Virtual Worlds Keynote
Supermarket Planograms in 3D

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This week our guest was Justin Bovington, CEO at Rivers Run Red. He gives us a very quick overview of how the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and Retail Sector can use virtual environments to better plan how their shelves are laid out, resulting in much better sales.

While the session above is a short 9 minutes, the conversation afterward with the audience went on for the better part of an hour. We had a fantastic time, and thanks again to Justin for being our guest this week! If you’d like to be a part of the live audience, do join us next Monday at 2pm Pacific for our next session.

What really strikes me about this is that she was able to find many big open featureless areas. Large deserts with a small oasis in the middle should be the exception, not the rule. Having said that just look how smoothly this platform runs. This is an entrepreneur’s dream project, if someone out there can find the funding to pick it up. With proper marketing there’s no reason this world couldn’t own the teen and tween demographic, even in the face of vSide and IMVU.

Here are a couple of other fan-made videos from the world to illustrate the point: a Prom in There.com Prom and an exploration of just one of the dozens of fun things to discover, in this case an ancient tomb.

Justin Bovington, CEO - Rivers Run Red

You would be shocked at how much time and effort goes into planning your supermarket experience. Stock isn’t just tossed up onto the shelves by category, but careful work goes into how to lead people’s eyes across the products and onto what they need to move the fastest. There’s an entire art and science at play that you’re a participant in every day, even if you don’t know it.

Every shelf is designed ahead of time using a “planogram”, which is a drawing of the shelf showing exactly where each product goes. The thing is, up until this point this has all been done on paper. Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red came up with a much better way to plan shelves that work: use a 3D environment.

This week, Justin is going to showcase and explore the potential of virtual worlds in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and Retail Sector. Taking it beyond meetings and collaboration: An exploration of how Rivers Run Red are developing immersive solutions and applications.

Join us today at 2pm PST (10pm GMT) in Second Life for this latest session of Virtual Worlds Keynote. Question and answer period will immediately follow this quick 10-15 minute presentation, so make sure you are there!

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To join us in Second Life, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
2. Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
3. Click here to be teleported to our studio before 2pm Pacific.

The document reads like a bit of a eulogy, filled with memories of the golden years and happy thoughts of their achievements. This, I can accept - they’re going down and aren’t funded by anyone, so there are no stock holders to give solid explanations to. What I’m not so sure about is the blame they cast upon the “economic downturn”.

This was a world whose primary source of revenue was virtual goods, an industry that saw $1.38 Billion in investment last year. What happened?

As business began to slide, they started tinkering with the toy:

Throughout the last year and this quarter, we have fought the good fight by churning out new features and revisions as fast as we possibly could. [...] introduced a whole new suite of casual games, a completely new foundation for our user interface, improved internal efficiencies for the product, real estate, a whole new level of Community Involvement, etc, etc. On top of that, we’ve revised our first user experience several times [...]

This is a little disconcerting. While the move to get the “first user experience” right was a positive one, it should have been perfected back when they opened the world in 2003. The rest of these tweaks are just that - tweaks. Ask Blizzard what effect applying patches to World of Warcraft has on customer loyalty and new user generation.

What it comes down to is this: you can’t be a computer geek or Web 2.0 guru after the initial build of a .com. Instead, you have to be a business geek and entrepreneurial guru. Specialists built the enterprise, and now new specialists are needed to run it.

To put it another way: architects and engineers who build skyscrapers don’t busy themselves making sure the offices are leased out and a maintenance crew is taking care of the place. The reverse is also true: most landlords can’t manage a construction project.

Sure, every once in awhile these two specialties are combined in one person, but this is why there’s only one Steve Jobs and one Bill Gates. Its a very rare individual that can handle both roles.

There needs to be an understanding, now that we’ve seen the dot-com boom and bust and we’ve seen so many of these worlds rise and fall, that there’s a difference between building a company and running it. This needs to be a common understanding, out there in the open, not as a criticism of anyone’s skill but as a way of placing value on specialization.

Virtual Worlds Keynote
Strategic Planning with IBM & Schneider Electric

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Last night Anders Grondstedt, President of The Grondstedt Group Inc., gave us some fantastic insight into how million-dollar ideas were developed at Schneider Electric and IBM. Executives from a number of locations were able to engage with each other and really work creatively by using a virtual environment. Costs were kept low, and productivity was even higher than usual for a meeting of this type.

Machinima is real-time animation using games and virtual worlds. NYC based Global Kids have enriched the art-form with their social issue work, all created in Teen Second Life. Draxtor Despres talked to participants and staff at GK as well as enlightens us with some machinima history and….the FUTURE….

Lots of goodness here: Draxtor, Global Kids, and a good run-down of a specific application of virtual environments. I’ll follow this up in the next few days with a good video about using Machinima for training if I can find the one I’m thinking of.

Do you know the video I’m thinking of? A general promo of Machinima for training applications? If so please leave a comment.

Anders Grondstedt, President - The Grondstedt Group Inc.

