After attending and speaking at the Virtual Worlds, Real People Conference this past week, I must say my interest level in virtual worlds has risen. First of all, IDC Herzeliya managed to organize excellent agenda, that really covered, or tried to cover, every aspect of VW. The speakers are active users, either academic of business, including Moshik Miller, a very passionate Ph.D student, doing his Doctorate on the economy of virtual worlds at the Technion. I also met Dr. Yesha Sivan, a metaverse researcher, who spoke about the Full 3D3C (3D, Collaboration, Creation and Commerce) – an interesting way of measuring a virtual world. For instance, World of Warcraft is superb at 3D (amazing graphics) and Collaboration, but lacks in Creation (everything is created by the game) and Commerce (no real economy). Secondlife is good at Collaboration, Creation and Commerce, but lacks in 3D (very low graphical quality). During the break-outs I had some discussions with participants who were intrigued on IBM’s activities and keen to find out how we can work together. There are 2 on-going projects right now, that obviously I can’t comment on, but will do so in the coming weeks.
Here are the slides I showed. You can download them [PDF format, 6MB] here.
DC Herzeliya are holding a unique conference coming Tuesday (15th), Virtual Worlds, Real People. The conference is organized by The Asper Institute for New Media Diplomacy, part of The Sammy Ofer School of Communications. Small excerpt from the agenda: People are spending increasing amounts of time in online virtual worlds and massive-multiplayer online games. Our goal is to bring together people from around Israel (and a few visitors) who are interested in the psychological, sociological, and communication aspects of such virtual worlds.
The conference is mainly academic, with an interesting agenda and speaker list (I’m not saying that because I’m on the list.. ). First of all, I think it’s the first time metaverse has its own conference in Israel, that is both academic and business. IDC has a feel for new media, and even held the first Blogference back in 2007. The discussions will cover almost every field relating to virtual worlds, starting with social impacts, business opportunities, economy, personal interactions, user interface and design, human behavior and much more. Other than my presentation, IBM and the Metaverse, which will focus on IBM activity in virtual worlds, I’m looking forward to hearing my colleagues speak, particularly on the social impacts and human behavior.
In a Global Innovation Outlook report IBM published back in 2007, titled Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders, there is a discussion on how MMORPGs increase leadership skills, and shape the personality of future leaders: If you want to see what business leadership may looklike in three to five years, look at what’s happening in online games [Byron Reeves, Ph.D].
The conference will take place coming Tuesday, January 15th, at IDC Herzeliya. I will post my presentation at slideshare.net after the conference.
After 3 days of army reserve training, just before heading home, I stopped at IDC Herzeliya, to lecture on The Next Net – What it means to your business, to the members of The Israeli Innovation Forum – an academic program for executives, run at the Arison School of Business. The forum aims at creating a community for executives to promote innovation in Israel, while fostering the knowledge and expertise of its members. For full disclosure I’ll mention that the forum is run by IDC with sponsorship from IBM Haifa Research Lab.
There is at least 1 video in my lectures, and on this I had 2, although I had only 30 minutes. The first video was The Facebook Song, which I saw at Lior Zoref.
This song provides a good intro and ice-breaker to the subject of social network – there are many disciplines, topics, focus areas – 30min was quite a challenge.
Just before slide 3 I did a quick survey, to see if social networking and web 2.0 era had any effect on business leaders – so I asked how many track blogs, write blogs or members of any social network. I liked what I saw – over 60% of participants had their hands up on all 3 questions, which shows social networking and social software is not overlooked, and business leaders are taking it seriously, looking for business opportunities.
In slide 6 a small shiver crossed my body – I noticed that I’m obsolete – not part of the NetGen. I’m almost 30 (presents are welcome), started working with computers in high school, and had my first cellphone only 10 years ago. The members of the forum reassured me that I’m still very relevant, so it’s cool. For now.
Despite the time (8pm), the members were very cooperative and we had some interesting discussions, on facebook, viral marketing and innovation at the business. To wrap us my lecture I pointed people to BusinesWeek Special Report, Social Networking with the Elite, which I wrote about earlier this week. When I referred to the CIA as the Central Intelligence Agency, one participant told me which CIA is the “important” one – the Culinary Institute of America. I should start cooking more… Gabi, thanks for the tip. Now I know.
As a (bit long) side comment, I must say Lior is a business colleague/competitor I value – he holds a unique vision on digital media and true to the ‘try it yourself‘ rule, was responsible for several breaking marketing ideas in Israel. The latest being Yossi and Lior‘s Test Broadcasting, a 15min clip, on technology and marketing.
IBM announced today (Tue) a new desktop productivity software, Lotus Symphony, free of charge. The new software, announced at Collaboration Summit in NYC this morning, includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool, and is available for download for all users: business, professional, academic and customers.
Lotus Symphony runs of both Windows and Linux machines, and support Open Document Format (ODF), Microsoft Office and exporting to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). The software is build on Eclipse and Lotus Expeditor, and can also handle Lotus SmartSuite files. Lotus Symphony is a stand-alone version of the Productivity Tools available in Lotus Notes 8 client, and provides the end-user with the flexibility to work on a productivity software of his/her choice, saving as ODF and exporting to PDF.
On Sunday and Tuesday I had Army Reserve Training, so no work done there. Monday and Thursday were very busy working days. Wednesday was the SWG Community Day event – so little work was done during that day.
Friday-Sat – my best friend’s bachelor party !! We drove to the north of Israel, 30min from the northern point, set camp on the banks of the river, brought some food and drinks (well, plenty of meat and a lot of beers) and spent the night, eating, drinking and playing drinking games. I’ll post some pictures later.
As you can see – a very busy week, hence why my writing this week has been kinda slow.
SWG Community Day was a big success. It was the climax of the week for me – the first event in which I led the Lotus brand session. As I’ve written before I thought a lot of what to talk about, what presentation to build, and from the responses I got I know it went well. We had some 35-40 people in our session, mostly BPs and customers, and I hope they all learnt a little bit more about Lotus Collaboration Strategy and enjoy the UC2 demo we showed. The presentation I gave will be available shortly in the event website, I’ll keep you posted. There’s also an article you can read (in Hebrew) on the event, right here.
Speaking of articles, there are 2 on the recent Web 2.0 Goes to Work initiative and related Lotus software (Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections), in InformationWeek and The Marker IT. These exposure we’re getting only shows just how important social software is for businesses, who are thinking of solutions on how to adopt and implement web 2.0 technologies and tools into the business. You can see a scan of the InformationWeek article to the left.
Adam has posted earlier this week about Sametime latest achievement, “IBM Lotus Sametime tops Corporate IM Platform review” at NetworkWorld. Another excellent example of Lotus Sametime lead in the corporate market. Speaking of corporate IM, and Microsoft’s latest attempt to penetrate that market, there’s an interesting post from Simon Barratt, who installed Microsoft’s Office Life Communications Server 2007, and has some notes on version adaptability… worth the read. Ed Brill also commented on Microsoft denied OOXML appeal. For those not in the biz, Microsoft has appealed to the ISO that its Open Office XML format be voted as an industry standard early last week. It was denied.
It has also been a good week for Notes and Domino 8 release! Some very cool stuff appeared on the web, here’s a selection of stuff I found, courtesy of Ed, Adam, Alan and more. First there’s this demo on ibm.com of Lotus Notes 8, high level marketing. Really good, highly recommended. Then we have some videos: Lotus Notes 8 on Linux
This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.
