The Watch – TOP 10 virtual worlds in the news – Courtesy MVJ – itsReal

About MVJ…

The Metaverse Journal is a site devoted to bringing an Australian perspective to virtual worlds. Launched in November 2006, we believe that virtual worlds at the very least may bring a new approach to internet-based interaction, and we want to cover their evolution. Virtual worlds may provide some of society’s biggest opportunities and greatest challenges in coming years – it’s an area worth keeping informed about.

Lowell Cremorne – Editor in Chief

February, 2008

1. The Washington Post – Spies’ Battleground Turns Virtual. “U.S. intelligence officials are cautioning that popular Internet services that enable computer users to adopt cartoon-like personas in three-dimensional online spaces also are creating security vulnerabilities by opening novel ways for terrorists and criminals to move money, organize and conduct corporate espionage Ex-Spies-Corporate-Work Jan-08 ”.

2. CNN Money – Pointing The Way To New Web Worlds. “You can sling from one Web to another in business these days. The so-called Web 2.0 technologies that gave birth to consumer blogs, social networks and other ways to offer product advice are weaving their way into the corporate world”.

3. CNET – Teen virtual world goes Hollywood. “Habbo, a virtual world for teens, signed a deal with the William Morris Agency, one of Hollywood’s oldest and largest talent agencies. As part of the deal, WMA will promote its celebrity sports and entertainment clients within the digital world and help Habbo forge new promotional partnerships in Hollywood”.

4. ClickZ – MinyanLand Virtual World Aims to Teach Kids Finance. “Teaching kids financial responsibility can be fun and advertisers should come along for the ride, say the creators of MinyanLand, a virtual world for kids. Launched January 30, MinyanLand is the result of the National Council on Economic Education, financial infotainment company Minyanville and family site network Kaboose, coming together to try and educate children in grades three to six about the importance of financial responsibility and thrifty spending. Unlike several other virtual worlds targeting the kids market, including Disney’s Club Penguin, Minyanland does not require a subscription fee to participate, according to Kevin Wassong, president of Minyanville”.

5. ABC Science (Australia) – Bionic lens spies virtual world. “Engineers say they have combined a flexible contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights for the first time. The ‘bionic’ lens could give wearers a new look at the world by superimposing computerised images onto their natural view. Such virtual displays could be useful to drivers and pilots, who could have route, weather or vehicle status information overlaid onto their vision. Video game players could immerse themselves in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion”.

6. CNN – For online addicts, relationships float between real, virtual worlds. “Think of online video game addiction and what probably comes to mind is a socially awkward adolescent. But teens are not the only ones who get addicted. Consider Zach Elliott, who lives in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, is in his mid-40s, and plays Final Fantasy XI, an online role-playing game. About three years ago, he says, “there were people in my real life that sort of vanished into this game, and I followed them into it””.

7. FOX Business – Multiverse Unveils Virtual Times Square. “The Multiverse Network, Inc., the company building the leading network of 3D virtual worlds, today unveiled Virtual Times Square, a true-to-life digital recreation of one of the world’s most famous metropolitan environments”.

8. CIO.com – Companies Explore Virtual Worlds As Collaboration Tools. “For emergency responders working along Interstate 95, accidents aren’t a game; they’re a way of life (and death). So it seemed odd to a group of firefighters, cops and medics when researchers from the University of Maryland suggested it use a virtual world to collaborate on training for rollovers, multicar pileups and life-threatening injuries”.

9. TrainingZone.co.uk – View to a Kill: Training in Virtual Worlds. “Learning and training are likely to be the ‘killer application’ for computer-generated 3D worlds such as Second Life, delegates heard at the Learning Technologies event in London last week. Capgemini consultant Marco Tippmer made the claim during a session on the hype and realities of the latest training technology. We have been here before, he admitted, during the ‘virtual reality 1.0′ bust in the early 1990s, when lack of sufficient computing power undermined expectations surrounding touch-sensitive gloves and immersive 3D headsets”.

10. ZDNet UK – Nortel: Virtual worlds may replace the office. “Nortel Networks is looking to the next generation of employees to shape the workplace of tomorrow, and high on its agenda is exploring the role of Web 2.0 technologies and virtual worlds such as Linden Lab’s Second Life”.

INTEL’s perspective on the emerging 3D Web – itsReal

This video is LONG and also very much a crystal ball look at what things will be like when computing power… from INTEL will allow for these types of environments… if you have the time and 3D Web is your area of interest check it out… look for QUAQ, ParaVerses and Virtual Surgery…

Video here at Intel Developers Forum

EXCLUSIVE: interview with CEO & Founder of gogofrog – itsReal

APLINK, a.k.a. Andrew Peters has just had an important call from the Australian High Commission and in the background are “frog like” obscene sounds emanating from my MacBook. How hard to keep a straight face and be serious with my homeland officials. These are the sounds emanating from the gogofrog websites homepage.

