Our private island is a little less secret now
We have been putting on quite a show the last few days. We have been doing press, writer and analysts interviews on why we regard things like Second Life and general metaverse technology as so important.
To underline this importance we had Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger our vice president of technology strategy and innovation at IBM over here in UK from the US. He is a well known figure inside and outside of IBM becuase of his very open attitude to ideas and his smart way of understanding so many areas that IBM works in. He freely admitted that he was put on the track of considering anything related to games technology a few years ago by Hursley’s Chris Sharp.
We put on a show for everyone around having a truly global meeting in Second Life as a backdrop to all our conversations. We had people from India, UK, US, Canada and even Australia, so some people were well into timezone hell.
We illustrated in the actions of the group how we had all taken to the excellant multi gadget chairs by Timeless Prototype. As this lets us indicate we are indeed having a meeting despite the fact that you really dont need to sit down in a virtual world.
We also showed Hugo’s Amazon interface, and Yossarian’s translator.
To show how we energize brainstorms we used a favourite of Idz Ni’s (and now most of eightbar) of the Abramelin Wolfe canon that lets us fire ourselves about the island. This is the equivalent of taking a 3 min break for chocolate in RL.
We also showed onbaording new employees, and the real educational benefits of this environment.
Roo had to dash over to Zurich but popped in to say hi and take some photos.
Anyway, it was great for us to all talk and explain what we have all been up to to a new audience.
Irving also did some radio and tv interviews, with the tv interview having our backup machinima playing in the background.
All the various write ups and programmes will start to appear. I will post them here as we get told about them or bump into them.
The first one is here by Martin Banks on The Register
So now that is all done I can prep for my trip to Almaden in California next week. I should be there weds thru Friday, then Roo and I have meetings in New York the following week. I thought the metaverse meant less travel :-)
** Minor update to point to the new blog article on Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s site and trackback
September 21st, 2006 at 9:08 pm
*grumble* *mumble* plum job *mumble*
September 22nd, 2006 at 10:33 am
yeah - and we came to hursley and got none of it. thanks a lot guys, that’s really great.
September 22nd, 2006 at 11:40 am
Sorry James. Just bad timing really. :-/
September 22nd, 2006 at 2:42 pm
bad timing? the event was in the works for frigging months. f**k sake. seriously - why short change the analysts?
[Minor edit by Roo. It's a family show]
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:28 pm
I hated to do it, and it’s the first proper swear word we’ve had on Eightbar so I wasn’t sure what to do about it, but I’ve made a couple of minor substitutions to your last comment. Editing other people’s comments is a minefield, so I hope you understand. :-)
I’m sorry that you’ve been made to feel annoyed by all of this James. From your comments here, and on your own blog, I can understand why, since some of what you expected to see just wasn’t on offer when you came. The fact that some of us were showing that exact stuff to some press on the same day probably didn’t help either. I can only apologise personally for not being more public about our plans in advance, and for not responding to your blog when it was obvious I was not going to be around for the event. That was thoughtless of me, since I know how excited you are by some of the work we do.
I do hope we’ll continue to talk though.
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:31 pm
James, the work we have been doing in Second Life is now getting more support around the company. I am sure you understand that both the speed of change and the embryonic nature of this it may not have been put in official agendas.
As we have said all along we are IBMers who happen to be writing about what we see as important at the moment.
We are more than happy to discuss what we are doing and how this is evolving, but as Dr Wladawsky-Berger indicated in the interviews this is an experiment and we are discovering what we need to consider. We are a big company with a lot of things to talk about all in various stages of acceptance and maturity. It is both the benefit of blogging that we are able to talk about what we do, but also the curse as it at some point has a cross over with ‘offiical’ communications.
September 23rd, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Are you acting as eightbar “The postings on this site are our own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.” or are you acting as IBM? Seem like the lines have already been crossed.
September 24th, 2006 at 12:48 am
Hi ‘i luv blogs’. My honest answer would be neither. The people who contribute to Eightbar do not necessarily represent IBM, but we can’t really be said to represent (or act as) ‘Eightbar’ either, since Eightbar is a blog and not a corporation. We write as ourselves. We are individuals with our own interests, friendships and hobbies, who also happen to work at IBM.
Sorry if we have sometimes slipped into using plural pronouns such as ‘we’ (see how easy it is? I did it right there). I personally find that quite hard to avoid when writing here, as a lot of us know each other and work together.
