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METANOMICS IN THE NEWS - ENTERPRISE 2.0 CONFERENCE

NOVEMBER 4, 2009

ANNOUNCER: Metanomics is brought to you by Remedy

Communications and Dusan Writer’s Metaverse.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Hi. I’m Robert Bloomfield, professor at

Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Today we continue exploring Virtual Worlds in the larger sphere

of social media, culture, enterprise and policy. Naturally, our

discussion about Virtual Worlds takes place in a Virtual World.

So join us. This is Metanomics.

ANNOUNCER: Metanomics is filmed today in front of a live

audience at our studios in Second Life. We are pleased to

broadcast weekly to our event partners and to welcome

discussion. We use ChatBridge technology to allow viewers to

comment during the show. Metanomics is sponsored by the Johnson

Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and

Immersive Workspaces. Welcome. This is Metanomics.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Welcome to Metanomics! Today we have a very

special mixed-reality show. Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon will be

at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, announcing

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Linden Lab’s new enterprise solution, named Second Life

Enterprise. Mark will be joined in San Francisco by

Douglas Maxwell, Program Technology Lead for the US Navy’s Naval

Undersea Warfare Center. Douglas’s colleague Steven Aguiar will

be speaking from Second Life, as will Neil Katz, who has been

responsible for IBM’s technical strategy for immersive Virtual

Worlds. The session will be hosted by Doug Thompson, CEO of

Remedy Limited, a communications firm that also happens to own

Metanomics.

For those of us who have been focused on serious uses of Virtual

Worlds, this has the potential to be a watershed moment. I can’t

help but think back to the very first episodes of Metanomics in

September of 2007, 2 years and about 85 episodes ago. I kicked

off the series with an episode called Metanomics 101, in which I

defined Metanomics as the economics of the Metaverse, a term for

Virtual Worlds popularized in the science fiction novel Snow

Crash by Neal Stephenson.

I think of those early days because they show just how far

Second Life has come in two years. Back then, Second Life didn’t

have voice so we had to use Skype to patch in sound. Linden Lab

would take the grid down for maintenance just about every

Wednesday and any other time they needed to so, more than once,

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that was during Metanomics. Guests, and entire regions even,

would crash without notice. Second Life was pretty clearly not

ready for prime time enterprise use, and that was reflected in

the topics that we covered on Metanomics. We devoted most of our

sessions to business and policy matters that affected the

resident community.

Second Life was filled with entrepreneurs, banks, stock markets,

designers, and these people came on to Metanomics to talk about

the challenges they faced in running a virtual business in a

world of anonymity and complete dependence on the platform

developer, Linden Lab. We also brought in legal scholars to

examine challenges of governing virtual communities, identifying

the right legal analogies. We had a senior staff member from the

Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress talk about the

regulation and even the taxation of resident businesses.

But when we covered enterprise in our first year, it was

primarily through covering other platforms, like Forterra and

There.com. A year later, it was a different story. Second Life

had become much more reliable and had introduced voice

technology. While not every resident was a fan of voice, which

made it hard to be anonymous, it was a boon to enterprise users.

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In November of 2008, Victoria Coleman, of Samsung, provided one

of my favorite descriptions of the value of Virtual Worlds for

enterprise. Victoria was leading a team of engineers in the U.S.

and Korea, and conference calls were simply not cutting it for

them. A big problem was the language barrier. The Korean

participants were simply not confident enough about their

language skills to interrupt and say their piece in a conference

call. So they couldn’t accomplish the most basic task of a

collaborative group, which is to communicate their ideas. Let me

quote a bit of what Victoria said on the show about how things

changed when they moved from the conference calls to Second

Life. She says, “The same Korean people, who were really

reluctant to get on the phone and were very shy and wouldn’t say

anything, would show up in the Virtual World environment, decked

out in completely fantastic outfits. They would be very

sociable, very talkative. It was really like talking to a

completely different set of people. So the fact that Second Life

created this medium that let them connect with us, but in a way

that amplified their skills versus made the lack of English into

a central point, all of a sudden became a truly empowering

experience for them.” That was Victoria Coleman talking about

her experience at Samsung.

Samsung isn’t the only group that saw the promise of Virtual

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Worlds for enterprise, and, since summer of 2008, about half of

our shows have covered the enterprise-oriented projects of just

about every type of organization you can think of, from

nonprofits like American Cancer Society to tech giants like

Microsoft to a variety of federal agencies.

