Stanford Research Institute - Consulting Business Intelligence (aka. SRIC-BI http://www.sric-bi.com) today released results from a survey taken amongst the members of their own  Virtual Worlds Consortium, SDForum’s Virtual World SIG, Boulder, Colorado’s  Serious Second Life, and Stanford’s  MetaverseU.

The  download is available at: http://www.sric-bi.com and directly linked here (link opens .pdf document): http://www.sric-bi.com/news/VWCcollabwksurvey2008-03.pdf

The groups questioned largely focus on collaborative work (serious games) more than entertainment uses, and the survey was geared towards that.  Members of these groups are definitely motivated to use virtual worlds (70% see significant potential) and cite security and eases of use as key to adoption by enterprise and government customers.

The respondents were split 50/50 on whether Second Life would remain the leading VW platform in the next 2-3 years.

At least one quarter of the respondents use virtual worlds over 20 hours per week.  Another quarter only use them 1-5 hours per week.
Another 36% use virtual worlds in a 5-20 hour range, and the remaining 12.5% barely log on and use less than 1 hour per week.
<1 hour           12.5%
1-5 hours        26.3%
5-10 hours     15.0%
10-20 hours   21.3%
20+ hours       25%

That’s as far as I’ve had time to dig into this but there are a lot of forward-looking questions and interesting conclusions  in there - so take a look.

Thanks to  Dr. Eilif Trondsen of SRIC-BI  for conducting and sharing the survey.

-Bob Ketner

* Daniel Chalef, “Knowledge Tree
- started in S.Africa
- no dev world cust. Except China
- premium services
- “if you’re releasing under iso approved then you’re os
- pharma
- key trends: saas, community, freemium,

* Ismael Ghamili, Intalio
- cosmo - commercial open source
- users help each other for free version
- no outbound sales or vc
- virtual nuclear weapons testing
- digg type input for new features
- 2/3 leads from google search
- key trends: subscription not perpetual licensing, drives improvement

* Don Brown, Atlassian
- jira, open symphony,
- 20-30m, 9 products, saas
- 1/3 to 2/3 os products
- credit card purshases <$10k
- get code on purchase
- insane licensing and service and consultants drives govt to os
- co. contributes core but “pure” os is not going to be
possible otherwise where’s the business?
- key trends: free

* Chander Kant, Zmanda
- os backup/dev
- inside sales
- 2.0, defense, archiving
- if you compete with your free version then you are os

* moderator Andrew Aitken, Olliance
- what about multiple versions that get created/modified
- “freemium”

[Other namedrops: sugar crm, olpc, ]

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Global Open Source: VC Panel: Where’s the money?

* Kevin Efrusy, Accel
- must be THE company not A company
- great for the developer who works under a boss who “buys
software he learned about in an airline mag” and who could have completed
the project in the time taken for the server req. [Comment: story of
my life]
_ usage talks
- better to measure production heartbeats than downloads or heaven
forbid, feature count
- os fastest to global but another microsoft? It’s questionable
- downloads gameable - downloader is unlikely convert, -not decision
maker
- you have to sell this stuff, you must sell - money doesn’t just flow
through the home page through happy users this is not what happens
- 2 stages: ubiquity then money
- downtime terror drives paying customers
- sox inhibits ipo goals

* Vineet Buch, Blue Run Ventures
- if you don’t control it someone will give it away for free
- new concept that os is rational choice
- devs in Bangalore hit now by US recessipon
- very early stage, dinner napkin stage
- fire sales from direction disagreements
- acq may be better than ipo with couple of recent examples

* John Occhipini, Woodside Fund
- continued thirst for acqs until big co’s are in os
- global base to avoid recession
- recurring revenue stream
- product + service to run it in cloud model
- repeat entrepreneurs get napkin funding easier
- quality inside sales in marketing model
- speed of community important
- legacy proprietaries still need to migrate, this will drive hi$ acqs

* Philippe Cases, Partech
- microsoft WAS rhe low cost provider

* moderator Joe Brockmeyer, Novell

[Namedrops: recession, add-ons]

* See sdforum.org for Mar. 24 2008 for full  paricipants list.

* Sander Ruiter - Dutch Ministry uses os. For interoperability, less
depndent on suppliers, no complex licensing agreements

* Arnaud Le Hors, IBM
- os.now due to internet
-  even including retraining, switching to open office saves 60%, wow
- govt can’t distibute in prop. standards to public
- consider the ROI on linux
- IBM branded open office requested

* Mark Radcliffe, DLA Piper
- even DOD is interested
-  “if you’re writing software you’re infringing patents” so
you need your own pile for defense but file selectively. 15% of patents
are even worthwhile or active

* Tony Wasserman, Carnegie Mellon
- piracy of windows inhibits uptake of linux in dev. world
- open office big w. govts. esp. due to cost
- devices, nokia tablet ex. has 90% os.
- some companies won’t buy anything w/o svc. contract
- bus model: service, premium functions,

* moderator Dirk Riehle SAP
- SAP is leading os projects, linux, eclipse,

[Bob K commentary: what will pirates sell in an os world?]

