The Second Life Goldmine: Sam Palmisano

CNNMoney gets some money quotes from Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM.

CNNMoney:

"By early January more than 3,000 IBM employees had acquired their own avatars, and about 300 were routinely conducting company business inside Second Life. "The 3-D Internet may at first appear to be eye candy," Palmisano writes in an e-mail interview, "but don't get hung up on how frivolous some of its initial uses may seem." He calls 3-D realms such as Second Life the "next phase of the Internet's evolution" and says they may have "the same level of impact" as the first Web explosion.

But what's beginning to catch the attention of IBM and other huge corporations is something potentially far more profound than a new online pastime. It's the ability to use Second Life as a platform for a whole new Net - this one in 3-D and even more social than the original - with huge opportunities to sell products and services.

In essence, (Linden Lab's) customers are renting space on the 1,750 servers that store the digital representation of the land. One of the biggest landowners is IBM, which rules over 24 islands. Since Linden revamped its business model to focus on real estate, users and revenues have grown at least 10 percent every month.

Easier said than done, of course. Metaverses will become a very competitive field, says Irving Wladawsky- Berger, vice president for technical strategy at IBM. These are just the earliest days of exploration, and needless to say, the outcome is anything but certain. "Today," says Wladawsky- Berger, "virtual worlds are where video and VCRs were in the early 1980s, or where the Web was in 1993."

IBM's Todd "Turbo" Watson on v-Business

From his bio you can tell that Turbo is a player. "He later led the development of the IBM e-business Web site, and most recently has been responsible for helping drive the strategy and optimization of the IBM Software Group Web presence."

Tuesday, Turbo took some time to write up his thoughts on the recent IBM announcement to invest $10m in a 3D world initiative.

From his post:

"For those of us who have been early advocates inside Big Blue around the notion of "v-business," particularly in Second Life, this is very exciting news, as it clearly indicates our own bullishness about the promise of virtual technologies in business, educational, medical, and other organizations that can benefit from a more visual Web environment.

Just as we did in the early days of e-business and Linux, our goal is to build a community and drive the business opportunities for virtual business, or "v-business."

Having been at an Internet World press conference where IBM's commitment to "e-business" was announced over a decade ago, I'm very excited to see a similar commitment to these emerging virtual worlds, and to see them announced very much in the spirit and energy this new frontier presents to businesses and organizations around the globe."

eightbar covers the IBM event

eightbar has some information and pictures from the IBM event this week.

From the post:


"The event itself was a ‘townhall’ IBM meeting, held in an IBM location in China, in front of more than 6,000 employees. Sam Palmisano presented in person, but when he started talking about Virtual Worlds and the 3D Internet, he first handed over to Irving (who recently blogged about signing up to Second Life) whose avatar was surrounded by a decent sized bunch of IBMers from across the world.

Sam Palmisano's $100M Bet

The Next Net is reporting that one of the things IBM CEO Sam Pamisano will be talking about at the Second Life event is the winners of the Innovation Jams.

The list:

"He is putting $100 million into the final ten ideas in the hopes that a few may turn into billion-dollar businesses. Here is where he is placing his bets:

Smart Healthcare Payment Systems: Speeding healthcare payments by connecting patients, doctors, and insurance companies through smart cards.

Simplified Business Engines: A suite of Web 2.0 business apps (running on blade servers) for small businesses.

Real-time Translation Services: Seamless speech-to-text-to-speech software that can translate one language to another like a Babble Fish (based on IBM Research's impressive MASTOR technology).

Intelligent Utility Networks: Bringing network management and monitoring to the utility grid.

3D Internet: Build a technology platform for virtual worlds so that businesses can conduct meetings, presentations, focus groups, product demos or run virtual stores in a "standards-based 3D Internet" (sort of like Second Life).

“Digital Me”: Online storage and management for personal digital photos, videos, music, files, identification documents, and health and financial records.

Branchless Banking for the Masses: Sell technology to financial institutions that lets them provide basic banking services to the unbanked in remote parts of India, China, and other fast-growing emerging markets.

Integrated Mass Transit Information System: Back-end systems for connecting and managing real-time data for all of a region’s transit systems, and coordinating among buses, rail, highways, waterways and airlines.

Electronic Health Record System: Create a central repository for health records that accepts data from any provider, integrates with the health payment system (see above), and offers personal healthcare records to consumers and their doctors.

“Big Green” Innovations: A new business unit that will focus on emerging environmental opportunities, such as advanced water modeling (looking for water like today we look for oil), nanotech-based water filtration and efficient solar power systems."

Second Life Stories: Nov 13th, IBM, Amazon and Sun

So I couldn't keep up with everything last week and need to make sure I have time for everything this week. I may do the "Second Life Stories" as a weekly catch all for things I missed. We'll see.