Today, Linden Lab makes a big leap forward with Second Life

Enterprise. As I understand it, Second Life Enterprise allows

firms to run Second Life servers behind their own firewalls. Not

only does this allow security, but firms will have control over

user accounts, data transfers, and key server decisions. No more

worries that Linden Lab will restart your servers in the middle

of a big presentation to your boss or a key client. One of the

most unusual features distinguishing Second Life Enterprise from

other Virtual World enterprise solutions is, well, Second Life

itself. Second Life proper still boasts a large and extremely

energized and creative resident community, and I do mean

creative, as you can see by all of the different content that we

have featured on Metanomics. Owners of Second Life Enterprise

can tap into this community, and transfer assets between Second

Life and their own instance of Second Life Enterprise.

Now no doubt many of you are thinking that there is a great deal

of content in Second Life that isn’t actually intended for

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enterprise use. That’s true. But Victoria Coleman’s experience

with Samsung conveys an important message. The rather whimsical

nature of Second Life content can be very effective in fostering

traditional corporate goals of teamwork, collaboration and

brainstorming. Corporations go on hiking retreats and play

softball; why not have the occasional meeting led by a gorilla,

for example, as I once hosted a Metanomics episode?

Residents of Second Life should also be aware that enterprises

that adopt Second Life Enterprise are potentially creating a new

group of Second Life residents. After all, a key barrier to

entry in Second Life is simply getting to know its interface and

tools. Once people have come into Second Life Enterprise for

work in the day, at night, why not go to Muse Isle’s new Midwest

snowscape for a little ice skating?

I’ve got one last thought. Widespread adoption of Second Life

Enterprise may well change the nature of enterprise overall, in

ways we can’t yet imagine. In summer of 2009, Margaret Regan, of

the FutureWork Institute, talked about, well, the future of work

on Metanomics. Margaret has a vision of enterprises being

structured more like Hollywood productions: a team assembles for

a task, they make the film, and they disband once they complete

it. This is a very different labor market, and it’s a very

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different and much more decentralized way of managing a large

enterprise.

This model, if it’s going to be possible, will require a very

strong platform for virtual collaboration. Second Life

Enterprise might be that platform if it can do what Professor

Mitzi Montoya, of North Carolina State University, spoke about

during her Metanomics appearance. A good collaborative platform

needs to allow people to engage with one another, engage with

the subject matter at hand and engage with the environment in

which they are collaborating. The level of engagement Second

Life already provides its resident community tells me that

Second Life Enterprise has promise.

Of course, the devil is in the details. So let’s turn now to the

live panel in San Francisco to hear those details. I’m

Robert Bloomfield turning the reins over to Doug Thompson, who

will be introducing the speakers and moderating the discussion.

We’ll have a short break as we switch over to the live feed, but

I’ll see you in there in the text chat.

INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION

DOUG THOMPSON: Thanks for your patience, everybody, and

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welcome. It’s good to see a full room here, and we have a full

room online as well. As I mentioned before the session started,

we are broadcasting live to Second Life and to the web. Today

we’re going to be talking about the future of work. That was the

title of the session, but this whole conference really is about

the future of work. We’ve been hearing a lot about how

technology can help us to collaborate better, connect more

effectively and share knowledge and experience.

There was a great quote yesterday, by Andrew McAfee, of MIT, and

he was talking about how, with Enterprise 2.0 technology, we are

looking for ways to narrate our work. I love that phrase

“narrate our work.” Because today we are going to explore this

idea a little bit more by looking at immersive media or Virtual

Worlds.

We’re joined by two panelists here: Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden

Lab, and Doug Maxwell, of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. And

we’ll be joined shortly by two other guests who will be

conferenced in. So to kick things off, I’m going to pass it over

to Mark Kingdon to talk about some work that Linden Lab has

done. And, I’ll pass it over to you, Mark.

MARK KINGDON: Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Dusan, and

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thank you to our folks in-world as well for attending the

conference this morning and joining us here as we talk about the

future of work. To get us started, I thought I’d do a pop quiz.

You expected probably something a little bit different, but I

thought we’d do a pop quiz. And, most of you, if not all of you,

should have gotten a laser pen. Do you have one? It’s in a small

box on the table, if you don’t. Get it out because it’s part of

the pop quiz. Read the warning label if you’d like. The print’s

a little bit small for me, but it says, “Use this carefully

because it could probably blind you and burn you.” So we’re

going to try to use it safely today, and it’s part of the pop

quiz. So get it out.

