and meet, teach and learn, rehearse business activities, visualize and collaborate on information and documents and products – even operate real-world facilities and systems . . . maybe even vehicles! People will be able to work with the same kinds of data and documents they do now but in an immersive 3D collaborative environment that creates a more social and natural-feeling experience than can be achieved via a conference call, email conversation or even video conference.

A basic necessity: using existing work materials and tools in immersive workspaces

Today a handful of software vendors and open source projects offer virtual world platforms suitable for creating immersive learning simulations and immersive workspaces. Most of these platforms have lightweight (if any) support for office documents but they do tend to have built-in communication and collaboration features like voice over IP (VoIP) and text chat. Built-in features like this are fine for the time being because they allow Immersive Internet project teams inside enterprises to run fully functional pilots without worrying too much about integrating with existing software or adhering to enterprise IT standards. But this approach is not viable long-term because enterprise IT buyers want to leverage the thousands (or even millions) of dollars their organizations have already spent to widely deploy enterprise communication and collaboration software. And information workers will not tolerate being forced to duplicate the efforts they’ve made to create office documents — virtual world platform vendors absolutely must focus on tight integration with common desktop productivity tools.

Successful virtual world platform vendors will integrate closely with information worker tools

During the next 3-4 years we will see virtual world platform vendors deliver ever-deeper integration with the leading enterprise collaboration platforms and office productivity suites. Virtual world platform vendors will focus on extending the capabilities of information worker platforms for the enterprise  with features like visual, immersive social networking experiences, spatialized voice over IP, and many types of avatars for designed for specific business purposes (see figure).

We are seeing indicators all over the virtual world platforms market like:

• In the commercial sector: Forterra OLIVE, ProtonMedia ProtoSphere, and Qwaq Forums. The currently-shipping version of Forterra OLIVE (2.1) offers spatially accurate built-in VoIP, integrated text chat, streaming video, and broadcast messaging, and integrates with Microsoft PowerPoint so people can drag and drop slides in-world. OLIVE version 2.2, due out in late September, will add whiteboarding and application sharing, as well as support for Microsoft Word and Excel. Forterra is also working with IBM on specifications for integrating OLIVE with IBM’s Lotus Sametime unified communications platform. No date for beta release has yet been announced. ProtonMedia ProtoSphere has built-in audio, video, whiteboarding, text chat, application sharing, and wikis and blogs. Qwaq Forums is a SaaS offering that has built-in text chat and spatialized VoIP and integrates out of the box with Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org. You can easily drag items from your desktop or a folder onto a virtual wall in a forum and everyone using the same virtual space can see each other’s edits or modifications to content in real-time. Qwaq Forums also has an extensible API that allows developers to add functionality using programming languages like Python. New features that will be available in September include desktop sharing and workspaces designed for specific workflows (e.g., walls dedicated to brainstorming and workspaces that associate collaborative annotations with documents).
• In the open source community: OpenSim, realXtend, and Sun Project Wonderland. OpenSim 0.5 currently provides limited communication and collaboration functionality – most notably text chat and voice chat (if OpenSim is running alongside a SIP-compatible communications server). The Project Manhattan Microsoft Developer Community, which is external to Microsoft, is working on integration of OpenSim with Microsoft productivity and communication and collaboration tools. RealXtend, which is based on OpenSim, has voice chat and application sharing. On the realXtend road map are lip synch for voice, integration with Skype for voice, and integration with Google Spreadsheets and OpenOffice for desktop productivity. Via server-side scripting realXtend developers could integrate with Microsoft Office docs and other types of objects docs, but this integration is not available out of box. Sun Project Wonderland supports text chat and spatialized audio. The 0.4 release, due out later this summer, will provide a PDF viewer, application sharing, and voice access via telephone for people who are not in-world.

The next few years will bring a gold rush of new Immersive Internet technology innovation and development as businesses begin to implement virtual campuses, immersive workspaces, and immersive learning simulations and other serious games. After a swell, the virtual world platform market will go through the same market consolidation so many other markets have undergone (e.g., enterprise resource planning, enterprise content management, and enterprise collaboration platforms).

My take: as enterprise adoption of Immersive Internet apps reaches mainstream, the enterprise collaboration platform and office productivity suite vendors will become one and the same with virtual world platform providers, often through acquisition. So keep an eye on the startups in the virtual world platforms market, and strategic partnerships they strike with enterprise software vendors focused on information workers.
In the last decade and a half we muddled through the transition of “world wide what?” to “e-business” to “just plain business.” In the beginning, people couldn’t even imagine how the Web could be used to get real work done. Then we had the dot coms, which many people thought were part of their own special economy. Now the Web is perfectly mainstream and we can’t imagine getting work done without it. The Immersive Internet is in that same first stage now. Hold onto your hats ― here we go again.