CNN/Fortune: "No, Second Life is not over hyped"

"Yet Second Life may be more important, longterm, than even this much publicity would suggest. That's because what it really may represent is an alternative vision for how to interact with information and communicate over the Internet.

So far Second Life is way too hard to use. The people who do best there are still techie types. It requires a fairly powerful computer. You have to download a special software application to use it. It can't be used in many corporate offices (like mine at Time Inc., for instance).

But Second Life is important as much for what it represents as for what it concretely offers today. Looking at Second Life makes me realize just how much the Web, wonderful and useful as it is, still mimics a print model.

Second Life goes much further. It took a radical approach to design from the beginning. It offered itself as a mere platform for the creations of its occupants. Essentially everything seen inside the software today was created by its users."

Information Week: "IBM gets a Second Life"

"IBM is set to invest $10 million over the next twelve months to increase its presence in the market for technologies that enable so-called virtual worlds such as Second Life, a 3-D Web environment in which people from various walks doff their everyday identities to assume online alter egos, a company spokesman said Friday.

"Just as AOL and other early Internet services were early entry ways into the largely undeveloped World Wide Web, Second Life, other virtual worlds, and massive, multi-player game environments are the precursor to a 3-D Internet," says the spokesman. IBM wants to create 3-D business environments that mirror Second Life's interactivity and sense of immersion. The company envisions scenarios under which, say, a team of healthcare researchers from around the world could enter a virtual meeting room to tackle a disease outbreak.

Silicon.com: "Big Blue expands into Second Life"

"Chairman and chief executive Sam Palmisano is set to visit Second Life on Tuesday, following a "town hall" meeting with some 7,000 employees in China, and speak with the more than 250 IBM employees on one of the company's virtual islands.

The company is looking to build a private 3D intranet where it will be able to discuss sensitive business information. It is moving to champion what it calls "v-business" - short for virtual business - just as it championed "ebusiness", or electronic business, during the dot-com boom.

Sandy Kearney, IBM's director of emerging 3D internet and virtual business, said: "We always ask the question, 'if you knew 20 years ago what you know about the web today, what would you do differently? The web took decades. This will likely take half that time."

Reuters: "IBM accelerates push into 3D virtual worlds"

"Big Blue has already established the biggest Second Life presence of any Fortune 500 company. It is also looking to build a 3D intranet where its clients will be able to discuss sensitive business information.

The company’s move into virtual worlds is due in large part to the efforts of its “multiverse evangelists,” Ian Hughes (Epredator Potato) and Roo Reynolds (Algernon Spackler in-world), who said last month that IBM wanted to make “v-business” a priority just as it championed “e-business” during the dot-com boom.

“The essence of ecommerce today is built around the idea of catalogs. That’s very useful, it fits with the idea of Web pages and catalog pages, but most people don’t think of shopping in terms of catalogs and pages, but in terms of stores that they go into,” said IBM chief technology strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger (Second Life name Irving Islander).

“In addition to our desire to work more closely with Linden Labs, we’re exploring how we can work with many virtual world players, including companies like Multiverse and Bigworld Technology, as well as open source platforms like Uni-Verse.org,” the spokesman said in an email. “IBM’s ultimate aim is for inter-world integration, instead of separate islands of virtual worlds, where you cannot cross over from one to the other in a consistent way.”

Second Life Insider: "Quite achievements"

"That's got to be one heck of an island that they've got going on there, I must say. 250 on an island is quite a stretch. 250 on a four-sim corner is still a stretch. Either IBM is getting much better toys, or they're planning to do this in shifts."

Information Week: "Second Life residence build stores around Amazon.com"

This one is important. Bezos is an investor in Linden and SL uses S3.

"Whether Amazon.com becomes a fixture within Second Life will be left up to its members, who build the revenue-sharing virtual stores and write the scripts needed to integrate with Amazon.com's Web services for third-party retailers. Second Life residents do a total of about $6 million worth of business a month, up from about $2 million a few months ago.

"Our strategy is to provide tools that let residents create and enhance their own experience in Second Life, and to let them decide what can be done and how to do it," says Glenn Fisher, director of marketing programs at Linden.

Life2Life (SLurl) is one of the retail projects built around Amazon.com's product services. Second Life residents Tabatha Hegel and Hugo Dalgleish, their names in the online world, are using the search and shopping tools they've created in at least four locations."

Millions of Us: "Sun and open source java Q&A"

"I’m really excited to announce that Sun’s Tim Bray and Simon Phipps alongside Mark Shuttleworth will be hosting a Q&A session in the Second Life Sun Pavilion this coming Monday, November 13th, at 1:00 PM PST. The Q&A session is to follow an announcement that morning by Sun via webcast and other media channels. We will be broadcasting the webcast at the Sun Pavilion to kick off the Q&A session.

