November 15, 2007

Second Life Machinima of Connected Life Winner

Cisco announced the winner of its Connected Life contest in Second Life recently. Check out the machinima of the connected life winner.

Posted by Dannette Veale at 10:52 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 11, 2007

Living the Virtual Future

At a recent Cisco virtual event there was a comment put forth about how we are all living the future and I heard others refer to being pioneers in a virtual world. Cisco wants to venture forth with you into this new frontier which is why the later part of 2007 has been and will be jam packed with virtual events and activities. If you haven't been paying attention, have been too busy, or have been under a rock for a while (JK ;-); let me bring you up to speed.

Upcoming Virtual Event:
1) This coming week on November 15th at 12pm PDT we have our monthly TechChat. I anticipate a lively discussion as our topic is 'Why Unified Communications and Collaboration Are the Next Trend for the Internet'. Our speakers are Alan Cohen, Vice President Enterprise and Midmarket Solutions, and Joe Burton, CTO, Unified Communications. Hope to see you out at the Cisco Bandwidth Stage.

Recent Virtual Events:
2) In October the winners of the Cisco Connected Life Contest where announced in Second Life with the grand prize winner and several of the finalist joining virtually to attend the gala festivities. The additional value-add for the attendees was the demo of the grand prize winners 'Personal Digital Butler' concept. There where some truly serendipitous moments during this event for me. Such as on of our finalists who attended in world commenting, "Not to sound corny but we are living the future as we speak.....only a few decades ago who would have thought virtual communities in cyberspace." Our main speaker, Thomas Barnett, Senior Manager in Service Provider Marketing, summarized the value of using a virtual environment in this sound clip. The grand prize winner also provided a sound clip on why he found this event to be, 'the wave of the future."

3) A Virtual Partner Career Fair was held recently. It was a really successful experiment with recruiting in a virtual space with more than 60 attendees; view some pictures of the event. There was a lot of interaction between our partners and the possible recruits. One of the effective (and fun) things we were able to do in a virtual space was once a booth was staffed we could send up a poof (think smoke signals in real life) so the attendees could easily see which booth was now online with representatives able to talk to them. I don't think the majority of career fair venues would let one even light a fire. This is a great example of what you can do easily virtually in comparison to real life. Here's a link to Nobody Fugazi’s post, where he says, “The combination of technology oriented individuals, a virtual world setting and a chance to shop for employers and employees at the same time seems to have been a fitting use of Second Life. Perhaps some other businesses will learn from this example."

4) CSI, CBS and Cisco teamed up to bring TelePresence, Second Life and TeleVision together in a CSI Episode. In addition you can continue the story by becoming a virtual CSI in Second Life using a Cisco TelePresence HUD to communicate with HQ.

To quote John F. Kennedy, "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." We hope to see you out living the future with us in the virtual world. When you arrive give me a shout out, my avatar is Dannette CiscoSystems.

Posted by Dannette Veale at 07:50 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 08, 2007

You are [Here]

If you want to know where a given space is on the path to being mainstream, there are few measures better than looking at the distribution of venture capital flowing into that space over the prior twelve months. In the case of the Virtual World market, the last twelve months have had somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 deals totaling $1.26B, ranging from investments in world developers, 'producers', and the supporting ecosystem of in-world economy and advertising companies. Including the Disney/Club Penguin and Intel/Havok deals, which skew the numbers heavily and account for 2/3 of all activity, you get a distribution roughly like this:

What does this tell us?

Out of $451M of non-acquisition money flowing into startups, the majority of it is round two. This generally means that there were many many startups with ideas for 'metaverse' platforms that were bootstrapped with the help of friends, family and angel investors (or deep corporate pockets, but we'll touch on that in a separate blogpost). Out of the 'many many', some suffered what we call 'execution failure', which is to say that they were unable to make their vision a reality, even in prototype form to demonstrate to venture capitalists for more funding. This left a subset of startups that had/have prototypes in-hand and were out looking to take their invention mainstream with the help of a capital infusion from the venture community. They had received their smaller A/first/Seed/Angel round(s) already, and were looking to expand.

Also interesting is the number of companies that have effectively retreaded their business models away from fully recreational or training simulations and are attempting to steer into consumer virtual world businesses. A number of startups have gone through their first two or three rounds of funding, at which point they were shipping product, only to take on one or two more rounds of funding and go back into product development mode to re-ship a retreaded product for a larger more consumer-focused mainstream user base.

One final thing to note are the investments in surrounding and secondary technologies, such as platforms (Intel/Havok), producers (CBS/Electric Sheep and Omnicom/Millions of Us), economies (Bessemer/Sparter) and advertising companies for virtual worlds (Microsoft/Massive, Intel/IGA, Time Warner/Double Fusion). This usually follows consolidation and more mainstream adoption of the primary technology (in this case, virtual worlds), but is showing up early this time around.

Effectively, if you see the majority of venture deals leaning towards rounds two and three, that means that you are on the verge of seeing a number of new products and platforms announced. Considerable potential energy. This should be a fun time to watch the industry and see the second generation of virtual world platforms emerge that integrate the key learnings and address the shortcomings of first generation worlds, and the consolidation of the market around key areas such as training, business collaboration, and social networking.

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November 05, 2007

Cisco Channel Partner Career Fair- Tomorrow in SL

We've received quite a bit of interest from 9 of our European Channel Partners, who will have a presence at our Channel Partner Career Fair on our Second LIfe campus. We've also received quite a bit of interest from potential candidates. The focus will be on our European Channel partners seeking candidates with Networking and IT skills for their various locations, and candidates interested in career opportunities in these areas. The event will be held on our Second Life Campus from 9-11 AM SLT, at this SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/cisco%20systems%203/120/152/23/.
"See" you there!

Posted by Randy Sisk at 09:44 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)