Chris Sparshott » virtual worlds

What are you working on?

Chris Sparshott — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:46:56 +0000

I stumbled upon this video about some of the things IBM is working on in their R&D department, an interesting mix of ideas.

I regret that I have not been working on these projects but here is a short list of my interest areas:

Value of Software for business
Social software, design, deployment, adoption and measuring
Social Networking
CMS, WCM and portals
Virtual Worlds for business
Analytics and prediction
Marketing

Rivers Run Red and Immersive Workspace

Chris Sparshott — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:42:00 +0000

Following on from the previous blog post where I presented about Virtual worlds there was an exciting announcement around the release of a collaboration platform from Linden Labs and River Run Red.

This is a logical evolution of virtual world technology and this is something we do inside IBM across a number of virtual world technologies. 3D collaboration is in its infancy and the initial release of services will be purely in SaaS mode but over time I would expect on-premise solutions to be the norm.

I am keen to see 3D applications seep into mainstream life. There are examples from IBM Research, Immersive Technologies and 3DInternet that make this more and more likely.

LiveWorld

Chris Sparshott — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:50:00 +0000

While trying to decide whether to start up a corporate blogging service for New Zealand based businesses I stumbled upon LiveWorld’s solutions.

“Community Center 2.0 is LiveWorld’s enterprise-scale social network and community platform. It brings together community applications, management tools and systems infrastructure to deliver the best mix of user features, administration, management, reporting and scalability—all flexible enough to tailor to your community requirements. Community Center offers the strongest loyalty marketing, support community and engagement network solution on the market.”

Sounds like a load of the usual marketing guff but the list of customers is impressive and the interview with the CEO below sparks interest. The CEO talks about Generation C for Community connected those born after 1978….interesting but it isn’t really inclusive enough. The new generation is the Opt-In generation. This is where members of all the generations choose to use the latest tools and methods to communicate and interact. While the usage of these new tools is driven by the younger generations the number of “older” folk using the tools is also growing.

Looking further into the website they list a bunch of capabilities that Liveworlds provides:

“Expressive Profile, Blog, Photo Album, Friends List
Community Showcase Gallery
Community Calendar
Message Forum
Messaging
Subscriptions
Mobile Alerts
Mobile Upload
Moderation Tools and Reporting
User generated content: video, photos, reviews, blogs, polls
Live events”

So I guess that this is a server based solution with a bunch of ways of calling and integrating the function into corporate and social networking sites. However, I am not sure if this is a Web Content Management system to rival Drupal, Joomla, Lotus Web Content Management? Questions of integration with those sorts of systems would be useful to understand.

The Liveworld website seems to be a bit light on detail in terms of the technical information and there isn’t a nice video to watch the solution working which is a shame as I am sure that would have cleared up a lot of the basic questions that are twirling around my head.

In summary this looks like a company to watch, I like there business model and they are a serious operator !

Good Luck!