The first thing I’m going to have you do is point it at the

ceiling, which is not hard to do. And then, if you push this

bar, you’ll get a light on the ceilings. It looks like a little

firefly. Okay. Most of you are doing it. Yes, don’t blind any

friends. Now we’re going to test a little bit and see how your

aim is so follow me over here. Okay. Yeah. Pretty good. Hand-eye

coordination is about I’d say B-minus, but we’ll try it some

more. Towards the middle here. Yeah, okay. Great. And then

behind me. All right. Good enough for the quiz, I think. All

right.

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So let’s test by pointing at the screen. Don’t blind anyone in

the front of the room. All right. You’re pretty good. Let’s go

to the right-hand bullet. You’re there. Good enough for the

quiz. All right. So the first question is:

Do you have teams in your companies that work remotely? Yes

or no. Yes. Good news.

Are you currently using web or video conferencing more

frequently today than in the past? Yes. Wouldn’t be here if you

didn’t.

How satisfied are you with your web and video conferencing

technologies? Yeah. Exactly. I don’t see many fives or fours,

that’s for sure, and I think you all probably fall within the

two to four range.

How important is security in your work collaboration tools?

Again, all over the board but leaning towards the high end,

which you would expect in most companies or enterprises.

Have you ever attended a meeting or an event in a Virtual

World? Okay. So we’re slightly more than probably half. Yes.

Have you ever been in Second Life? Okay. Pretty evenly

split. Well, good. This helps us know a little bit about you as

we talk about the power of Virtual Worlds today.

You can put your laser pens away now. I’m glad to see that no

one was hurt, and, if you didn’t get a pen, there are more at

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our booth out in the booth area. We have quite a stack out

there, and the team’s happy to share one with you.

So we’re going to talk a little bit today about virtual work and

how work in the enterprise is changing as workforces change and

needs change.

There are two sets of opposing trends that are driving what we

see is the adoption of virtual work technologies. The first set

of opposing trends is the fact that workforces today are more

globally organized than ever before. Even in our small company

of 300 people, moving soon to 400, 30 percent of our staff work

remotely, and they work from countries around the world. Travel

has become prohibitively expensive, in terms of cash and carbon.

When you put the facts together, you have a globally organized

workforce and the need to connect, what does that mean? It means

it’s hard do so, which draws people into the Virtual World

because it’s a wonderful facsimile for the kinds of connection

you can get in the Real World.

Another set of opposing trends is bringing people into the

Virtual World. One is that, in order to rapidly innovate, you

need to be together to create. I was at a presentation recently

that John Chambers gave, and he talked about what he saw as the

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next wave of productivity in business. He said it would come,

not from supply-chain management, as it had in the past, or even

refined investment in information technology. He said it would

come from increased productivity through collaboration. We

believe very much the same thing, which is that collaboration

brings people together and allows people to innovate more

rapidly.

The challenge out there today, and I think this is what brings

people into the Virtual World, is that collaboration tools

generally are weak, two dimensional, don’t allow you to have a

presence, can often be asynchronous. And, when they’re

synchronous, there’s a technology barrier that keeps people

apart. So these are the opposing factors that we think are

driving people into the Virtual World. Gartner published a study

recently that looked at adoption of Virtual Worlds and believes

that, by 2012, more than 70 percent of organizations,

enterprises will use private Virtual Worlds to support

collaboration and interaction in their business.

We think that Virtual Worlds are an incredible compliment to

traditional collaboration tools. Not a substitute for, but a

great compliment to. They offer persistence and presence. You

can represent yourself in the form of an avatar. You can work in

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an environment that persists after you leave. It also offers

layered communication opportunities, through text, spatial voice

and audio. And you can interact with your environment in ways

that you can’t, say, in a video conference. So it adds another

layer of richness to the collaborative experience.

Today when we look at Second Life, there are more than 1,300

enterprises or organizations in Second Life, moving towards

1,400, doing everything from events and meetings to training and

simulations, large companies with distributed workforces.

Businesses in Second Life are doing all kinds of things today.

They’re doing recruiting, virtual meetings, scenario-based

planning, data visualization, team building, complex simulations

of supply chains and data centers and manufacturing facilities.

They’re prototyping products. They’re engaging with consumers.

They’re meeting investors to discuss investor relations. Every

imaginable activity in business we’re seeing today in the

Virtual World space. Some of our panelists will talk about what

they’re doing, and they’ll give you a richer sense of the

possibilities.

