IBM/MIT Virtual Worlds conference notes
Virtual Worlds News is liveblogging IBM and MIT’s conference.
- Opening remarks.
- Colin Parris: “Virtual Worlds and Business Value”
- “Digital Convergence and Identity” panel
I am sure more will be posted.
Year: 2007
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GigaOM’s Top 10 Most Popular MMOs
You may join the debate already in progress.
FWIW, I think some of these numbers are wrong. But the overall point the list is trying to make is right.
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Areae hiring a Director of Business Development
Director of Business Development job description.
And you’ll all be glad to note that it doesn’t necessarily require relocating to San Diego. You could work in San Francisco too. 🙂
We’ve been getting a lot of biz dev type inquiries already (funny how that works, given that we still haven’t announced anything!). So there’s stuff to do pretty much immediately.
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Virtual Goods Summit, Supernova
I’ll be speaking at the Virtual Goods Summit 2007, which takes place June 22 at Stanford University. This is one of those fortuitous coincidence things — I was going to be in town speaking at Supernova, which I’ve mentioned before as being one of my favorite tech conferences, and the chance to show up at the summit luckily slotted in right before I have to catch a plane back home. 🙂In both cases it’ll be panels — the Supernova one will be more general, about virtual worlds overall, and folks like Reuben Steiger of Millions of Us and Clay Shirky will be on it. The one at the Virtual Goods Summit will be about brass tacks — the issues you run into when diving into the whole microtransaction world — and oh boy, it’s an interesting mix of folks on it. Details:
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Virtual Lower East Side
Speaking of Viacom and MTV, here’s their fifth (!) virtual world in the last nine months.* The Virtual Lower East Side looks like it uses the Doppelganger technology also used for The Lounge — the cel-shaded avatars are a dead giveaway. (BTW, The Lounge just announced digital currency sales…)
VLES is a painstaking replica of all the storefronts and clubs in the real Lower East Side. And it looks like its intended to be MySpace all over again — there’s a prominent sign-up for bands.
Here at the office the question was asked “Are they [Viacom] winning?” And the answer was “Nobody else is even playing.” The way in which these guys are looking at virtual worlds simply isn’t the same way anyone else is.
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* Virtual Laguna Beach. The Hills. Pimp My Ride. Nicktropolis. And now VLES. You can make a good case that VLB and The Hills are actually two zones of one world though. 🙂 Fine, four.