Join us today at 2pm Pacific Time in Second Life (by clicking here) for a rare opportunity to see how high-level executives make some of their biggest decisions. I’m very excited to announce that our guest on Virtual Worlds Keynote this week will be Anders Grondstedt, someone with tremendous experience both as a developer and as a speaker on all things virtual. Here’s the breakdown of today’s session:

How do two global billion-dollar corporations co-create value without the carbon footprint of flying executives around the world to meet? How do you build dialogue and consensus and collaborate and innovate with today’s post-bureaucracy organizations who work from coffee shops, kitchen tables and cubicles in four countries? That was the question facing Schneider Electric and IBM. One thing is for sure: Few breakthrough ideas have ever been conceived while staring at the phone and talking to disembodied voices on a conference call, watching a death-by-PowerPoint webinar drone-a-thon or participating in a video conferencing session that brings the drama and depth of a C-SPAN program. Learn how they turned to the virtual world to create customer intimacy and break through innovation ideas.

Remember: only the presentation itself is recorded, so if you want to ask questions make sure you attend the live session. See you there!

—

To join us in Second Life, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
2. Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
3. Click here to be teleported to our studio before 2pm Pacific.

Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, my blip channel, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:

Top Stories

Interview with Mark Kingdon, CEO, Second Life
Talking about Second Life as a business tool:

ProtonMedia Upgrades ProtoSphere
Includes 250 person auditoriums, single-port firewall traversal, and a healthy bundle of gadgets.

The Bottom Line on Second Life 2.0
My attempt at being both succinct and in-depth at the same time about the new viewer upgrade.

Events

UPCOMING: Monday, March 1st at 2pm Pacific - Anders Grondstedt, President of The Gronstedt Group, as he tells us how Schneider Electric and IBM have found a strategic planning solution in Second Life. Attend the live event here.

Virtual Fashion Offers Opportunities for Designers
Using virtual environments to launch fashion products.

Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual
Presentation on the transition into using virtual environments as training and collaboration tools.

Real World Expos in Virtual Spaces
How sales were impacted by having a virtual component to a real world expo.

Training and Education

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference - March 12-13
The “big show” in education. Don’t miss it!

Problem-based learning in Second Life: new resource
University of Derby and Aston University releases “Best Practices in Virtual Worlds Teaching: A guide to using problem-based learning in Second Life”, download it here.

Government and Military

Second Life at Work
The Department of Agriculture seeks to use Second Life as a meetings and collaboration tool.

Gaming

Child’s Play Goes Virtual: CBSNews.com Visits Engage Expo Floor
See video below on CNN’s coverage of the Engage! toy fair:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Advertisers are disappointed with Sony’s virtual world as an ad platform
… because it sucks. Sorry Sony.

Health

Imagine Solutions: Transforming health care through a patient-focused delivery system
The Mayo Clinic looks at SL.

Virtual Poster Session = Green Travel
Pharma covers a global pharmaceutical firm conducting a virtual poster session in ProtoSphere.

Second Lives Clinic: demonstrating autologous stem cell transplant in Crohn’s disease
Take THAT Crohn’s disease!

Nerds

Scientific Research in Virtual Worlds
Detailing efforts in Sociology, Psychology, and Engineering. Lots of cool stuff here.

Newbs

Is ‘Virtual World’ replacing reality?
Everybody panic!!!

Misc.

Virtual worlds pose compliance risks
A fantastic breakdown of the issues surrounding communication, behavior and archiving risks in virtual worlds.

Why sales of virtual goods are soaring.
Forbes takes a look at virtual goods.

Linden Lab boss: sex isn’t the key to Second Life
PC Pro is embarrassed into thinking before typing. Kudos to Linden Lab for responding to this kind of thing; a good change in policy.

1. Interface Cleanup: The old interface was a disaster. There’s no other way to say it. For new users it was like being threatened with the edge of a broken bottle, daring them to try to figure that nonsense out. This is much better. Well, not perfect, but better than a broken bottle in the face.
2. Current Location Easily Accessible: Just like in your web browser, your location in Second Life is now at the top of your screen. Copy/paste it into a document, send it to a friend, or paste locations up there that you want to visit. Now if they could find a way to make them shorter and more memorable…
3. Places To Explore: The worst part about entering Second Life for the first time, apart from the interface, has been the complete lack of direction for finding something interesting to do. While some will inevitably whine about the “preferential treatment” these destinations are getting, this was a critical change.
4. Improved Avatar Customization: Its still way to complex for new users, but they’ve made it much easier than it was before.
5. You can buy a house!: In the real world you can just buy a house and furnish it, and now you can in Second Life too. Thank goodness. Before you had to buy some land, make sure it was big enough for what you needed (which, as a new user, you have no real clue about), then find somewhere that sells houses, and figure out the build tools to deploy it correctly. Forget all that now: just go buy a house. *whew*
6. Webpages On Walls: A game-changing feature. Watch YouTube or run other Flash-based applications on your wall, no problem. Even bigger: users can just click the surface to automatically zoom in on it properly. Genius!

I’m usually loathe to give the Linden Lab crew too much credit for development of new features as it all seemingly comes at a glacier’s pace, but this was a huge leap forward for them. New users might actually get through an entire orientation without smashing their keyboards in frustration! Well done guys.

Now don’t stop here; keep it up!

Video Resources

A general overview of the Second Life 2.0 interface.

Web content on walls parts 1 and 2
(called “Shared Media” because they just can’t help but make up new terminology for you to learn… aren’t you grateful… )

You can buy a house. (”Linden Homes”)

The full set of in-depth tutorials covering every little thing in the new interface.

Second Life Basic Orientation

A short 2 minute clip describing what you need to know to go to a meeting in Second Life. I created this video for Clever Zebra with simplicity in mind: just cover the basics, and worry about extras like avatar customization and flying after people have had a meeting and perceive that learning more is worth the extra time.

As always your feedback welcome.