One way to think about Virtual Worlds and their evolution into

the future is to look at it through the eyes of an employer or

worker in an enterprise. So we’re going to look at the future of

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Virtual Worlds through the eyes of Zoey. Zoey’s a designer and a

really cool company. It’s a new division of a manufacturing

company that makes office furniture. They have a new method of

manufacture that allows them to work with suppliers in local

markets, minimize the transfer costs of products, build them

almost to order in local markets. She relies on a global

footprint from a supplier perspective and a market perspective,

to create and then bring these products to market.

Some of the complicators in her job are that she works from home

a few days a week, and many of her partners, as well as her

customers, are in other parts of the world. And she needs to be

able to communicate and collaborate with them, particularly

around product design, in a way that’s very powerful and enables

them to share materials, designs, ideas in a real-time way.

Now imagine Zoey working in Second Life trying to do those

things. Imagine a future that’s not at all far down the road,

you can see a Zoey who perhaps got her job through a job fair

that she went to in Second Life, went through the interview

process in Second Life, was assigned a mentor, given a space to

work in Second Life where she created her own unique space to

connect with her customers and her suppliers. In the case of

Zoey, it’s probably a giant table in a field, with a small

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office sitting on top, since she’s interested in furniture

design.

She goes to company meetings in Second Life. She connects with

her co-workers and partners, collaborators around the world. She

works with suppliers to look at their manufacturing process, to

make sure it’s on spec, that it uses lean manufacturing methods,

that it’s eco-friendly, that the product is designed in such a

way that it’s easily shipped. Then once the product is

created--of course, she’s been working with the suppliers and

manufacturers throughout the process--she can begin to work with

distribution partners, demonstrating the product in Second Life

before it’s actually shipped out to the market.

Now you could say, “Gee, can’t Zoey do this today in Second

Life?” And, arguably, she can do a lot of this in Second Life

today, on the main grid of Second Life. But there’s an element

of her work that her company might not be comfortable with her

doing in Second Life because it turns out that her company, she

being part of a startup in a much larger organization, has very

stringent rules around security, and they have a very robust set

of internal systems for document sharing, planning and the like.

And, for them, an optimal experience would be one where part of

the Second Life experience happened behind their firewall. And,

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when you think about Second Life today and you think about

virtual work, there are companies that want a public experience,

where they can interact with customers quite freely, they would

buy an island in Second Life and do that.

There are those who also want an experience that’s by invitation

only. Perhaps they want to invite select suppliers in for

conversations or select customers. They could do that on our

main grid today, just using our basic permissions controls. But

then there are elements of the Second Life experience that they

want behind their firewall, connected through LDAP to their

internal systems. And that’s where the need for a “behind the

firewall” solution comes in. We see the Second Life experience

evolving in very much that way.

There’s a public, what I would call “private by invitation only”

and a firewalled experience. And it is because of our vision of

the Second Life experience and how it’s evolving that we decided

to invest last year in a “behind the firewall” solution. And

this was very much driven by customer demand. Companies came to

us, and they said, “The Second Life experience doesn’t feel

complete to us until you had a “behind the firewall” solution.

There’s a lot that can do and do do and want to continue doing

on your main grid. But, for it to be complete, we need a “behind

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the firewall” solution that’s neatly integrated into our

internal systems and that allows a level of security that you

might not find elsewhere.

We also want the ability to bring our existing content from

Second Life into a “behind the firewall” solution, and we want

access to a rich array of content.” And that’s what we have done

with Second Life Enterprise, which today we’re announcing is in

Beta. It was code-named Nebraska. Many people who have

participated in the earlier Alpha and private Beta know it as

Nebraska. From here on, I think it’s going to be called Second

Life Enterprise. So Second Life Enterprise unlocks another level

of potential for virtual work because it will exist behind the

firewall.

There are a couple of features that make Second Life Enterprise

very powerful. I talked a little bit about security. Content is

also very important. One of the major costs of the virtual world

and working the virtual world is the creation of content. Second

Life offers an amazing marketplace for content. This year in

Second Life there will be 500 million U.S. dollars in user-to-

user transactions, a good part of which are content, people

buying office furniture. I have beautiful office furniture in my

Second Life office; none in my real office. And we’re going to

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enable people to move content that they own from the main grid

into Nebraska. And then later in the first quarter, we’re going

to open a marketplace that’s for enterprise, and it will be the

first content marketplace for enterprises in a virtual world,

Second Life specifically. And this will a boon for companies

that are building their presence in Second Life. Certainly there

will be things that they want to do that are highly customized

to what it is that they’re doing. But there are also basic needs

that people have that can easily be acquired.

