Last night as Andy Murray made his triumphant comeback in a massive 5 setter I was driving away from Wimbledon and on to Corby. I am presenting at the Learning Grid for the next 2 days and Helen from Hursley is coming up to do the other half of the gig here.
We are presenting to visiting schools from around the area at the Rockingham Motor Speedway as an event called the learning grid.
As part of an hour long presentation in the auditorium here we get about 7 minutes to help show why what we do is so interesting and fun aswell as important. The aim of the event is to inspire kids into engineering. So far what I have seen this has got some fantastic exhibits.
My office for the day (when not presenting is a tad different from the Wimbledon basement)

The cars in the car park are a bit different too.

Still the message is the same. we have 2 minutes of video of our VP of the Virtual Worlds/Digital Convergence business talking, then the rest is Helen or I, Hursley. Wimbledon, Second Life, Say it Sign It, Battlefield2 and all the chips in the games consoles to finish.
There are 2 MC’s here, about to go and meet them Michael Rod (from tomorrows world and screen test) and Michaela Hyde from kids tv.
The videos all seem to work, running in a decent resolution.
Wish me luck and go Murray !

This year more than ever before the Wimbledon web experience is much more what us Web 2.0 geekanisters would like to see. Letting people experience Wimbledon wherever they happen to be. I am not just talking about the Second Life presence
This widget is another prime example, able to be embedded and posted all over the place, facebook, blogs etc. It is also personalized to the user, the players they choose to follow. Its been a quiet revolution for a website that got 266,311,332 page views last year over the event, but one that I am very happy to see.
So props to Stephen Hammer and the Atlanta sports event crew for putting this widget together. You have the next 7 days to enjoy its live features.

Christian Renaud, Cisco’s metaverse evangelist has just announced today is his last day at Cisco. He explains quite clearly in his post that its not a bitter move. The thing he is off to do is a startup of an unspecified nature, so we look forward to seeing what that is, and everyone at eightbar wishes him good luck.
As the CEO of Cisco really gets the whole metaverse drive we know that it does not mean the end of Cisco’s drive into this. So its still IBM and Cisco pushing the envelope.
So another change, another indication as with my previous post on the growth of this industry.

Last night the VUC meeting popped into Wimbledon and annouce that Robi is the new guildmaster vote winner. It was brilliant to suddenly have a whole load of people, the acitivists in all this, pop in to say hi. Such a rush I cant really explain how good it made me feel. Thanks all.

Over at the IBM 7 Wimbledon build we just spent a little while chatting with Recka Wuyts of http://www.metaverse-tv.com/. I had not been able to get along to SL5B at the start, mainly because of needing to be in Wimbledon all the time to be able to talk to people like Recka and our other visitors about IBM and Wimbledon
By way of a thankyou for popping by and staying and taking the tour, and becuase I am interested in the whole dynamic of this years 2 week 5th birthday of Second Life and because the event coincides with Wimbledon and because its good to here Phillip talk and because….. enough already, here is the metaverse-tv video from blip

Judge has built a roof garden based on the real life media centre roof garden. When Tara5 Oh came to visit we had a misunderstanding on the bottle of Pimms (a Wimbledon tradition of sorts) and the word prim (somewhat popular in Second Life)
I cut a video of both the real and the virtual to illustrate the interpretation

Tish over at Ugotrade has just posted some transcripts from the an event in Second Life yesterday. The Cisco CEO John Chambers appeared and answered some questions. Now I know I am biased, but it is good to hear many of the same themes and reasoning I/We use when evangelizing coming from someone else, and in particular a CEO of major company like Cisco.
Read the full article on ugotrade

“John Chambers: …..very often if there is one thing that I have learned in my thirty years in high tech is sometimes concepts are a little bit too early but when they do take off they take off with tremendous speed and efficiency.
This where I think it is important especially for the business communities and the entertainment industries to understand what is possible because when the market does move it usually moves at speeds faster then anyone anticipated. ”

“I think what is exciting to here is that where last year we were talking about that in theory and this year we are beginning to see people grab this is going to happen. We may disagree on the time frame but it is not longer a question any more of if, it is now a question of when. ”

Wimbledon is building a new court number 2. I got to go and have a look. The whole place is currently plain concrete and also has some terracotta warrior style statues of the players. All in all it looks like a Second Life render of a place that has not had any textures applied yet. (It was Ricky that pointed this out first yesterday to me and so I had to go and see, and he is right I think)

The avatars of the players ar in the video below, along with a nice particle effect (they were watering the real grass with real water and getting a real rainbow)
Replacement video as the other one was incorrectly identified as copyright infringement. Still doing the paperwork to clear my good name

The gates are open at the venue, the website is starting to provide all the fantastic extras. There is a more official twitter feed this year, with an author ready to share some things, likewise a facebook group for those of you who like that too. We also have the soft launch of the IBM 7 Wimbledon build in Second Life. One of the coolest things this year is Judge Hocho’s build of the roof garden. This area is a press/media/IBM only area on top of the broadcast centre. Judge has built a retreat in Second Life representing this. Everyone here who has seen it on screen have appreciated it. Nice one Judge.

I’m not really in to Twitter and have been asked several times in the last couple of weeks to explain this dark ages behaviour. Sorting through some old patent disclosures, I found that I’d been part of a group that had tried to patent something that essentially was Twitter, in 2003, so it seemed appropriate that I should explain my inconsistencies.

In IBM we used a predecessor to Sametime 7.5, called ICT, for instant messaging. Like Sametime, it allowed you to set a status message with a limited number of characters. Most people left this as the default, “I am online”, “I am away”, but some of us would use it to describe what we were actually working on (this was before Blogs really took off).

We soon got a little bored with this (“I’m writing Java code” soon gets dull, no it was always dull), so we began to be a little more creative, setting our statuses to be little hidden messages that only a small group of people, or even just an individual would understand. It was completely unreliable. The chances of that person hovering over your name, on their buddy list, when you had a message for them was pretty small. That was part of the attraction, because if they did, it was a really nice feeling. It was the equivalent of catching someone’s eye in a meeting and knowing what each other are thinking.

The trouble was, the status messages weren’t persistent, once it had changed there was no way of going back in time. It seemed like a bit of a flaw, so we tried to patent a, “system for the persistence of sequential status messages” (hello Twitter!). It even had a nice little visual mockup included:

This is impressive, not for it’s similarity to Twitter, but for the fact that in the 5 years since, I’ve lost my hair and gained wrinkles, but Kelly looks exactly the same as she does now, i.e. 13. Anyway, the patent rightly got nowhere as there wasn’t anything technologically novel in it.

Over time we stopped setting these status messages, it was fun while it lasted, but I think we just got bored of it. I think this has started to happen for blogging and I think it will for Twitter too. They’re both here to stay, but not in the form they currently take. I think auto status generation will grow and inferences drawn from those will answer the question, “What am I doing now?”. I really don’t see people carrying on writing, “I’m playing cards with @youknowwho” for too much longer.

In the meantime, the thing that will really take off, will be email. 2009 will be the year when people start sending each other emails again, it’ll be like 1998 all over again and I can’t wait. Email is still my favourite form of electronic communication.

* I should also point out that I am wrong about everything like this, always and there is also the possibility that I just don’t get it.