Update: SimTeach has a nice abstract of the presentation as well as some additional screen shots
… just managed to squeeze in about half of the video from the Intel Developer’s Conference mentioned in Visualization Mesh – very impressive so far … more details later but this screen shot shows a virtual world with numerous live enterprise apps including a Qwaq forum
Update 02/03/02008: this post has set off a chain of others over the six months since it first appeared and will mostly likely continue to so I’m adding this search link. Pay special attention to the China connection as well as the view from a Facebook investor.
While as Wired’s Frank Rose reports some big brands are in fact wasting money in Second Life, discussions based on questions like “Is Second Life on the way out as a marketing vehicle? “ miss the real value chain issues surrounding commerce in Second Life and the rest of the meshverse. Although one has to look beyond even the long tail noted SL journalist James Au discusses, the fundamentals of the coming boom are drop-dead simple, not to mention familiar and proven:
location, location, location
At the end of this post are links to several entries where I’ve covered this from various perspectives. Here I want to touch briefly on scenarios driving the convergence between virtual and tangible property(both places and objects). It would be nice to go into much greater detail but I can’t give away everything – besides, I’m very busy getting ready 
As evidence that business in Second Life is beginning to take off, Rosedale said 830 residents are making more than $1,000 per month, and that number has doubled in the last 6 months. There are more than $1.3 million per day worth of interpersonal transactions.
Utility Belt: Linden Lab: Second Life entrepreneurship is booming
Related Meshverse Links
While nowhere near as functional as Qwaq this video of Sun’s MPK20 does a decent job conveying a feel for what virtual workplaces are. Sun’s Virtual Workplace site also nicely states the case for using 3D collaboration tools …
Gartner says 80% of internet users will have some kind of meshverse account in 4 years. IBM has developed a virtual world game and Information Week talks about the uses of Second Life in business
Turns out that quite a few Second Life users are network engineers. These are Cisco’s customers, and Cisco is aggressively using Second Life to communicate with them.The conversation really turned my head around. Until now, I’ve been thinking about SL as a consumer form of entertainment and communications — mainly entertainment — sort of like instant messaging was 10 years ago. Now, I see that real-world business discussions are happening in Second Life today.
He routinely encounters customers in Second Life who want to talk to him about their needs and what they want Cisco to do. “I bump into customers and partners multiple times a day in Second Life. In 11 years at Cisco, walking through the parking lot in San Jose, I never get people come up to me and say, ‘I’m a Cisco customer, have a second?’”
Renaud confirms what I’ve seen for myself, and learned talking to other real-life businesses in Second Life. Second Life is a social networking tool, like blogging or Web discussion forums. It’s a way for people to come together and talk. It’s a way for companies to come together and talk with their business partners and customers.
Renaud and I talked about Second Life as a three-dimensional diagramming tool. No, that’s not right — let’s make up a new buzzphrase, shall we? Let’s say Second Life is a tool for holding three-dimensional visual conversations. Just as WebEx allows you to share PowerPoints over the Internet, Second Life allows you to build something you can look at from all angles, with multiple people who can discuss the object in realtime.
…
Renaud described how Cisco built an entire network diagram for a corporate customer in Second Life. I know from conversations with IBM that they’re doing similar things.
One big liability to Second Life as a business tool: It’s hard to import data from other sources. There’s a couple of projects to build Web browsers into the Second Life client. One day, you’ll be able to import sales data from an Oracle database, create a three-dimensional diagram of that data that changes in near-realtime, and hold a meeting of top corporate executives all over the world in Second Life to discuss the results. You can’t do that today without using a lot of roll-your-own tools.
As has been noted, Qwaq is a meshverse platform aimed at robust business applications.
This video has some excellent demos and discussion of business, education and other uses of the meshverse … link from one of the panelists David Smith …
For those of you wanting to get a demo of Qwaq Forums – check it out. Beware, there is about 3-5 minutes of nothing happening at the beginning of the video.Croquet
There was a time when even talking about PC’s inside an enterprise was taboo. Many of you are young enough to remember when people questioned whether the web was relevant to big business. Ditto for blogging. Although oversleeping usually proves costly for many, change is hard – even this corporate alarm clock seems a bit sluggish:
Our inclination would have been that the corporate world is not ready to deal with each other in 3D World but that premise has partially been proven wrong by the success of Second Life among corporations. Plus there is the din of complaints about Webex so suits might be interested in a cool alternative.
alarm:clock: Virtual World Burn-outs Go All Corporate With Qwaq
If you’re inside large corporate walls or your business is dependent on large entities don’t let the nay sayers blindfold your vision – as shift hits the fan you’ll be able to benefit from having been awake.