The “behind the firewall” product, Second Life Enterprise, will

also be quite flexible in that it can be integrated into an

enterprise’s existing systems, and offer a very high level of

control. You can set up accounts in bulk for your company, use

real names, have an administration panel as you would expect in

a product like this.

There are a couple of features that we’re really really excited

about. Beyond the security and beyond the content richness,

Second Life, if you’ve experienced it, has spatial 3D voice,

which means if you’re sitting around a conference table in

Second Life and someone is speaking, have your headphones on,

you feel as if you’re in the room with them. It’s uncanny. And

it’s because there’s a 3D orientation to the source of the

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voice. That’s going to be available in Second Life Enterprise as

part of the solution.

We’ll also have standard communications with text chat and other

things you find in Second Life today. You’ll be able to have 800

plus avatars in the same immersive environment across eight

regions. And as I mentioned before, you’ll have administrative

control. You’ll be able to use real names, which is not

something you can easily do on the main grid today, and you’ll

have the marketplace which I mentioned before.

I talked a bit before about the key features. Here they are in a

little bit more detail. At our booth we have spec sheets and all

of the things that you need to understand Second Life Enterprise

at a much more detailed level. This is a very comprehensive

product that we’re putting out in Beta. And it’s comprehensive

because we’ve been working with 14 different organizations on

the Alpha and Beta product development, played a very active

role with us in defining the requirements and helping us build

the solution that we think is incredibly powerful.

All right. So you can learn more about Second Life Enterprise at

our booth, or you could go to our website, work.secondlife.com.

Thank you.

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DOUG THOMPSON: Thanks, Mark. We’re really lucky today now

talking about virtual environments, it made the most sense to

actually patch in a virtual environment, and we have two guests

who are joining us from Second Life. They’re actually on a stage

in Second Life, and there’s about 200 people watching them right

now in a virtual environment, and this is also being streamed to

the web. We’re joined by Steve Aguiar, also of the Naval

Undersea Warfare Center, and Neil Katz of IBM. So that’s who’s

joining us in-world.

There’s been so many case studies, use cases, examples of

technology here at the conference, what we wanted to do was get

some of your use cases and to find out people who have been

using Second Life Enterprise for the last six months or a year,

find out what they’ve been using it for so we can kind of get a

sense of the range of applications that you folks here in the

audience might want to think about.

I’m going to start here at our live panel and welcome

Doug Maxwell. Doug is a staff researcher at the Center for

Advanced System Technology at NUWC. And, welcome, and maybe

share a little bit about what you’ve been doing behind the

firewall.

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DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Well, thank you, Mark and Doug. We have a

number of research goals. We go beyond just the normal training

applications that we can also discuss a bit later. But we would

also like to create a collaborative engineering environment,

using Virtual Worlds. What we would like to do is be able to

prototype next-generation combat attack centers inside of

submarines and be able to quickly and efficiently show alternate

designs. We would also like to connect to the shipyards and the

fleet users and bring fleet users in earlier in the design phase

so that we can catch any issues earlier. I believe Steve will

have some other comments on our training applications.

One thing that has attracted us to the Second Life framework is,

it has a very robust external communications mechanism so we can

also link objects in-world to Legacy simulators that we’ve spent

quite a bit of time and resources developing elsewhere. So for

example, we can have an unmanned vehicle, as a model represented

inside of Second Life, driven by one of our Legacy behavioral

models outside. I could go on and one, but those are some of the

highlights.

DOUG THOMPSON: We’ll pass it over to your colleague.

Steve Aguiar is also at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. He

was appointed the project lead for the Virtual Worlds

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exploration and application program. Steve, welcome to our

session.

STEVE AGUIAR: Thank you. It’s a real honor to be here. Having

worked with the technology for a while, it’s really interesting

to talk about this. I will just start out by saying that every

week or so we are finding new ways of using this, and it’s a

very interesting process to go through. Doug talked about our

collaborative engineering examples with design of command and

controls for new submarines. I’ll just throw in an anecdote that

last week I was attending a conference in Sweden, and, right in

the middle of the conference support, I’m working with engineers

back in Newport, designing these combat control systems. So the

remote accessibility of this stuff is really important.

