How is your life connected? Would your experiences be richer if you could realize your vision of a connected life? Networked virtual environments provide a way for us to connect with each other, and these platforms provide a rich visual and social experience. Another aspect of being connected is the ability to access your media, your friends, and your real world environment from anywhere and anyplace.
Posted by Randy Sisk at 11:56AM PST
As we approach the virtual Cisco Channel Partner Career fair (Nov. 6th 9-11 AM PST; http://slurl.com/secondlife/cisco%20systems%203/120/152/23/), hosted on our Second Life campus, there are a couple of interesting options to ponder from both sides of the table: the employer and the prospective employee.
Posted by Randy Sisk at 02:44PM PST
For those of you who were not at the Virtual Worlds 2007 Conference and Expo last week, there were a number of announcements by ourselves and others that were not product specific in nature, but rather more focused on overall industry development.
First among those was the launch of the Metaverse Market Index (MMI), which is an effort spearheaded by Nick Wilson at Metaversed and Prof. Robert Bloomfield at Cornell University. The MMI is an organization that was recently developed by and for the industry to track adoption, economies and use activity of virtual worlds. This is an important step in the maturation of the industry, as we move beyond early vendor-specific approaches to measuring the market to a more industry-common measure. This will clear up any ambiguity for people outside of the industry when trying to separate fact from hype, as well as allow people within the industry with a common yardstick (meter-stick for those not in the coalition of the metrically challenged) by which to monitor the growth of the industry.
Next, and possibly more contentious, is the notion of the Virtual World Interoperability Forum. This requires a bit more elaboration…...
Posted by Christian Renaud at 09:38AM PST
Speaking of hosting meet-ups in virtual places, and reducing carbon footprint, our public presence in virtual worlds is about providing a place for our customers, stakeholders, partners, and others, our ’worldwide virtual family’, to meet for different purposes. Cisco will be hosting our first Cisco Channel Partner career fair at our Second Life campus, between the Channel Partner pavilion and the Technology Center building on Cisco Systems 3. Why have a Second Life career fair?
Posted by Randy Sisk at 07:38PM PST
I had written previously about the opportunities to reduce air travel by substituting virtual meetings for physical meetings, however reading through the excellent work already being done for Blog Action day has really got me motivated to make a change today.
I’d like to make a bargain with you…...http://blogs.webex.com/webex_interactions/2007/10/cost-benefits-o.html
For the remainder of the year, don’t fly. Neither will I. Instead, we will use the amazing array of tools at our disposal, from Telepresence to WebEx to avatar-mediated communications, to approximate the magic of physical proximity.
What’s the bargain? I promise to pay $1000 out of my own pocket per airline trip that I take between now and the end of the year. Where does that $1000 go?
Posted by Christian Renaud at 02:24PM PST
Check out what attendees at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo think about the future of virtual worlds.
Posted by Dannette Veale at 07:02PM PST
With each presentation I hear at a conference, there is always a moment when you are scribbling what the presenter is saying and you feel like an undergraduate in your first astronomy class furiously taking verbatim notes because you don’t know what will be on the test. Then you realize that you missed 50% or more of the point of the presentation.
Two good things about the keynote today at Virtual Worlds 2007….(1) There’s no test, and (2) we can do simple things like list the references used in the slides on a blog, like this one!
Posted by Christian Renaud at 12:25PM PST
So today I was at the virtual worlds conference in San Jose. Tomorrow our very own Christian Renaud is the keynote speaker!
One of the topics that kept popping up during the various sessions I attended was community in networked virtual environments and the idea that 2D, 2 1/2 D, and 3D spaces help foster community.
Cisco believes this to be true. Since our inception in Second Life we have created a Cisco News Group which is now well over 200 strong. There are also many non-Cisco created yet Cisco related groups in Second Life for example: Cisco User Group, CCIE Group, Cisco Italy Group, Cisco French Group, etc.
I couldn’t tell you the number of times I have helped out newbs in Second Life; Cisco fellows as well as non-Cisco fellows. It can be intimidating when you are born in a virtual world; I remember it all to well. You have this awful skin, bad hair, and not so great clothing…and as a recent NY Times article stated even in a virtual world stuff matters when it comes to status and acceptance in the community.
It is truly groovy that people do help each other in these virtual worlds and more importantly they want to help each other. After all isn’t that what community is all about?
To that end Cisco is using virtual worlds like Second Life to extend our community. We want to help our community learn about us, each other and how we can collaborate with one another. One of the ways we foster this is to hold virtual events on subjects that we understand to be top of mind for our community. Tomorrow we will hold a TechChat in Second Life at noon PDT on Application Intelligence on Your Router: A Technical Discussion of Performance Routing.
Posted by Dannette Veale at 01:56PM PST
Hi all. My name is Dannette Veale and I work in Corporate Events here at Cisco. Let me start by stipulating I am not super-technical like my fellow virtual worlds bloggers, who should have capes and related insignia to indicate their super hero status 
However I am a geek, always have been and always will be I am proud to say. Specifically I am a science fiction/cyberpunk/anime/gaming geek; so virtual worlds are right up my alley of interests.
At Cisco, I am tasked with programming virtual events in networked virtual environments...so virtual events for all you readers to learn from and enjoy, hopefully. Much of my work time is spent on Cisco’s islands in Second Life as Dannette CiscoSystems.
I get these types of questions/comments a lot:
1) Why does Cisco pay me to play?
2) Why would I participate in a virtual event instead of a webcast or forum?
3) Why would I use this virtual thing? You got to be kidding me...maybe my kids but not me!
Posted by Dannette Veale at 08:55PM PST
Last Friday, I had the privilege of speaking to several groups of college seniors on the Cisco campus. They came to get a better understanding of Cisco and some of our technologies, and we get the chance to speak with them about their role in potentially changing the world. As the “speaker”, I approached it as a wonderful opportunity to be a student of this captive audience of soon-to-be colleagues or future customers.
Posted by Brian Gracely at 08:28PM PST
465,003,915
That is how many aggregate subscribers are claimed by 44 of the top self-proclaimed virtual worlds.
443,230,979
That is the entire population of Mexico, the United States and Canada.
We are all accustomed to the early stages of any technology when individual companies attempt to set the rules and language that will be used for the ensuing battles. There have been expensive fights over simple things like rather to call the aggregation of ISDN B-channels ‘MLPP’ or ‘Bonding’, IP telephony vs IP-PBXs, and so on. There are very tangible benefits to defining the market you are going to compete in. This is Law 5, the Law of Focus, in the classic marketing work The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout, “The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.”
This is still going on in the virtual world sector, as every platform with an avatar calls themselves a ‘virtual world’, and attempts to define the rest of the market around their paradigm. What typically follows this Cambrian explosion of platforms and competing technologies (and semantics) is that there is a ‘great rationalization’ (a ‘KT Period’, to mix my periods/eras/eons/epochs). This space is rapidly becoming ripe for it’s own.
Posted by Christian Renaud at 10:21AM PST
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