Reading reviews like this nice summary at StartupSquad, or looking at the datasheet for Qwaq Forums, one starts to wonder what else one really needs in a computing environment. Working with Qwaq Forums, one gets a sense of what happens when browsers, applications and operating systems have been assimilated into the meshverse. As Dr. Dobbs’s points out, we’re either at the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning of operating systems and the Croquet site states that Croquet is designed to be an operating system for the post-browser Internet. Raph Koster puts it this way
Given the whimsical nature of the Croquet demos I saw, it’s a bit of a letdown to see a corporate office space as the first Qwaq product. But I suppose that it’s a bid to establish OpenCroquet as more of an operating system than a virtual world, which seems to be the emphasis among the project leaders.
Qwaq: commercializing OpenCroquet
(emphasis mine)
Raph and some people commenting on his post seem concerned about the practicality of 3D for business. In particular one person says
anything that is “3d enough” and important enough to merit the work involved in getting everyone setup with clients and whatnot at the same time to look at, would probably be something that would be better served with a “real” meatspace unveiling where you can back-slap and hand-shake.
Having had a chance to actually use Qwaq, I can say that the setup is pretty easy for people with reasonably recent machines and a broadband connection. You download the client, fire it up, select a location from a list of places accessible to you and you’re in world! You immediately see all the other people present along and relevant 2D 411(including video) is readily available and can be collaboratively edited. Things attendees “forgot” to bring can be easily dragged and dropped into the space. New information can be spontaneously created. If your meeting deals with tangible objects – products, facilities etc. , you can See What You Mean. Forums make it practical(time and cost-wise) for geographically dispersed teams to gather and key portions can be recorded for people who missed the meeting. Follow-up meetings can pick up literally right where things left off. Topics involving process/workflow or geographic location also provide other practical reasons Why 3D impacts the bottom line.
While there have been many failed attempts to leverage 3D, it hasn’t gone away because human beings are born with a set of rich media sensory systems which 2D information systems only scratch the surface of. Based on years of usability research, Microsoft put some limited 3D features into Vista and Sun has Project Looking Glass. Adobe’s Acrobat 3D page is a great place to find case studies on the business benefits of 3D although they have the cart before the horse. 3D is not contained in documents, but documents naturally fit into a 3D world. Last but not least are Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth which are the tip of the iceberg that will revolutionize search. 3D in business is more than practical, it is inevitable.
Related links:
Imagine if Cisco were to use Croquet to build out WebEx and then use the principles behind social networking applications like Ning to offer a kind of 3D world without boundaries;… and Cisco is a galaxy… or maybe the networked universe.And maybe Cisco just acquires Qwaq.
Sound far-fetched? Well, I think Cisco is already headed in the direction of the meshverse and considering this view
“As collaboration in the workplace becomes increasingly important, companies are looking for rich communications tools to help them work more effectively and efficiently,” said Charles H. Giancarlo, Chief Development Officer at Cisco. “The combination of Cisco and WebEx will deliver compelling solutions accelerating this next wave of business communications.
Acquiring virtual world capabilities seems natural. Will it happen? Probably not anytime soon. While I haven’t spoken to the folks at Qwaq about this specific topic, they don’t strike me in general as a group looking for a quick exit. Then again, Cisco has pretty deep pockets . What is more likely I think is that as Cisco and others look to adopt standards based, open meshverse solutions like Croquet, Qwaq should prosper.
Some traditional media like Time Magazine and the NY Times got this message last year, but Viacom apparently still hasn’t. Ron Teitelbaum points out that the “you” message has also been lost on most groupware/collaboration vendors:
Groupware today is painful. Yeah it kind of works, but participants quickly learn its limitations. The experience leaves much to be desired. The major piece that is missing from most group collaborations and presentations is you.
QWAQ puts you back in the picture. This is not presentation software, it is not powerpoint, or VNC. This is a real virtual world where you are represented, have control over your actions, can drag information off your computer and place it in a secure virtual world for all your co-workers to see. You can share applications, build 2d and 3d simulations, go off and have a private conversation, do whatever you like.
Steve Borsch(gonna have to steal borrow the opening paragraph of his about page) says:
What they’ve delivered is a very important step in the evolution of collaboration, social spaces, accelerated creativity and for the delivery of a virtual space that we ALL will need for the work of the future.
… Spend some time wrapping your head around what they’ve delivered, what it could do for you and why today’s announcement is such an important leap forward. Qwaq Forums isn’t the end-game….it’s just the beginning.