But just to emphasize a little on the training example, you

think very simply of distributed learning, say, with classroom

training. But we’re also using it for scenario simulations,

using real operational areas and real tactical missions,

contextual or immersive learning where the power of the Virtual

World is allowing your student to be immersed in information

spaces that otherwise was impossible. We’re also looking at

procedural training and even just simple augmentation of Legacy

content such as Flash. So we’re not replacing all our training

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content; we’re augmenting it with the Virtual World capacities.

DOUG THOMPSON: Awesome! Our fourth panelist is Neil Katz, who

is an IBM distinguished engineer and a member of the IBM Academy

for Technology. Welcome, Neil.

NEIL KATZ: Welcome. Thank you for having me here.

DOUG THOMPSON: What kind of range of use cases are you seeing

for immersive or Virtual World technology at IBM?

NEIL KATZ: Well, I think many of the use cases that Mark

addressed is really what we’re seeing it being used for. In a

large globally distributed company, like IBM, we have teams that

help us in emerging geographies: India, China, and then across

the U.S. Even my team, we’re not all together, with members in

Austin and myself in South Florida, and Burlington, New York. In

this day, when it’s just that much harder to get together, we

see using this for meetings and large events where it gives a

very immersive and interactive and collaborative experience that

you can’t get by other means such as web meetings, not that this

is a replacement for them, but it provides that alternative. In

addition, of course, using it for learning activities and other

type of collaborative activities are other use cases that we’re

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applying the use for Virtual Worlds inside our enterprise.

DOUG THOMPSON: It’s interesting at this conference, it’s like

there’s a narrative arc that’s kind of happened in the

Enterprise 2.0 market. It sounds like this year there’s

sufficient evidence to really put forth a good case for why

Enterprise 2.0 technology makes sense to deploy in your

organization. And Virtual World technology, as part of that

Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem of technologies, also has a lot of

data. But I’m kind of curious, from the panelists, how do you

keep your project sponsors? How do you measure whether this

stuff is working and whether it’s successful? I’m going to jump

back in-world, maybe pass this back to Neil.

NEIL KATZ: I think the way we measure it inside of IBM is

really through the community and the interest generated by the

community in using these types of environments. And so we have

programs inside where we can deploy Virtual Worlds and then,

through internal communications, that generates interest. And,

through that generation of interest, we’re able to then create

that internal viral effect, which creates more demand.

So we’ve seen significant interest inside of IBM for using these

virtual events, starting a year ago, to where we are today.

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We’re at the point now we’re running at least one virtual event

a day on our internal systems with just continued demand. So

that’s really how we measure it is really by the community and

this viral approach to getting increasing demand through using

it, leveraging it and interacting with it on a regular basis.

DOUG THOMPSON: Maybe I’ll pass this over to Doug as well

because I imagine you needed a project sponsor to get your stuff

up and running. Tell us how that works.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: We have a number of project sponsors, but

really the metrics that you use are dependent upon the activity

that you’re engaged in. So if you want to measure proficiency in

a Virtual World training application [versus?] a Real World

training application, that’s fairly easy to do. One thing that

we also do in some of our testing in our virtual combat control

experiments is, we want to know things like can a sailor do

time-to-target with a certainty the same inside of a Virtual

World as they can inside of a Real world. So right now we’re

just wrapping up some experiments in that realm, and what we

would like to do is bring a more statistically relevant sample

in there, to be able to actually produce scientific validation

of our hypothesis. And, again, it really depends on what

activity you’re engaged in for your metrics.

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DOUG THOMPSON: So, Steve, I’m going to ask you the same

question. I got to go to my boss and tell him I want to bring an

avatar to work. What kind of proof am I going to bring my boss

that I should be doing that?

STEVE AGUIAR: Well, we’re still gathering that proof. And, as

Doug pointed out, it really is application specific. That is the

holy grail to be able to come back with metrics and numbers and

quantify that, if you invest this amount of dollars, you’re

going to get this much more productivity. A lot of our benefits

are just more subjective. For example, we are seeing improved

product quality and customer satisfaction, and our customer is

the U.S. Navy so, to us, that is a very important metric. Now

we’ve just started scratching the surface of the application so

as we’re developing the applications in tandem, we’re developing

the ways to measure success. I’ll just also add too that, from a

project perspective, at a high level we are seeing significant

and quantifiable return on investment by using these products so

I can leave it with that.

