Mobilemind

That last post on the Wii and SecondLife was supposed to be a quick puff-piece, but as I mulled it over it grew and grew until I split it into two with this opinion post as the second part. Personally, I think something good is brewing with Second Life, but first we're headed for (already in?) a goldrush that will be followed by backlash, similar to the era when companies rushed to establish a presence on dial-in line networks likethe Source, and CompuServe, and Prodigy, and America Online, (and others- anyone remember GEnie or Minitel or ...) . It was relatively cheap and tremendously popular to build-out forums and email lists and knowledge bases there, but it all got eclipsed by the internet + the web. Second Life also just feels too "siloed" for my tastes, with no good way to interact across worlds (yes, I am aware of various SL mash-ups). The virtual worlds and games reek of the multiple ID's problem of the early 90's. I remember when you were really cool if your business card has like 6 email addresses on it. I also agree with folks suspicious of the hype and over-the-top "me-too" crowd it is attracting now, again like the AOL-era landgrabs. Here's some good quotes and interesting data I found on a quick web news search:

More often than not, you'll hear that "Second Life" boasts millions of users. But the truth of the matter is that no one knows how many people are using the service other than Linden Lab, the company that hosts "Second Life."

According to Clay Shirky, a faculty member in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University who's made a four-month study of Second Life's audience, the number of regular users is well under 200,000.

Virtual worlds may indeed play a big role in the future of the Internet. But for the moment, the talk far exceeds the actual worth of these services-- at least in business terms.

If fewer than 200,000 people are regularly using "Second Life," it's not the best marketing tool. And though virtual worlds are certainly a means of long-distance communication, it's yet to be seen whether this makes sense — in the long term — for anything other than fun and games.

So many companies are entering "Second Life" because it's the thing to do, because the press gives virtual worlds so much attention.

Source: Is Corporate Mania for 'Second Life' Just a Lot of Hype? As for the Wii, pretty cool, but then so was the Magnavox Odyssey that Dad brought home in '73 to spoil all 5 of us kids. Does anyone else miss video games that included real dice, poker chips and plastic overlays you had to tape to the screen? We eventually got an Atari 2600, but never bothered with Colecovision, Mattel Intelvision, Sega and the lot that followe-- including the very first PlayStation released about 21 years later. Dang I'm old.

Labels: second life, simulation, technology, virtual worlds

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Interesting thoughts on using a Nintendo Wii and Second Life together, from the Gadgets blog of Wired online

Nintendo games have made the Wii controller a satisfyingly realistic controller for pretend tennis, golf and baseball. But how about using it to practice doing surgery, applying pesticides or operating a nuclear power plant?

It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next year or so for mainstream corporate training. For edu-tainment, the surgery bit has already happened. In a March Edition of Learning Trends (link followers- scroll to March 5, '07 #434), Elliott Masie mentioned a Wii application called Trauma Center: Second Opinion that is only $49 and lets you perform a varierty of tests and interventions using the simulated environment and the motion-sensitive Wiimote controller.

More from Wired:

One of the attractions of [MIT Research Fellow David E. Stone] Stone's approach is the low cost. In Second Life, it's relatively easy to build chairs, buildings and other objects for avatars to sit on or walk through. Tools like wrenches or manual controls are also easy to build and, with a little tweaking, users can control them with a Wiimote.

Labels: learning, secondlife, simulation, technology, virtual worlds

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Apple just sent me an email with information on iPhone Tech Talks that are scheduled for

• Los Angeles, CA 08/02
• San Francisco, CA 08/24
• Chicago, IL 08/28
• New York, NY 08/30
• New York, NY 08/31

It looks like an interesting day,and I will admit to a small amount of "return-ers remorse"

Bring your notebook, your code, and your iPhone After a morning of in-depth presentations and demonstrations, you'll work with the experts to design, code, debug and test your solutions on iPhone. Access to your code is required.

