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.

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