DOUG THOMPSON: I’m going to pass it back to Mark for a second

because he’s kind of got a bird’s eye view of the types of

organizations that are using this technology. We have IBM and

these guys here; those are large organizations. Can you point to

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metrics or examples across a wider range?

MARK KINGDON: Sure. There are as many examples as there are

applications. We have some case studies on our website,

work.secondlife.com, that lay those out in more detail. One

common metric people look at, if they’re looking at this as a

substitute for some sort of conference is the reduction in

travel costs. I think that underestimates the benefit because

you’re just looking at a cost savings, and you’re not looking at

the productivity gain. But even that justifies a very high

return on investment. So I think it very much depends on the

application. Check out the website, and look at some of the case

studies. The thing about Second Life is that it’s easy enough to

try right on the main grid and bring project sponsors in that

way, which is what we see a lot of.

DOUG THOMPSON: Doug made a comment earlier, which was about

bringing in other content. I think one of the big topics here at

this conference has been bringing Enterprise 2.0 technology into

IT systems where there are already systems that exist. So I

think it was at yesterday’s keynote they talked about, “We’re

not going to get rid of email and Blackberries overnight so how

can we bring in Enterprise 2.0 applications that link into

that?” I’m curious because, when I first thought of Virtual

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Worlds, I think of them as this separate place that you go. It’s

kind of this place that you log into that becomes disconnected

from web-based or internal information. Maybe I’ll ask Doug here

first: Does this technology--can it be integrated into

enterprise systems, and what’s that connection to web-based

content?

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: One thing that we have to do is, when we get

into these systems, you have to remember that it’s serious work,

and so you have to treat it just like serious work. When we do

integration-type demonstrations to potential sponsors, we’ve

learned that just the magic of being able to connect their

Legacy systems into the in-world objects and being able to

connect people via the multilayered chat and IM is all great.

But when the first question out of their mouth is, “Why is that

guy wearing wings?” you know you’ve got kind of a problem. So

kind of an obscure answer to your question is the reason we like

the Virtual Worlds platform is because they’re so flexible. And

it’s easy for us, depending on the kind of latencies you need,

to bring in other content whether it be web-based or video or

even Legacy simulators into the system and treat it just like

real serious work.

DOUG THOMPSON: So, Neil, let me throw this over to you. If I

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was an application developer building an Enterprise 2.0

application, can I extend existing applications to include an

immersive environment with things like the Second Life

Enterprise?

NEIL KATZ: You have to go through certainly the scenario and

the use case for this application developer and make sure that

it applies to a Virtual World. But the thing that we’re working

on and we have done is making sure that we integrate our

instance of Virtual Worlds with our enterprise back ends. The

biggest thing, of course, is integrating it with the corporate

directory so that people log in with their user ID and password

that they are most familiar with. But then beyond that is

allowing it to integrate with the existing tools and systems

that we have so that they can easily bring in their existing

desktop applications that they need integrated with the

libraries of content that they have and be able to bring that

easily within the Virtual World so that we try to make the

experience as seamless as possible. So for an application

developer, of course, it’s kind of understanding what the users

expect and then using the tools that are available, integrating

it with the Virtual World environment.

DOUG THOMPSON: Steve, I’m going to toss this next question over

30

to you, if that’s all right, which is: What has surprised you or

delighted you or where did you get a return that maybe you

weren’t expecting from using Virtual World technology?

STEVE AGUIAR: I think every day at work I get a new surprise. I

would like to just talk though for a moment that when you give

demonstrations of this product, to try to explain it to various

levels of management or program offices, I find it very useful

to remember that every individual comes to this technology

different, with different levels of experience. And some people

get it right away, and some people just don’t get it. I would

definitely recommend that my experience has shown I’ve had to

demo two or three or four times even, and I cross different

applications before that light bulb goes on. And then suddenly

that person who was a naysayer or just didn’t understand it is

one of our biggest advocates. So on such occasion, one person at

a time, and, once they get past that threshold, then they come

back to me with ideas that I had never even dreamed of, and

hence the innovation just starts to happen, and that’s what I

really like about the technology.

DOUG THOMPSON: That’s wonderful. So where do you see this going

next, or, if you had one piece of advice for somebody who was

thinking of taking on this technology, what would that be, Doug?

