Cindy Gordon, the CEO of Helix Commerce International Inc. and the founder of 2BeVirtual.com and John Jainschigg, Director, CMP Metaverse gave this presentation. They were preceded by Hugh McKellar, editor of KMWorld, who gave Jan Schultes (sp?) an award as well as Bruce Molloy, the CEO of Connotate.
John has explored Second Life for about 18 months. He opened with a presentation of images from Second Life, Yahoo! Avatars and other virtual worlds in PowerPoint to a blaring soundtrack. Then Cindy took over.
The presentation outlined the history of virtual worlds, business’ evolving strategies in virtual worlds and business implications.
Interesting use of terminology – social media platforms as the current wave, not social networking services.
“Virtual worlds are online environments that let us apply the technology and psychology of multiplayer online games to business.”
About 1% of the audience regularly plays MMOGs, about 3% have Second Life accounts. Nobody deployed virtual worlds for their business.
Escalation of children-oriented virtual worlds – various services (Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Whyville) – we’re socializing a generation in avatars and personas.
Over $1 billion projected to be invested in virtual worlds by year-end, rapidly-growing ecosystem.
Benefits:
- Promotes profound attention
- Enables rapid learning
- Strong retention
- Builds community and trust
- Spontaneous generation of culture
- Creation of a new B2B economy
Main players – Second Life (average age of users is 32, 56% male, 55K peak concurrency and 1.5 million users, about 40K users have a positive cashflow), There, Kaneva, Entropia, Active Worlds, Areae.
Helix/CMP launching Second Life global branding research report in January.
John takes over:
Interesting term – “flat web” – yet Metaverse is not just “the 3D Web”
1st Phase – Primacy of the Build (simplistic automated interaction, minimal human presence, traffic viewed in web terms, metrics as an afterthought, no ROI)
2nd Phase -Crowd Sourcing and Involvement (more gamelike automated interaction, increased human presence, user anonymity troublesome, traffic still viewed in web terms, metrics emerging, ROI resolving somewhat).
- Weather Channel Island cited as a success – 4-island build emphasizing extreme sports.
- Pontiac Motorati – lots to do all the time, free land for residents, connection with blog networks, promotion of avatar personalities, strong web presence. However, metrics are minimal.
- Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) – unique sims offering news and events in a social setting, heavy use of RSS feeds with novel displays, live music, contests, art exhibitions. See their goal as bridging Australian and SL cultures.
- CSI: NY led to 175,000 people engaging with the asset so far, vastly simplified interface for SL.
3rd Phase – Era of Engagement (business recruitment/B2B events/sales/social commerce, web integration with inworld tools for identity transfer, secuity, metrics, human presence paramount, user anonymity less troublesome, shift from traffic to audience qualification/attention/interaction/dwelling, smart metrics solutions hard to find, ROI increasingly straightforward)
Challenges:
- Finding a qualified professional audience
- Registering them
- De-anonymizing inworld interactions
- Producing compelling events at real-world scales
- Extending virtual events to a larger web audience
- Implementing definitive metrics and analytics
- Nurturing and maintaining professional communities
CMP Metaverse 6-day Life 2.0 summit series inworld with CMP media properties leveraged for initial audience development and attendee identity double-confirmed through a promotion and registration system. CMP created a hosted metrics system and proprietary sensor array based on hyperspectral imaging technology (hours of attendance, sessions attended, booths visited, media viewed, web pages, notecards, document download links etc. offered). Every interaction and movement with 4-second precision cross-referenced with registration data for every attendee. Fall summit saw 1000 inworld (peak concurrency 140) with global audience, C-level execs and software architects attending, sponsored content. Dwell times for top 500 attendees were 15 hours, for top 25 attendees were 26 hours. 279 Platinum Leads, 190 Gold Leads.
No infrastructure, travel costs, physical logistics and 100% green.
Thursday 8:30 PM EST inworld event.
My quick thoughts:
- In some sense, isn’t avatar portability for businesses reducing actual engagement in/with any given virtual world?
- How will business demands (non-anonymity, standardization but also tying to the ‘outside Web’) change virtual worlds?
- How will differing broadband penetration rates affect the potential of virtual worlds?
- Given Nick Carr’s analysis of power consumption, how green is this really?
Technorati Tags: kmw07
November 7, 2007 at 11:40 pm |
Second Life News for November 8, 2007
New Viewer: Second Life 1.18.4 Viewer Now Available! The Second Life 1.18.4 Viewer is now available as the primary download. Again, with your help reporting issues in the Issue Tracker and participation in public bug triages, we were able to find and f…
November 8, 2007 at 6:15 am |
Thanks so much for the quick post!
My quick thoughts on your quick thoughts:
* Re. avatar portability reducing engagement with particular virtual worlds: interesting idea. We have ‘avatar portability’ in real life: does that reduce our engagement with locale and country? Probably, in some respects. Almost certainly not in others. Already, the Second Life environment is huge and diverse to the extent that I think most users have a complex relationship with the entity — a combination, perhaps of loyalty to the culture surrounding SL (analogous to ‘patriotism’) and a real affinity for the places and small communities within SL that they frequent. I’m not sure whether avatar portability will affect this at all.
* Re. how will business demands change virtual worlds? In the main, what businesses require is greater scaleability, security, robustness, and some significant missing features, perhaps including the ability to ‘wear’ ones’ real identity at will in virtual spaces and to impose certain kinds of visitor policy automatically (e.g., so that all your visitors must be wearing clothes to enter your property). Beyond this, it’s to the detriment of business to dis-integrate itself from the hubs of metaverse social, residential, retail, etc., life — why walk away from where people live, shop and play? If the geographic metaphor is valid (which is, of course, arguable) then at least some of the same rules should hold in the metaverse that hold in the real world: i.e., a universe of office parks is sterile and unappealing, and by contrast, the most effective and congenial neighborhoods are densely mixed-use.
* re. broadband penetration (and system capacity in general, and distance (i.e., router hops, media conversions, etc.) from subscriber to datacenter – a digital divide is obvious on the internet at large. If anything, since virtual worlds require more in the way of advanced broadband, client and access capacity, that divide will be worse re. virtual worlds than it is for the net, for the foreseeable future.
* re. How green is this really? By comparison with what I did today — getting into an airplane in San Jose and flying home to NYC with a stopover in Phoenix at the cost of God knows how many gallons of kerosene burned, black smoke in the atmosphere, acres of airport, cab to the airport, ridiculous HVAC bills for the hotel and convention center, restaurant meals, all that concentrated physical ’stuff’ (and then, of course, multiplying that by however-many thousand attendees and presenters and tradespeople and KM staffers and etc. went to the show) — doing events in Second Life is very, very green.
It’s not non-resource-consumptive or carbon neutral, of course. Still, it consumes only one mode of power (electricity) within one industrial paradigm (i.e., computers and data communications). That given, it’s simpler to project being able to reduce the power consumption (and other environmentally-deleterious effects) of SL usage (since we’re talking about one family of technologies and essentially one industry) than it is to project reducing the impact of conventional trade events, which are both massive in scale and diverse in scope.