Of course since I no longer have an iPhone and I'm not in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago or NYC, I won't be going. I'm sure Jeff will notice the conspicuous absence of Hudson, WI as a venue-- and feel no disappointment whatsoever.

Labels: Apple, events, technology

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Google and ZDNet seem to think so. I stumbled on to this Enterprise YouTube coming post on ZDNet in the Googling Google blog by Garett Rogers.

... why would a company want to integrate with YouTube, especially since most are either considering or have already blocked the website from their network? After thinking a while, I came to the conclusion that there are several uses for an enterprise version of YouTube that could make it worthwhile.

Training Videos Companies are usually responsible for training new hires and even long time employees who are simply moving to new positions. This never ending process takes a lot of man hours that could be better spent in other areas of the organization. It would be easy to create training videos once and upload them to your corporate training application (YouTube) — allowing you to allocate resources more efficiently.

He goes on to cite Corporate Culture and Public Relations as other opportunities for YouTube as an Enterprise App. I wonder about social networking and informal learning as other emerging practices for use of an Enterprise YouTube application. It will be interesting to see what reader comments pop-up on the XDNet site in response-- it obviously has a much wider or more diversereadership than the training and development community and their take on things will be interesting.

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I just got back from the roving Adobe on AIR barcamp event in Seattle. The bus is cool, the APIs are cool, the AIR product/environment is cool, and the whole event approach is cool. It really struck me as a "2.0" seminar, in the "Web 2.0" sense- early feedback from users/participants, user-driven, high-tech, effective and appealing UI, adaptive, editable, lots of APIs and mash-ups (Flikr images, twitter feeds, JSON APIs and geo-tagging with GPS location data).

It was both organized and ad hoc. Both a tech-y learning event and a corporate mark-com session. A great chance to learn and see what's been done, work with experts, expand your network, and/or submerge head-down in the wireless network if you need to get a little business done online.

I really like that I came away with all the same materials and content that I would have had at a "1.0" seminar at a downtown hotel, BUT it was something that had community, something that will have its own lifecycle and a sort of harmonic sustain. This approach is something I could interact with and engage as it was on its way here, and something "sticky" that I'll want to check back in with and follow as it goes forward. Those are the things that you don't have with classic seminars-- and I'm also going to monitor the Google code site with examples and check out the twitter and camera live-feeds as they wind their way to Vancouver, back to Portland, a week-end diversion to Las Vegas, and then an event in L.A. (then Dallas then Denver- check a map first next time guys).

Good luck to Adobe with AIR and to the remote and local participants who join in the experience. Even if you're not into the product, you should check out the approach and think about creating your own mash-up like this for training and collaboration sessions-- its really quite effective. I'll be editing down some video interviews I did with the Adobe team and then submitting that to the Masie Learning Consortium site next week.

Labels: events, learning, technology

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A short list of the reasons why my iPhone went back to AT&T on Saturday.

1. Couldn't accept meeting invites on it.
2. No Cut/Copy/Paste.
3. The keyboard.
4. Not enough fine tuning control over email:
• Can't control size of email initially downloaded
• Only checks at pre-defined intervals; 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour...
• Doesn't put things in "Sent items", instead you automatically cc: yourself on everything
5. No indicator lamp or LED- can't tell at a glance if I have voicemail/email/SMS messages-- or even if the thing is powered on.
6. No encrypted password vault or 'eWallet' utility (I depend on this to 'remember' things like seldom-used low-stakes passwords, etc)
7. No video out; can't use it with the cool display glasses I recently bought.
8. No removable memory or 'mountable storage'; can't use it to transport files. The SanDisk folding SD card + USB that I use with the Treo has spoiled me.
9. Lack of 3rd party applications/extensions.
10. No "museum mode" for the iPod features; most of the training things I want to do I can do better on a video iPod or desktop.
11. No Adobe Flash.Yet?
12. It's good, borderline great, but there HAS to be a better one coming 12-18 months from now.

Labels: Apple, technology

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