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

Read all the blog coverage on the Virtual Worlds FALL 2007 conference:

http://www.djcline.com/?p=3107 

http://www.djcline.com/?p=3059 

http://www.djcline.com/?p=3097

There is so much blogging on this event I don’t know where to begin, but also check out:

http://metaversed.com/15-oct-2007/future-content-watching-detectives

http://metaversed.com/12-oct-2007/business-age-avatar

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2007/10/post-conference.html

 The conference organizers: Chris Sherman, Tonda Bunge , and Tim Williams were excellent hosts and put on an event like no other…thank you!!

 Now, for those who would like to keep the conversation going: 

On Oct. 22 we will be featuring a panel review of the year ahead in virtual wolds.
Scheduled guest panelists will include technology providers IBM, Forterra Systems, eFrontier, Multiverse, and Linden Lab and more.

Following up on some of the insights from the Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 conference, please bring your points of discussion and questions to this   interactive forum.

Find out how to best implement virtual worlds for business, networking, and entertainment, on the eve of several major promotions that will surely propel virtual worlds into the mainstream like never before.

We will organize the key points using scenario planning methods and reconnect with many of the speakers from the conference.  Not to be missed!

Media and teleport links:
http://www.virtualworldsig.com

SDForum link:
http://sdforum.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Calendar.eventDetail&eventID=12941

Location
Pillsbury Winthrop Office Silicon Valley
2475 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1114

Agenda
6:30 PM Registration and Networking
7:00 PM -8:40 PM Presentations

Price
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
No registration required
See you there,
Bob Ketner

The article mentions upcoming Virtual World SIG presenter Seriosity and also touches on augmented reality, Mechanical Turk, telepresence, and distributed workforces. We have discussed it in virtual world circles before but it’s the first big publication mention I have seen of how work processes could be deconstructed, distributed, and completed by contractors working around the world.

I’ve also tossed around the idea that work processes themselves could be deconstructed. For example: the task of identifying a tumor on an x-ray could be represented as a map or other image and then “acted upon” or spotted by a player (contractor) for a digital currency reward. Couldn’t other data manipulation tasks be abstracted as well? I can imagine a future of monotonous data entry or auditing being accomplished by a workforce that only viewed the data as “a game” or as elements in a virtual world. The source data would be even be somewhat encrypted by virtue of this “virtualization”. Great things to consider as we continue to redefine “virtual worlds” as they emerge.

Let’s continue the discussion at the upcoming SIG and I’ll also be speaking on the topic at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference enterprise track where SDForum will have a presence with a booth and a VC forum.

Book discussed in the article:

The Future of Work