Lady Gaga Telephone (Pomplamoose cover)

See also Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) - Beyonce. Hipsters are just loving this stuff. Ironic takes on popular songs make people feel so good about how very clever and “above it all” they are. Please remember to wear an expression that encapsulates focused disinterest or you’ll spoil it.

From a technological point of view, however, the above video represents how cheap and easy media has become to produce. Two people accomplish here what used to take dozens, using equipment that used to carry a prohibitive cost. A sign of the times, to be sure.

The issue I take is when people talk about us being able to do something fundamentally new here. Cheaper and faster, sure, but this isn’t actually anything new. The fact is that the same “hipster appeal” media can be produced without even using electricity:

Ukranian Polka Band playing “Hot N Cold”

Ok, sure, they’re not true hipsters because they sniggered before they started but it’s counter-balanced by the retro instrumentation. The point is that 20-somethings always consider themselves innovators by default, but pretty much always try to accomplish the exact same thing no matter what decade we’re in.

There’s a difference between new technology and true innovation.

While pop sociology isn’t what I’m primarily interested in, it’s necessary to point out that technological progress is having a ripple effect through the world of business at the moment. First websites, then email, then cell phones, and now smartphones have forced themselves into our daily lives whether we want them to or not.

Those seeking a competitive advantage often ask: “What are the kids into these days?” Many execs still feel scorched from missing the big scores of the dot-com bubble days, and want to know what’s being hyped as the next big thing before it gets forced down their throats.

This works itself out in both positive and negative ways: we sometimes find faster and cheaper ways of being productive, but we also occasionally spend time and money on things that are irrelevant. The real magic happens when we apply a little innovation.

Spinning Flax Into Gold

Take Twitter, for instance. When it first launched it was a waste of time. 90% of the content was completely useless, and only appealed to voyeur celebrity stalkers or friends who were enjoying a new way to chat. Since we were all so paranoid about missing the “next big thing”, however, massive resources were dumped into supporting the platform.

So many people had put their reputations on the line promoting Twitter that, with their backs up against the wall, they were forced to innovate. (Cue defensive technophiles rushing to the comments to tell me how unbelievably useful Twitter was even before it was released etc etc etc… guys, have a quiet moment of honesty with yourselves.) Eventually people figured out how to make it productive, shoehorning in social networking opportunities, hash-tag protocols for live on-location news updates, and quick polling for instant feedback.

The fact is that there was nothing inherently wonderful about Twitter. It was later innovation that turned it into a useful tool.

Here’s another great example: MySpace. Once the darling of the interwebs, everybody just had to be on it. Of course, then people realized that Facebook has a better interface, LinkedIn a more focused network, and custom made websites more flexibility. MySpace started to die.

How did it survive? Innovation. That MP3 player plugin, combined with some good deals with record companies, turned MySpace into one of the easiest and fastest ways for bands to promote themselves to an audience that might never listen to them otherwise. The built-in e-commerce system was a nice touch as well.

Virtual environments have the same issues. They can be a waste of time, or with a little applied innovation, the pivotal tool your business uses to create a serious competitive advantage.

The latest gadget will not save your company. Only innovation will.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

One of the biggest challenges I have always faced in my efforts to broaden the appeal of virtual environments is the perception that they’re just toys. The public’s thinking is often that gaming is not a business application, and so by extension virtual worlds are just a game that isn’t all that much fun.

The effort has been to help people see that a virtual environment has nothing at all to do with gaming, and is often a very practical solution to real world problems. Slowly this understanding is growing.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t acknowledge that the fun factor of virtual environments does play a part. I got involved with Second Life because I’m a gamer, despite it not actually being a game. The intuitive connection exists.

While my primary outreach strategy is currently the Virtual Worlds Keynote series, I’m beginning to realize that I need to start using gaming as a framework in my future planning. Gaming strategies lead to much better ROI than traditional project management. If I can find a way to leverage existing human instincts, rather than my current policy of educating people to overcome what their instincts are telling them, I’ll get further, faster.

The seeds of some new ideas are starting to germinate… but I’d love to hear your ideas, if you’re willing to offer them. I’ll give a +1 Vorpal Sword to the best one.

Virtual Worlds Keynote
Military Amputee Peer Support

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One of the great things about the Internet is that it connects people who, in the past, have had a hard time keeping in touch. In researching the phenomena of medical amputees rehabilitating and re-integrating into their home communities, it has been shown that peer support is a real key to the process.

This is where virtual world technology has stepped in as a perfect fit. The geographic boundaries are broken down, issues are addressed like body identification and self expression, and training scenarios for everyday things like going to a grocery store are properly simulated.

Doug Thompson and Remedy Communications seem to have approached the project right, taking as much feedback as possible not just from clinicians but also from the program participants. This has become a great support system with full web integration and social networking technologies, and is being rolled out for military veteran amputees and their families.

One thing that Doug mentioned during the presentation was that they discovered a need for this system with veterans from conflicts as far back as Vietnam. It’s good to know that there is continued support for those who have given so much.

What got me off topic today was our book club. We’re currently reading one of my favorite novels: “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” by Cory Doctorow. (Read it for free here.)

It got me thinking about something called “the singularity” again. This is a term first coined by Ray Kurzweil to describe the point in the near future when the pace technological innovation becomes, for all intents and purposes, infinite. Here’s a short video describing one aspect of the phenomenon:

THE IMMORTALISTS - a short film by Jason Silva

Immortality is within our grasp. Yes, for real. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Sadly, there’s a catch. Even when humanity is smart, we’re still horrible at dealing with each other. Sooner or later someone will decide that what the world really needs is a good apocalypse.

After all, in an age where the pace of technological innovation is infinite, you’ll have about three dozen cheap and easy ways to end all human life listed on six dozen popular blogs.

It could be that this phenomena of knowing that anyone could end it all at any moment might be the new way people come to live with death. For a time, mankind won’t be fearing their own deaths, but rather the end of all civilization.

What will finally end it, of course, will be those who try to prevent the end from coming. As organizations are formed to lock down the “dangerous” information or censor “dangerous” people, there will be a backlash from people objecting to being controlled. The schism between the opposing points of view will rise until eventually it produces someone who can’t stand an eternity of humanity being controlled in this way.

So they’ll end it for all of us.

When people make guesses as to how the world might end, they usually point at natural phenomena or ecological disaster. I’m putting $50 on the singularity. Any takers?

Doug Thompson, CEO of Remedy Communications

I’ve long been a fan of the work Virtual Ability Inc. (VAI) has done creating one of Second Life’s most flawless and in-depth orientation experiences. They’ve firmly established themselves as innovators in the field and so, when I find out about projects they’ve been a part of, I pay attention.

This is why I took notice when Doug Thompson mentioned in conversation that Remedy Communications had worked with them on a project funded by the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) of the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC). (There was a full press release about the project, linked here.)

For virtual environment geeks, this is a nice look at a use of the “behind-the-firewall” solution Linden Lab provides. For everyone else, however, this is a good look at why virtual environments are meaningful in the first place and how they can make all the difference to those using them.

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.

—

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.

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!

—

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.