MySQL
- everyone worked from home
- best way to organize is to not have an office
- business model on subscription or ads not license
- keeping “what works” is just inertia in the market
- Zuckerberg used it because it was free
- commodity hardware- open source- 2.0- SaaS - this is the new terrain
- open source is not a business model
- software patents are harmful
- 50m developers worldwide - who cares how many Ph Ds you hire, harness
the vast group for the speed of evolution
- MySQL employees at 110 airports - all you need is an internet
connection
- 60,000 people show up to the MySQL site daily
- “free” does not mean “free of charge” - just
means it’s free
- those who spend time to save money innovate - those who spend money
to save time pay for the service

- 90% of the features at 10% of the cost
- itls not an “exit” for him because he’s still running it.
The acq. was like IPO only better
-  “never be defensive” is the strategy
- key metrics was sales, downloads, traffic, blog posts, search
results, bug reports

Here’s that list from 03/19/08 from Mike Rhodin  of IBM Lotus that references 5 trends to embrace in the virtual workplace.

The press release is here: http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=834515&sourceType=1 

Here’s my own description of them:

1) “The Virtual Workplace will become the rule.”
Laptops and mobile devices will allow us to move beyond the “desk - typewriter - phone” model of the workplace. For many people of course this is already a way of life.  Social networking aspects of the virtual world will give the feeling of community.  The need for business travel will be reduced as virtual worlds and telepresence tools get better.

2) Real-time collaboration will become the norm. 
Email is too slow, and should be used (as it is in Second Life) as merely a cache of stored messages which arrived for you while you were asleep.  Again, already many young workers consider email too slow, having grown up on texting on phones.

3) “Beyond Phone Calls”. 
If you value productivity and time, the telephone is one of the least effective ways to communicate. Here IBM again mentions IM as being a tool for replacing many phone communications.  Now, of course the telephone is not going away, that’s not the point.  But there are huge benefits available in shifting select communications from phone to IM.

4) Interoperability desired.
IBM focuses on interoperability and open standards as inevitable as the space matures.  A lot of this just hasn’t been figured out yet and may not be, since platforms are generally competing business entities with different competencies. They are not necessarily interested in interoperability, whereas business just requires a coherent set of tools that does a few basic things flawlessly. That might not be found in any 1 platform, hence the cry for openness. They also mention increased ease of finding resources which could refer to ease of finding things in virtual worlds or better access to the correct individuals.

5) “Meetings” replaced with new models.
Fewer meetings - Woo-hoo!  It’s a conceptual leap - “gaming technologies will significantly influence online corporate meeting experiences”.  As I said at Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 in San Jose “gamers are using it now” and in fact, “collaborating ” much more effectively and with less cost.

-Bob Ketner

There were big announcements over the last couple of days that IBM and Forterra are teaming up to create collaboration tools for intelligence agencies. Both companies (IBM on 01/22/07 and Forterra on 06/25/07) have presented at the Virtual World SIG over the past year.

The article on applications for intelligence agencies are here:
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0377901.htm

and here: http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/03/20/

That article references another release in which Mike Rhodin of IBM Lotus describes 5 future trends in this direction of “Unified Communications”. That release is linked here: Marketwire IBM press release.

And more discussion about the IBM view of virtual worlds here:
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0377261.htm

This type of news could be an early glimpse of the slope of enlightenment, which would be welcome, as there are indications that this could be a trough of disillusionment period. It’s good to see these virtual world concepts that have been talked about for so long put into some concrete plans. Now let’s just hope that today’s version of the ARPANET is online and their version of “the grid” is up when the red phone rings at 3 am!

-Bob Ketner

I was talking at Virtual Worlds Go Mobile on Tuesday and it occurred to me the crucial difference between social networking and virtual worlds.
In social networking, you are you - singular - with the attributes you have as you the person we can meet.
In virtual worlds, you are an avatar or more than one avatar with attributes that exist only in the virtual world.

Doesnt’ mean you can’t create fictional social networking personas, but it does mean that the expectations are totally different and should not be confused.  Trying to drag your RL identity into virtual worlds is like trying to game the system - it simply doesn’t work.

Likewise, there is some resistance in the idea of overlays of digital information over the real world perceptions we have.  I have encountered this in speaking about augmented reality .  Who knows if these two realms will ever recruit converts from the other side.  Stay posted here for updates!