The next session was a panel of interesting folks. Again, this is my interpretation of their comments, my notes, my opinions, my mistakes.
cnet reporter is moderator, he's writing a book on virtual worlds (vw).
Joe Lazlo from Jupiter Research. We help companies understand new technologies. How to take advantage of them and separate the hype from the reality. covers Massively Multiplayer Games and is paying close attention to vw.
Sibley Verbeck from Electric Sheep. Software for virtual worlds, help the industry become used by the mass market.
Chris Collins, data analyst at Second Life.
Justin Bovington from Rivers Run Red. Helps clients - adidas, reebok - get into virtual worlds.
Steve Prentiss - research at Gartner. Loosely allied with security and business management space, and looking at long-term directions for corporate activities inside virtual worlds.
cnet: where is this industry?
Sibley: still undefined. the metrics on where we are today - there's interest in the potential, the value is exploratory... virtual worlds might not be right yet for your business. The trend is that the interest level is very high, we have lots of questions and not answers necessarily.
Justin - vws - own medium or own channel? As part of a media mix, they are important.
Chris - we're just scratching the surface with interactions in SL and new registrations, and where they are coming from. Incredible growth - international - popping up as they being to hear the message of the virtual world.
Gartner: we're where the internet industry was in the mid 90's. You don't expose second life at Davos without people starting to take note. Describing it as a media channel is one of the most accurate ways of doing it. This is a channel that needs to be able to be used with other medium. In SL, a constraint to growth, that you can't move your avatar from one world to another. There's only one internet, there are multiple virtual worlds (IWH notes this isn't really true -- remember AOL?). They need to merge or become a standard.
Jupiter - we're not even in the bubble stage yet, we need bubble then bust then boom.
cnet: so here we are today, what's the pitch to companies that are interested?
Sibley - the pitch is the same, now companies are finally interested. PR, marketing and advertising,f course, but longer term sales of products, or turning your entertainment audience into a community also. Let's design a project that isn't just a PR flash in the pan, but has some staying power.
Justin - SL is good at understanding trends, and then the idea behind co-collaboration and co-design.
Chris - how companies have been working with second life, lately, they are building on their own community on their website, they want to be able to take that community off their website and send them directly to their own island using our registration API. So you can interact more with your community, and they can interact with each other.
Justin - they also see SL as a great way to create their own content. Podcasts will come from there, videocasts being made in-world.
Sibley - lots of examples of successful businesses, outside the contexts we've been talking about here. VWs are fundamentally a communication medium. the first natural ecosystem is entertainment. If it's there to aggregate audience, businesses will feed around that. The most successful virtual worlds are club penguin, webkins. While they haven't gone 3d and businesses can't go and create something, they have shown the way of how do you build an audience, entertain them, have them participate in an internal economy, sell things to them. Have a look at those other examples we haven't really touched on.
Gartner - enterprises are going virtual, we see vws as a powerful communications tool, with aspects of crossing cultural divides. It's not polite to interupt someone, but you can start typing and be more involved, for example. This has to do with oiling the wheels of businesses, helping them be successful in their real-world businesses.
cnet: General Motors is considering going in, or spending millions of dollars - what is the return?
Sibley: Well, we did something with MLB. Makes sense, they have lots of fans, everything you can do online you can do in VW. Show video from game, add community elements, feel like you're there.
Jupiter: you can't have more than 20 people online at once. Like the Victoria's Secret webcast and it breaks. We're a long way from a good experience.
Sibley: - I disagree. We have run events at a 1,000-1,500 scale.
Justin - if you think linear - from 0-90 minutes - then I agree. But the BBC event had over 6,000 people over a week. We had to think of events in a very new way. We sat down with Adidas and saw that in traditional media, they get 6 minutes exposure time with their target audience and on ours they got 11. We sold 27,000 pairs of virtual tennis shoes. People were participating in brands. You can't buy that. They were Linden $50 - they were $2.75.
(Justin wonders if Chris is a copy of Philip.)
Panelist complaint that $2.75 is not ROI.
Jupiter: it's more R&D than ROI. In the future we need a firm set of business metrics. It's important to spend money just to be there now.
chris: people spend an incredible amount of time. The learning curve is very steep, but they get so immersed, it's very sticky. Interacting with other individuals is huge.
cnet: how do you choose the right platform? Obviously Second Life is the first choice.
Gartner: first you tell them there are other worlds. Trying to work out ROI is like trying to work out how many users LL actually has, the numbers don't add up. You have to experiment and put it down to R&D. Think of it as community building, think about it as an investment, but don't think of it as building another media channel.
Justin: this is a potent part of the media mix. It displays ownership. I disagree that metrics are hermetically sealed in the v. world. Taking words and creating pictures, that is potent, it has a much larger effect outside the world. This is not a trickle up - it's not being created by the techonlogy like the web in the beginning. It's the ad agencies that are driving alot of it - this speaks their language. And they have lost a lot of TV budget. It's not being driven by web companies. Some web companies are openly hostile to virtual worlds.
Gartner: Businesses are hostile too, it's not network-secure, and people take it home.
cnet: why did MTV choose There instead of SL?
Sibley - there are a host of answers, we try to stay abreast of the growing platforms and help companies make that choice. It depends who your audience is, what kind of experience they expect or enjoy, what is their techical expertise, the demographic.
Justin: we need to validate this space with competition. And there's a difference. In SL The average age in SL is 33.
Jupiter: it's also about, do you want to build your own island and bring your own audience? Or do you want to be in a virtual world that's shared with others?
Audeince: I run one of these other worlds, from 1985 when it was in hypercard, called Whyville. The idea that you can't use virtual worlds with large numbers of people is not true. We had a live event with 6K people. This conference is extremely second life centric, I can understand why, but it's a disservice to the audience.
So Philip says he just figured out that it's about people, they're burdened with a platform based on a different conception of what mattered. Are they thinking about changing their platform now? I think social is the first step, it's really about serious interaction, education, kids spending hours with your product.
Sibley - yes, SL has opensourced the client, that's an interesting opportunity.
Chris - I can't speak about platform related issues, but the lowered barriers to entry, the way that SL lets you create whatever you want, means that it's evolving. If there are no barriers to entry, you can create what you want to create.
Sibley - yes, a low barrier of entry to creating, but what the audience member is talking about is a low barrier to enjoying. How do you find what you like on SL?
Jupiter - well, Myspace is the biggest virtual world. It's not 3d. But people are interacting with each other in there nonstop.
Audience: Hi, I work in interactive advertising, my clients are looking into this. How do you measure traffic? Do you use Omniture?
Justin: I suggest looking at the panel later. It's a big issue, being addressed.
Audience: Are the only people making money here the people who sell pickaxes to goldminers?
Justin: the Internet was the goldrush. We think of vws as broadband's killer app.
Chris: we're seeing incredible growth in all areas, economic growth, new registration growth, the amount of information we release and publish is a huge set, especially in comparison to other vws here. Our retention percentages have kept consistent. No matter how many people we register, the underlying retention percentages are the same.
Audience: What are some of the different models?
Garnter: one of the issues is intellectual property. How do you get money in and out? I agree that MySpace is an immersive virtual world, it doesn't have to be 3d. Although the broadband penetration and server requirements are daunting, if you go back to old graphics -it depends on what you are trying to achieve. I work with companies trying to cement together their internal communities, not their external communities. Second Life is not the only place.
Justin - there are stealth products in development in virtual worlds, at the moment 99% of activity is in SL, the challenge is we need more platforms to validate the market. I hope within the next couple of days someone will actually announce something.
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