Focus, focus, focus

Clearly, there are many choices available for starting your business in a virtual world. Wait a second. There are too many. Second Life, Forterra, Multiverse, 3DExplorers, Twinity, Sony Home, Google Lively, Microsoft working in OpenSim, Sun's Project Wunderland. Doesn't this remind you of something? The 1980s?

There are so many choices - Multimate, Wordstar, Word Perfect, Pagemaker, dBase II, Symphony, Lotus, Excel, DOS, CPM, and on and on and on.

Clearly the economics of virtual worlds will sort things out; but, do think about this. The Internet is the underbelly of the virtual world, wheareas it wasn't in the days before TCP/IP and HTML. So, if we're going to reduce down to one platform, one solution seems highly unlikely. I know we all use Office, and we think it's the end-all and be-all; but, there is no real text in nature, there are no spreadsheets. There are 3D visual objects that are mostly biological and chemical in nature. 

The virtual world extravaganza, the journey into innovation, and multiple neurons and visualizations should be very exciting to the developers and users of virtual worlds. Pick one, say Second Life or Forterra. And build like a madman so you really understand the affordances, the business processes, the communication techniques. And prepare yourself for our next transformation in computing. Trust me, when the supercomputers arrive at your desktop, you want to make sure you know more than C:>

Virtual Worlds Conference

So the results are out, the Virtual World's Conference was a success. There were 31 booths, several awards, lots of interaction, videos shot, blogs sparking all sorts of debate, Hollywood on-board. It's a wonderful year for virtual worlds.

But, why in the heck did we have a virtual world's conference in Los Angeles in a physical building. How much international participation did we get? How many garage virtual world's couldn't afford to bring their breath-taking innovations to the table? How many enterprises just didn't show up because they were "only looking".

Folks, please, let's use our technology to conduct a virtual world's conference, or else, we're saying we don't believe in our products yet. We can make money doing this. We can choose a virtual world without angering everyone else. 

We're so few, the competition is extremely large and if we continue to insist it's big dollars, big oil and big events, we might as well just wait for Microsoft and Google to tell us what to do next.

I know transformation is our key goal. It must enter our business models and our interaction models. 

Now go out there and do the right thing.

Welcome to 2b3d or not 2b3d

Surviving in a 3D internet is going to take acculturation. You'll have to figure out how to move from the desktop, the 2d flat desktop of documents, file folders, pictures, into a 3d world of gaming like worlds in which depth matters.

Let's get the dialogue started on how that's going to happen.

First of all, you'll need to dive in. Join Second Life at http://get.secondlife.com and http://join.secondlife.com. Download a copy of Google Lively. Read Virtual Worlds News at http://www.virtualworlds.com and join the lively discussion in Google Lively, and Metanomics.net (which will take you back into Second Life). Point is pick one you like, dive in, set up a home, make some friends and business partners, and get out there and talk, build, interact, play, learn, do business. 

Just stop sitting their looking at your word processing document writing descriptions of how it's going to be.