During the “State of Play” Virtual Conference I had the opportunity to hand my very last very badly mangled Pacific West Communications business card to the Founder of gogofrog, whilst I blushed with embarrassment, in true Aussie style he withdraw his own business card from his wallet and swiftly screwed it up…unfolded it and handed it to me with a “she’ll be right MATE” Rapturous laughter erupted and along with his business partner, Lorenzo from Japan, the gogofrog story began to unfold.

recruit.net Launches Largest Job Search Engine for Malaysia

  Recruit.net Launches Largest Job Search Engine For Malaysia… 

Find Tens of Thousands of Malaysian Jobs from Hundreds of Websites in a Single Search: http://malaysia.recruit.net..

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia August 27, 2007 – Recruit.net announced today the launch of a new search engine for Malaysia jobs. In one simple search, the service gives job seekers free access to thousands of opportunities from hundreds of websites in Malaysia.

Launched in Hong Kong in 2006, Recruit.net is the leading search engine for jobs in Asia Pacific, with over 3 million job listings from across the region, including Singapore, Japan, India, Australia, and China.

Recruit.net uses proprietary technology to provide the most comprehensive, relevant and fresh job search site in Malaysia that includes job listings from hundreds of websites, newspapers, recruitment agencies, associations, and companies directly.

In contrast to traditional job sites that only display jobs from their paying clients, Recruit.net puts job seekers first by allowing them to search jobs from hundreds of websites simultaneously. With thousands of new jobs every week, Malaysia.recruit.net gives people a brand new way to search for jobs in Malaysia. Job postings include full time, part-time and all levels of pay from waiters up to CEO�s

” It�s great to finally have a job search engine for all Malaysia jobs, this type of service has been hugely successful in the USA and was sorely missing in Malaysia� said Malaysia full time blogger Liew Cheon Fong, author LiewCF.com, one of the most popular blogs in South East Asia.

�We believe that people just want one place from where they can quickly and easily search and track all the jobs that match their interest, and this is basically the core of our service. Malaysia is the perfect country for our further international expansion and we are very excited to rolling out our service here.� Said Maneck Mohan Founder of Recruit.net

###

About Recruit.net

Recruit.net (www.recruit.net) is a Hong Kong based company that operates an international network of trilingual job search engines. Utilizing proprietary search technology Recruit.net enables job seekers to instantly search millions of jobs from thousands of companies across the world. Recruit.net provides a range of features to its users including, online salary checks, job trends, the ability to upload resumes and receive job alerts via email or RSS feeds.
Recruit.net also operates a Pay-Per-Click advertising network called adnet that provides advertisers with the ability to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising across a growing international network of partner sites and affiliates.

For more information, please visit http://www.recruit.net

 

Fly 4 hours in a 747, vs fly via avatar for 30 secs to the virtual meeting

APLINK Pick of the WEEK – Imagine if you will that by some freak of undersea volcanic activity, a brand-new continent suddenly appeared in the middle of the ocean, and within a two-year period, 8 million people from 105 countries worldwide decided to make it a vacation destination, some of them on a daily basis…..

read more | digg story

IBM Big Foots into Web 2.0

EXPECT a huge price tag for IBM web 2.0…hmm Web 2.0 applications are primarily for free with upgrade options so how will IBM market these solutions to corporates, interesting to see how this evolves…

IBM recently announced three major collaboration and social networking applications under the heading of a Web 2.0 Goes to Work Initiative. The three applications are IBM Quickr 8.0, IBM Lotus Connections, and IBM Info 2.0.

IBM has been using the concept of collaboration and information sharing internally for the better part of a decade, according to Jeff Schick, vice president of social software at Big Blue. Schick tells me that seven years ago the company built employee profile capability within IBM — called Blue Pages — that support connecting people to people, people to information, and people to the extraprise.

With 6 million lookups per day, Blue Pages gives IBM employees access to co-worker’s phone numbers, IM presence, and profiles — which help them locate colleagues with a particular expertise.

This week IBM officially launches the commercial version of all this under Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, and Info 2.0. While the concept may have been around for 10 years, I’m certain the technologies IBM is using today are far different.

Quickr is team collaboration software, and Connections is a social-networking application in the vein of MySpace and FaceBook, but with an enterprise focus. The apps have a lot in common in terms of the technologies underneath.

Quickr allows users to share and organize content libraries, create online collaboration sites, and access libraries through plug-ins on their desktop applications.

Connections offers five capabilities, including profiles to find people with expertise in particular fields, communities to build team sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and something called Dogear, which is essentially a way to share bookmarks. Another feature called Activities allows users to monitor their work with a dashboard, share tasks, and establish best practices.

Finally, Info 2.0 is a mashup technology that gives users the ability to mix and match components from various applications to make new applications. The example IBM offers is a store manager tracking inventory shipments against weather reports from national weather advisories and then mapping that with Google for inventory management.