There is bound to be some overlap with what I do personally and chose to write about here, and what IBM does as a company. This might appear to be confusing sometimes. Especially so when the two overlap and what I do and what IBM does just happens to be the same thing. The disclaimer does say “The postings … don’t necessarily represent IBM’s position’s, strategies or opinions”. I guess on a really good day, they might. Not really something to be relied on though. :-)
I (and I hope, we) will always aim to write in the first person, as individuals.
Does that help?
September 24th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
We (as in a royal we) or I fully agree with Roo.
Eightbar is merely a handle that we use, a nickname for the group of us and our blog and more recently our presence in Second Life.
The interesting transition is that some of “us” now are full time on exploring the potential of metaverse technologies, and its not a secret so we can talk about it.
September 29th, 2006 at 12:12 am
For your info, here are some pictures of the now not so secret IBM island in Second Life http://www.michelleblanc.com/2006/09/28/ibm-second-life-photos-exclusives/. Bravo for the guts of going there…
September 29th, 2006 at 2:52 am
Yes that our more public almaden island. We have that, we also have Hursley that is a more private sandbox, and a few others.
We have a lot of people all loking at all sorts of things.
Thanks for finding Almaden :-)
September 29th, 2006 at 8:50 am
I always thought of Hursley island as ‘private’ rather than ’secret’. After all, it has been written about quite a bit here on Eightbar.
October 3rd, 2006 at 3:02 pm
[...] Brands in Games points to this blog post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s vice president of technical strategy and innovation, about Virtual Worlds. Through various reports and blog entries it was clear that IBM was interested but this post shows just how bullish they are on using Virtual Worlds for business use. They are using Second Life to gain practical experience with Virtual Worlds. In the post, Wladawsky-Berger discusses IBM’s efforts in holding virtual meetings and thinking about redefining e-commerce and visualizing business processes. In the post he states the following: As Yogi Berra might have said, this feels like deja vu all over again. When we started our Internet efforts in IBM about ten years ago, the Internet was already being used by millions around the world, and we had a very strong sense that it was going to have a huge impact on businesses and institutions of all sorts, but we honestly were not quite sure what that impact would be. [...]
October 9th, 2006 at 8:13 pm
[...] As reported in a few places (but 3pointd is where I saw it) Sun is having a press conference in SL. Its great to see some other major tech companies come into this space. We know there are a few of them out there in various shapes and sizes, its just we have been a bit more public as IBMers over the past year blogging and experimenting with what this all means. I thought we had done the first fortune 500 press conference, but I suppose we had a more direct one to one with each of the particpants over the 2 days, though the event we were showing was real SL interaction across the world. This is a big area and there are a lot of avenues to pursue. The important point will be, as with the web, open standards. [...]
June 6th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
[...] Last night Roo and I donned our eightbar t-shirts and popped along to the book launch for Tim Guests “Second Lives” at the offices of Rivers Run Red. I have not been to a book launch before, but then who does? So whilst this was still work related, it fitted nicely into the combined social nature of what has been happening with the metaverse. A collection of us gathering in real life, from disparate sources but with the bond of Second Life, and business in Second Life. It had been a very long day with other events and meetings in London. One of the reasons we just had to go was that eightbar and IBM get quite a mention in the book, Roo and I also got Tim to sign copies. It was good to skip to our section and see Tim’s view of the event we ran way back, when I specifically asked if we could invite Tim to the press event due to his articles in Edge magazine. The event we ran was way back in September 2006 and was given a huge amount of credibility by the presence of Irving Wladawsky-Berger . On the train home Roo and I were looking back, seeing statements like “200 IBMers in Second Life” when we have over 4000 interested parties now. It just shows how quickly the interest has developed and it seems, via our collective diaries, to not be letting up. I still get emails from people who have just caught the buzz and are still amazed when they see the history. One of the benefits of blogs over up to date web pages is being able to show provenance. I am looking forward to reading the whole book, it is the BBC Radio 4 book of the week, which is significant too. Now there was some amusing talk about film deals, which was funny as on the way up to London Roo and I had been discussing what it must be like to be a technical advisor on a movie that has tech in it. We have all seen movies that have all the right words but none of the right fact. So when hollywood gets around to making movies about this cycle of virtual reality who are they going to get to advise them. I think its safe to say the door is open and we are happy to help. So thankyou to Rivers Run Red and Tim for a great gathering. I also now know what to get my dad for fathers day, another copy of the book. [...]
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[...] I can only assume the wording must have been written a while ago, since we’ve been quite open about what goes on at Hursley island since September 2006 and the IBM cluster of sims since December 2006. [...]