31

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: I think it would be, again, to take it

seriously and to make sure that you understand your audience,

the people who you’re pitching your ideas and who you’re

approaching for funding. If they’re savvy and they understand

the platform, then you can go a little bit crazy with your

demos, but, if they’re quite conservative or if they’re perhaps

a bit hostile to it, don’t show up looking like a dragon. That

would be my best advice and make sure that you understand your

audience.

DOUG THOMPSON: It’s interesting. And I can’t remember who said

this, but it was somebody from IBM, however, and I’m going to

give the alternate view, which was that you can do serious

business--and it was somebody from IBM, and I think it was

David Levine. He said, “but at the end of doing the serious

business, they take the IBM folks sailing.” Because there’s

something about the water cooler effect and the team building

and a sense of kind of getting outside of your normal box, which

actually does add something that has a measurable return. Neil,

maybe I’ll just pass it over to you for a comment. Where does

this all take us?

NEIL KATZ: Well, who knows where it’s going to take us. I think

what we’re really trying to do is get people to experience it,

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and it’s one of those things that we can talk to it, give people

demonstrations of it, but what we’re really doing is making it

as easy as possible to allow different people and groups to come

in and experience it themselves of providing the tools and the

facilities to easily get onboard and begin to hold meetings and

events. Certainly you have skeptics as in any new emerging

technology, but it’s actually amazing what you hear from people

who actually experience it, where they come in and afterwards

they say, “I thought I’d really hate this, but I’m actually

amazed that I really enjoyed my experience.” You hear that

regularly from people who come in. And so where is it going? Who

knows. We will continue to make it available, enhance it, and it

will grow based upon what people are looking for.

DOUG THOMPSON: Steve, you made a bit of an interesting comment

earlier, which was each week you’re discovering something new,

which there’s been a lot of discussion here. There was a

presentation yesterday by somebody that was talking about doing

a new release every week of an enterprise software platforms. Is

that sort of what it’s like, rapid prototyping, iterative

prototyping, or describe how do you take advantage of this

technology once you’ve got it?

STEVE AGUIAR: Right now it’s still just all R&D for us, and,

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like I said, the more people we put into the environment, we’re

deploying our enterprise grid, if you will, to our R&D workforce

so that about 2,000 people will be able to access it in the near

future. And, to us, again, that should just open up innovation.

So my speculation is, as I sit one on one with individuals and

they say, “Can you do this with it and that with it?” and we

work out whether it’s the right maturity and the right

technology for the right problem set, more often than not we’re

finding that, yeah, there’s some real performance benefit here.

I’m looking forward to seeing all the other applications that

I’m not privy to or really knowledgeable of.

DOUG THOMPSON: On which note, I’ll pass it back to Mark for a

little future vision. If I was enterprise today, where could

this take me?

MARK KINGDON: I think it’s taking us, well, into another

dimension, the third dimension for sure. I think that Virtual

World space is incredibly rich, with possibility, because every

aspect of a company’s business can be enhanced by the Virtual

World space, and we’re at the very, very beginning, the first

step, I would say, in the adoption of this technology. I’m

absolutely convinced that, in the next five years, it will

change in very fundamental ways the way we work. And I can say

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that with confidence, not just because we developed this

product, but, because I spend one to five hours a day in Second

Life myself working, because we have a distributed workforce.

It’s such an incredibly powerful tool and much more powerful

tools than I’ve used in the past because of the level of

engagement and connection you can have with people.

That’s just one of probably hundreds of use cases because, at

Linden Lab, we’re not simulating warfare. I would say that my

business meetings are probably a little bit more pedestrian,

although I’d love to have a submarine, if you have a spare one

sitting around. But you can see the possibility set is almost

endless, and the next five years will bring change that we can’t

imagine today.

DOUG THOMPSON: I want to thank the panelists and wrap it up

again with the concept of virtual environments as providing an

opportunity for us to narrate our work and to go deeper that as

social technologies increasingly get picked up in the

enterprise, these are places that we can have rich experiences

as well. I’d like to thank you all for being here today, as well

as our online audience.

MARK KINGDON: Thank you very much. If I may add, I’d like to

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thank Dusan, from Metanomics, for bringing the panel together

and organizing this in-world experience. Thank you very much.

And I’d also like to say, if you’re interested, Judy Wade, who’s

our VP of Enterprise International, is here, and

Hamilton Hitchings is here, if you’d like to speak to the folks

that have been driving the development of Second Life

Enterprise, and our booth is over in the Trade Show. Thank you.

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