« December 2007 | Main | February 2008 »

January 31, 2008

MetaverseU

For those already in the Northern California area, or who are able to attend via Second Life, the great folks at Stanford University will be holding 'MetaverseU' on the 16th and 17th of February at Stanford in Palo Alto. Henrik Bennetsen at Stanford has assembled a diverse field of people from around academia and industry with the goal to catalyze some critical thinking around the current state of networked virtual environments and where they could, can, and will go.

Be sure to check out the agenda page of speakers to see some of the topics and visionaries that he has put together for the event, and please try to attend if you are in the area for any of the other many virtual world-ish events taking place that week in San Francisco.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:17 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

No More Meeting Travel

One of the habits that Cisco promotes is substituting virtual meetings for physical ones. There are numerous statistics as far as the productivity benefits and cost savings that result from the immediacy and geographic-independence of a IP telephone call, video-conference, WebEx session, or Telepresence. One area that doesn't get mentioned as often is the environmental benefit of avoiding air and automobile travel by the use of these technologies.

Late last year, I pledged to avoid physical travel and instead substitute virtual meeting technologies like videoconferencing, WebEx and virtual world technologies. I was asked by The Nature Conservancy to write up a summary of my experiences which they recently published here, and was 'Digged' here. This has, in turn, resulted in a number of emails and phone calls asking for more best-practices for substituting virtual meetings for physical ones.

One thing I know for sure is that 10 or 100 brains are better than one. What I'd like to propose is that the readership also share their best practices, and we aggregate this into a user-editable wiki of what seasoned virtual attendees/presenters have found to be key elements to making their work a travel-free experience. Lets start out by using the comment field of this blog entry, and I'll furiously set up a Wiki page for us all to use once we have a critical mass of inputs. Sound like a deal?

Posted by Christian Renaud at 05:59 AM Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

January 30, 2008

Nexus 7000 Series Mixed Reality Event

So as I wrote last week we have another mixed reality event on Thursday, January 31st at 8:30 a.m. Pacific featuring Jayshree Ullal, SVP, Data Center. During this event you will be able to watch a live video stream of Jayshree in Second Life or on the web. You will be able to ask questions of Jayshree in both mediums. Jayshree will be discussing this weeks announcement of the Nexus 7000 Series Data Center-Class Platform. The Nexus series is an innovative family of data center-class switching platforms. The Nexus series delivers the infrastructure chapter in Cisco's Data Center 3.0 vision which was unveiled last year at Networkers at Cisco Live!

We hope to see you out for what should prove to be a lively discussion.

Posted by Dannette Veale at 07:57 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 20, 2008

Live Mixed Reality Events on January 23rd and January 31st

So you asked for mixed reality virtual events via the Second Life surveys completed last year and comments on this blog...as promised we are starting off 2008 with not one but two live mixed reality events in Second Life. During these events you will be able to watch a Cisco Senior Vice President via live video (make sure you have the latest version of Quicktime installed) and ask questions to be answered live on air. I'll post details on the January 31st event closer to that date, below are the details on the January 23rd event.

So, on January 23rd at 8:30am Pacific please join us in Second Life to hear Jayshree Ullal, SVP, Data Center, talk about Cisco's recent announcement regarding the Application Network Services (ANS) expanding portfolio. Including the business application vendors (such as Microsoft) jointly worked with to validate their applications over the Cisco network infrastructure and the new products added to the ANS portfolio. Cisco recognizes that business applications are critical to an organizations productivity, profit, and operations. ANS transforms your existing branch, data center, and campus networks into a business-enabling platform; ultimately reducing the total cost of ownership and enabling better utilization of resources.

Looking forward to a stimulating discussion. Hope to see you out at the events.

Posted by Dannette Veale at 09:59 AM Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

January 09, 2008

Thanks for a great first year!

On behalf of the entire Networked Virtual Environments team at Cisco, I'd like to thank the tens of thousands of our customers and partners that contributed and participated in events on our virtual campus in Second Life in 2007. Yesterday, concurrent with our CES announcements, we celebrated the first birthday of our virtual campus with cake, cookies, party hats, and some really annoying party horns (Pictures Here). We also were fortunate enough to have Moo Money of Second Life fame create a machinima highlight video of our 2007 Second Life experience.

A special thanks to those who came yesterday and made the party such a success. We look forward to seeing you all for an even better and more active year in 2008.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 01:37 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

January 04, 2008

Visual Networking, consumer products, and, oh, Happy 1st Birthday in SL for Cisco’s Campus!

Our Cisco SL virtual campus launched late in 2006 and our first big event was concurrent with the Consumer Electronics show and the launch of our SL connected home. The Cisco SL connected home showcases our consumer home networking products in an interactive 3D environment. With CES 2008 next week, we will be discussing Cisco’s consumer products, as well as discussing our Visual Networking Strategy. Join us for live Q&A with two of Cisco’s consumer marketing executives, at the connected home, and discuss Cisco’s latest consumer products and strategies for networking in the home. After the Q&A, we will be celebrating with a slide show, and serving virtual cake and sharing party favors, as we commemorate the 1 year anniversary of our virtual presence through Cisco’s SL campus. As this year begins to play out, Cisco’s virtual presence will be hopping, with many events already planned for 2008, as Dannette mentions below, as well as additional builds utilized with our events and engagements to better leverage the 3D environment for collaboration. We look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Randy Sisk at 06:52 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)