I’m very happy to announce the confirmation of John Bates of Entropia Universe as our speaker for the Aug. 25 Virtual World SIG.
Definitely put this on your calendar to join us in Palo Alto or online (in as many VW as we can meet in) for this one.

“Virtual Economies with Real Results: Entropia Universe”

Perhaps no other virtual world has pushed the concept and execution of virtual economies as far as Entropia Universe. Launched in 2003, the free-to-play Entropia has a user base of over 800,000 users today, generating over $400 Million USD in-game turnover in the economy.

Blurring the lines between games, virtual worlds, and real economies, Entropia was chosen in 2007 by the Beijing Municipal People’s Government as the platform of development for the Chinese “Cyber Recreation Development Corp” (CRD). The project will create a cash-based virtual economy for China that encompasses business-to-business transactions and other sophisticated economic models.

Not only innovative in economic terms, the Entropia world is being deployed this year using the CryEngine 2, which will deliver stunning graphical experiences not yet seen on a wide scale on the web. On nearly every level Entropia Universe is leading in virtual world innovation, while extending the reach of the experiences from the game directly to real-world ATM’s.

The change brought about by virtual collaboration is only beginning to be understood. Join us for a unique look inside the merging of real and virtual economies via one of the most fascinating virtual worlds today - Entropia Universe

John Bates Bio:

John Bates represents Entropia Universe and is responsible for business development, strategic marketing & PR initiatives throughout North America.

An Internet pioneer since 1987, Bates is an owner of Goldstar.com the world’s leading direct marketer of live entertainment. John co-founded BIGWORDS.com, a leading youth marketer and textbook seller. John consults companies on sales, marketing, brand advocacy, as well as Internet strategy & public relations. Bates has guided the explosive growth of companies from zero to millions in revenues and has experience in virtual worlds dating back to 1994.

John is a highly sought after speaker and has garnered excellent ratings at diverse venues like South by Southwest, Harvard’s Cyberposium, WebAttack, Jupiter Online Developers Conferences, Vanderbilt School of Business Distinguished Speakers Series, St. Gallen School of Business World Leaders Symposium, VeerStichting Symposium, Virtual Worlds, Virtual Goods Summit and more. John brings passion, enthusiasm and long experience in virtual worlds.

Location:

6:30 PM - 9:00 PM August 25, 2008
Pillsbury Winthrop
2475 Hanover St.
Palo Alto, CA
*LIVE* online media linked from http://www.virtualworldsig.com
About the SDForum Virtual World SIG: http://www.sdforum.org/vwsig

Here are 3 articles for today:

Gaia Online tees up its massively multiplayer online game

The missing ‘links’: Looking towards an augmented reality

Three steps to encourage corporate investment in virtual worlds

 I found this interesting article about how Microsoft has internal “Quests” that are worked on collaboratively.

You can safely say that the reality that “Work is an MMOG” has arrived.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080626/D91HVAS80.html 

I also like the sound of the “visionary manifestos”.  We need more of these.

  There’s a great post and conversation at:

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/06/possibility-of.html#more

by Bruce Damer asking whether we are approaching a “New Virtual World Winter”.   I’d encourage you to read the questions and join the conversation, as we’ll use these as the basis for some upcoming meetings including the annual “Future of Virtual Worlds” panel on Oct. 27.

My personal response is below:

What a great set of questions you have posted - that’s what it’s all about.

I’d like to chime in that my un-researched opinions in response, they really got me thinking.

Basically, there has been more and continued Balkanization and silos - due to the fact that these VW’s are competing businesses built on programming and intended purposes that may be simply incompatible on the most basic levels. These “proprietary islands” remain disconnected for the same reason Office Depot and Office Max are proprietary islands. So, it sounds blasphemous amongst fundamentalist open sourcers, but there’s no savior “browser” or ubiquitous interface coming.

As businesses, new open-ended worlds will generally have to answer the basic question of “what’s this for?” or face extinction. Everyone knows (but for some reason no one wants to admit) that SL is the flagship (non-game) platform. SL is the center of almost every VW discussion and despite all the silly criticism - all the wild outrage amongst users comes at times when they can’t be logged in 24×7. Old media entertainment brands would pay any price for such umbilical loyalty.

If you consider them VW’s inside of games (Wow, Halo, etc.) then by virtue of this I’d say the avatar based interactive online medium is definitely mainstream now. Amongst probable “serious” business users though, or in the areas of adopted collaborative tools, I feel more of a “Trough of Disillusionment” hangover, following a “Peak of Inflated Expectations” party as a result of a solid 2.5 years of aggressive PR and hype.

So the headlines have been blazing about 19 year old John Tyler Hammons (Wikipedia entry) is the “gamer elected mayor”.

Coverage: GamePolitics.com,  Yahoo games, Yahoo news, AP, G4TV

I did a bit of searching but couldn’t find a particular gaming reference but it immediately brought to mind the IBM study with Seriosity on “Virtual Worlds Real Leaders“. This is great reading - (get the full report .pdf here) and I believe there will be a lot more of these gaming parallels given the impact and reach of games on young and old alike.

Some of the folks who participated in the IBM report were presenters and attendees at the Virtual World SIG and these kinds of topics were things I spoke about at both Virtual Worlds 2007, and at NASA Virtual Worlds in Jan. 2008. The notions (or theories/findings) that the gaming environment can generate leadership is encouraging. At least, gaming trains users in online collaboration by default, and we’ve realized that “work is an MMOG” along the way from the SIG presentations.

The fact that so many headlines are running the “gaming” angle on the story just might bring the concept to the mainstream discussion. Can’t wait to see what develops around it.

- Bob K.

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