Originally published in the Pund-IT Review, Volume 4, Issue 35. Please contact us for a PDF of the original article.

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Your nominations for innovation in virtual worlds?

by Erica Driver.

I’ll be busy at the upcoming Virtual Worlds Expo in LA on September 3-4 doing:

• A presentation titled How To Convince The Boss You’re Not Off Your Rocker: Getting Buy-In For Enterprise Immersive Internet Initiatives on Wed. Sept. 3rd at 1PM
• A keynote interview of Colin Parris, VP of IBM’s Digital Convergence Emerging Business Opportunity on Thu. Sept. 4th at 9AM

I am also on a panel of analysts and industry observers to select recipients for the Virtual Worlds Innovation Awards. The categories will be something like (and don’t hold me to this): the youth space, the adult space, and enterprise applications. I’ve got strong opinions about good candidates, to be sure, but I’d also like your help! Send me an email with your suggestions to erica at thinkbalm dot com. Award winners will be announced on Wed. Sept. 3rd around 5PM in the expo hall.

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Daden Ltd. and VoxVue deliver immersive experiences about real places

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver. 

One of the most compelling use cases for work-related use of the Immersive Internet is data visualization, which allows people to quickly see, analyze trends and patterns in, and collaborate on complex data. Lots of jobs require people to analyze, extract meaning from, share and collaborate on, and take action on complex and ever-changing data. Traditionally, this data is in text form, spreadsheets, or 2D images and charts, all of which take time for people to assemble and digest. Immersive Internet apps that provide a high degree of data realism have the potential to reshape the way jobs like these get done by giving people access to rich visual information via an immersive, contextual experience. (For more of our thoughts about data realism, see the ThinkBalm articles, A realism model for Immersive Internet apps: Part 1 and A realism model for Immersive Internet apps: Part 2.)

Recently we had briefings with two technology companies that have created immersive data visualization solutions to help people consume information about real places: buildings, neighborhoods, and even cities. VoxVue Corp. is a Waltham, MA-based software vendor that built an Immersive Internet application for the commercial real estate industry called VoxVue/RE. Daden Limited is a virtual worlds development company based in Birmingham, UK that created a Virtual Briefing Hub in Second Life. Both of these companies have created mashups by integrating their own or third-party tools with Google Maps or a mirror world like Microsoft Virtual Earth and, in Daden Ltd.’s case, a virtual world.  

• VoxVue/RE: commercial real estate visualization. VoxVue/RE is a software application that combines data from Microsoft Virtual Earth with search, analytics, and presentation tools, as well as 3D models and other data about commercial real estate properties and neighborhoods. Urban planners, commercial brokers, architects, engineers and others in the commercial real estate sector can use VoxVue/RE to quickly get detailed information about properties. A commercial broker, for example, would use his mouse to “fly over” an area – let’s say Boston – and zoom in on a 3D model of a commercial building – let’s say the Prudential Tower. He would then hover his mouse over or click on the model of the tower to apply a filter and display information like vacancy rates, list of tenants by floor, lease terms and expiry dates, square footage of units, condition of units — even floor plans or the view from a particular place in the tower. VoxVue customers can use the 3D shapes Microsoft provides with Virtual Earth or import models they create using tools like Autodesk 3ds Max and Google Sketchup. Currently, VoxVue/RE does not have built-in collaboration tools or support for avatars, which limits a sense of shared experience among people using the software. Any shared experience would typically happen by multiple people sitting in front of the same computer screen, as in a sales meeting.
• Daden Ltd.’s Virtual Briefing Hub: Google Maps integrated with Second Life. Daden Ltd.’s Virtual Briefing Hub is part of a city-wide initiative called Digital Birmingham, sponsored by the Birmingham City Council in the UK. People represented by their avatars can meet in the Virtual Briefing Hub where they can all sit down and share the same view of Google Maps. They can click on preset pushpins stuck into the map and get geocoded information like BBC and CNN news feeds, photographs, simplified 3D renderings of buildings, and panoramic views. People can interact with Google Maps in this immersive environment using clickable navigation aids Daden Ltd. built into its map controller or text chat commands like “find London.” Imagine the implications for epidemiology (if it was integrated with real-time disease outbreak information), healthcare planning (if planners could meet in this environment to discuss the location of healthcare resources), or disaster relief planning (by viewing, for example, refugee migration data).

These solutions and others like them allow people to quickly gain insights from complex data directly in the context of their work activity (e.g., see the view from a floor in a building while viewing an office floor plan in VoxVue/RE, or clicking on a news feed pushpin attached to a particular neighborhood while discussing that neighborhood with colleagues in Daden’s Virtual Briefing Hub). And, importantly, the Immersive Internet extends the reach of data visualization. Participants in a business process can bring in colleagues or experts or share information with external parties (e.g., customers) in ways they simply haven’t been able to before.

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.