IBM tipped its hand about all this in January and this summer will be under a full head of Web 2.0 steam, shipping these applications by the end of June.

All of this could potentially have an impact on network traffic, bandwidth, and storage, but that is not the largest issue IT faces, according to David Cearley, lead analyst at Gartner.

The main challenge for IT will be delivering a set of end-user computing capabilities that best enable Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Up until now, IT in the main has been focused on delivering e-mail and Microsoft Word to the desktop. But new tools will now be needed to seed the environment with the ability to build community. Yes, end-users will create, maintain, and drive those communities forward, but according to Cearley, IT will need to deliver a new set of capabilities to make that happen.

For example, there are a lot of tools for blogs and wikis. Differentiating the functionalities each offers will be vital as enterprise demand for these tools proliferates.

“Simply giving someone wiki capability doesn’t mean anything,” Cearley says. Rather, IT will have to identify how employees will use the functionality, paying particular attention to the types of communities they will want to build. IT will then have to examine a range of social software to determine the best fit.

Choosing a solution is one thing; getting end-users up to speed is quite another. If you recall back in the ’80s companies actually had end-user computing departments that worked with people to show them how to use word processors and how to create applications with spreadsheets. Over time, the need for that kind of end-user support diminished.

Giving end-users the ability to create applications and mashups will likely mean a resurgence in the importance of having an adequate end-user support plan in place.

“It raises a whole new era of support requirements,” Cearley tells me.

I have to confess I was part of the community that first ignored social networking, then laughed at it, then attacked it, and now, I guess I have to say I was wrong. It wins.

My advice is to skip a few stages and figure out how to accommodate social networking and collaboration into your IT architecture now. And if you can’t, well, now that Big Blue is in the game, get out your checkbook; there’s always IBM Global Technology Services.

SOURCE

Vibrant SL Dialogue U decide…APLINK still believes in SL – itsReal

A pro & con conversation of Second Life’s ultimate future… This conversation proves that Second Life has rocked our perception of what IS the Internet and what the Internet IS becoming. I predict that what most see as an adventure into a reality whereby most people can not attain things they desire in the so called “real world” is purely folly, and that the reality of unimaginable commercial applications for virtual worlds is just around the corner – enJoy

Using Second Life for Architectural Collaboration…wishful thinking perhaps. 

BTW

Aplink has a new blog which is going to focus more on Second Life and Virtual Worlds, please do subscribe to aplink.biz I will be maintaining this current wordpress blog for more varied real & some virtual marketing and public relations topics.

Also within Second Life I have created a Group, surprisingly called APLINK, please do join my group as I will be announcing some initiatives & events in-world that you may be interested to know about before the masses do. – itsReal

Anshe Chung Wins Entropia Banking License – uum Second Life ??… the competition in Virtual Worlds gains NEW momentum – itsReal

Second Life land baron Anshe Chung wins one of five licenses to open a “bank” (really a virtual pawn shop) in Entropia Universe.

read more | digg story

Coming Soon – Outback Online, An Aussie virtual World ? – itsReal

Source: OutbackOnline

Being an Aussie/Kiwi export, I like to see things happening in those parts of the world…especially the idea that Australia will soon be revealing a new virtual world called Outback Online. Though we don’t know exactly what the experience will be, here is their current list of everything which Outback Online is NOT.

* Outback isn’t a game.
* Outback isn’t only chat. *chirp* Don’t all talk at once…
* Outback isn’t just about entertainment.
* Outback isn’t a platform limited to professional developers.
* Outback isn’t your destination to sit and run dance macros. Ouch, that was below the belt.
* Outback isn’t in direct correlation with the Australian Outback. G’day mate!
* Outback isn’t a browser plugin.
* Outback isn’t Second Life 2.0. … err Third Life?
* Outback isn’t a black box.
* Outback isn’t going to be in development for many years prior to release. Go Go Go!!
* Outback isn’t releasing this month.
* Outback isn’t likely to be as complete and polished at release, as you are used to.
* Outback isn’t a very large download.
* Outback isn’t going to cost $$!
* Outback isn’t limiting creation to a single metaphor. … what the heck does that mean?
* Outback isn’t full of kangaroos… 😦 but hey, we have one on our splash screen!

I have given my email address to be one of the first to see this creation, if you would like to also click HERE

STA Travel unveils Second Life presence – itsReal

Further to my post :

Singapore Girl (SIA) gets WED to TBWA – itsReal

it appears STA Travel… are seeing the light and are venturing into second life, read more

Source: Travolution

STA Travel is to test the possibilities of the virtual world with consumers with the opening a travel centre in Second Life.

The company has developed the centre after signing a partnership with the Electric Sheep Company and ElectricArtists.

The centre will include virtual dorms that members will be able to customise and use for meeting other Second Life residents.

STA and a selected number of travel partners will also host weekly events and tours of other areas in Second Life.

UK managing director John Constable said: “Our intention is not to try to exactly replicate what we do in the real world in the virtual world.