A bit more about the hosts, as these guys have really interesting backgrounds: Tim Bray is Sun’s Director of Web Technologies and a co-inventor of XML and Simon Phipps is Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer. Joining them will be Mark Shuttleworth, the Founder of the Ubuntu project (and one of my favorite Linux distributions), and odd tidbit, the version of Linux I used to run (and test) the Second Life Linux Alpha when I worked at Linden."

IBM's Ian Hughes: SLNN Interview

Ian Hughes, of eightbar, is one of IBM's leading Second Life developers.

SLNN:

"SLNN: How does IBM expect to contribute to Second Life's already-enormous potential for business?

Ian Hughes: My main interest has been how to get data in and out of Second Life and integrate with other systems. Given that I work at IBM Hursley (a software development Lab near Winchester, UK) which is home of MQ and CICS, two pieces of middleware that deliver messages across platforms and deal with transactions, it is something that we are able to look at with some knowledge."

IBM: v-Business

Adam Reuters reports on IBM's continued push into Second Life.

From the article: (photos by Michel Leblanc)

"Computer services giant IBM has plunged into Second Life at the urging of its “metaverse evangelists” Roo Reynolds and Ian Hughes, using it as a location for meetings, training and recruitment. But the company is also eyeing revenue opportunities that could have it vying with Second Life design firms to bring real-world businesses into the virtual realm.

, Ele

“E-business was a strategy for us, why not v-business?” said Reynolds, known in-world as Algernon Spackler, at the “My So-Called Second Life” conference in London on Tuesday. “I don’t mean to be competitive with Rivers Run Red or Electric Sheep, but just like we set up a bricks and mortar business online, we could integrate a company’s services in a virtual world.”

"Integration with services, integration with data — exactly what we helped people do back in the days of e-business, that’s sort of what I envision us doing,” he said. “Mind you, I’m an evangelist, not a strategist, but if I had to guess that’s where we’re going.”

IBM has embraced Second Life to an extent unmatched by any other major company — it has more than 230 employees spending time in-world, and it owns some half-dozen islands. Some are open to the public, but most are private, with restricted access for the public."

See also:
IBM's Secret Island
IBM's R&D in Second Life

IBM's Secret Island

Digging a little deeper on the IBM story.

From the Register:

"It would not be the first time the suggestion has been made that games programmers hold at least one key to the future for business systems development. But IBM's latest research project - a "secret island" within the confines of Linden Labs' Second Life massively multi-player games environment - brings that possibility a whole lot closer.

The basic premise is to exploit the multi-player and graphics capabilities at which games programmers now generally excel to create an on-screen virtual analogue of a business.

IBM has decided to use the capabilities already developed by Linden Labs for its Second Life gaming environment to build a separate, experimental area within it. Participants – from IBM research and development departments around the world – can contribute whatever they feel is important to create a productive environment in which to conduct and manage "business".

Communications can be by key-entry text or VoIP if that is appropriate. With text, all the contributions can be easily and fully minuted, and the probability is that speech-to-text systems will allow the same for speech-based interactions in the near future.

The advantage over phone or video conferencing systems is that participants feel they are much more "there" – for example, it is far easier to identify who is communicating what at any one time. It also adds the scope to move away from a formal meeting to relax or "play", or perhaps hold a breakout meeting, all of which can help creativity.

He (Wladawsky-Berger) is also looking at the potential the system might have for furthering the disaggregation of business structures. At one extreme this could lead to their being no "businesses" as we know them today – everyone would be self-employed."

IBM's R&D in Second Life

Irving Wladawsky-Beger, VP, Technical Strategy and Innovation at the IBM Corporation, has been thinking about Second Life.

From the post:

"Last week I was in London. One of the main reasons for the trip was to meet with members of the press to discuss our new initiatives focused on the impact of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) on business, in particular those games that are truly best thought of as virtual worlds or virtual environments, like Second Life.

To learn what is required in a practical way, we have been using the Second Life platform to conduct a series of experiments, such as holding virtual meetings on a variety of subjects with groups of various sizes. The meeting participants are represented visually by their individual avatars or personalized icons in the virtual world. We are very interested in understanding how best to conduct such virtual meetings.

eightbar:

"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.

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."

Freshtakes:

"IBM’s vice president Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, held a press meet-up in Second Life last week while in London – and in the process brought IBM’s “secret” Second Life island out of the shadows.

The purpose of the press meet-up was to discuss why IBM considers Second Life so important. IBM has been researching and experimenting with virtual worlds to understand, among other things, the importance of visual imagery to convey information - and a vast range of other aspects of human interaction with visual and virtual spaces. IBM believes virtual worlds and gaming will have a huge impact on IT, business, society and our personal lives in the very near future."