Coming up: ThinkBalm Innovation Community’s problem-solving session #1

by Erica Driver.

Next week, the ThinkBalm Innovation Community will experiment with a new event format: a problem-solving session (details here). Two members of the community will each have about 20 minutes to present an Immersive Internet-related problem they are working on and get input from other participants. We expect about a dozen and a half community members — all Immersive Internet advocates, implementers, explorers and technology marketers — to participate in this event. Participants will collaborate together in an immersive environment (we will meet in ThinkBalm’s Teleplace environment) to increase their first-hand experience with immersive technology and collectively build the body of knowledge about how virtual worlds, immersive learning environments, and virtual event platforms can benefit business. 

Part I: Laura Handrick, VP of Innovation at The Maids International

Laura Handrick, VP of Innovation at The Maids International will share a bit about what her team is working on and will pose the following questions for discussion:

1. How can a virtual learning space be used to entice / encourage / inspire management to replicate best practices in the real world?
2. What kinds of scripted objects should we create that are unique to our business (such as our proprietary back-pack vacuum)?
3. What kinds of giveaways might inspire visitors to return? Should we create virtual uniforms that hang on a rack that anyone visiting is free to wear?
4. How much security should we have?  We’re in a business with competitors, but not too worried that they will steal our ideas by visiting our virtual world space. However, once we begin to provide video programs, manuals, etc., we’ll have to prevent them from being replicated.

Part II: Richard Hackathorn, founder and president of Bolder Technology, Inc.

Richard Hackathorn, founder and president of Bolder Technology, Inc. will share some thoughts about Immersive Intelligence, which is a collaborative data-driven decision process for understanding complex systems using immersive spaces. To explore and mature the concept of Immersive Intelligence, he will raise the following questions for discussion:

1. What are the use cases? Expected business benefits? Unique contributions?
2. What is the architecture? How should a virtual world interact with a massive database?
3. How can millions of objects be created that convey rich visualization of the underlying data?
4. How do you visualize complex analytics acting on the base data?
5. What are some good current examples that illustrate key concepts?
6. How do we weave the collaborative elements into data visualization? To make decisions?
7. How do we engage people from the arts, architecture, sciences, etc?
8. How should we organize an open community? Financial model?

If you are an Immersive Internet advocate, implementer, explorer, or technology marketer and are interested in participating in this or future ThinkBalm Innovation Community events, we invite you to request membership in our LinkedIn group. You can find more info here.

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