Octavianworld

Picked Up On MITX Exchange

Octavianworld is now a featured blog on MITX Exchange.  (Thanks to MITX for the privilege, and especially to Dean Whitney for all his hard work building that site.)  I'm honored to be there, in good company, and hope to put back even a little of the lots I've learned through MITX people and events.

Upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Panel: "What Blogging Brings To Business"

I'm joining Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam, and Doug Cornelius on the "What Blogging Brings To Business" Panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston on June 10.

500 Mirrors: Channeling Light Into The Business of Virtual Worlds

I connected recently in NYC with my ex ArsDigita colleague and good friend Kevin Kelly.  Kevin is (among other roles) the CEO of 500 Mirrors, an enterprise-class virtual world platform provider, and was in town for the annual VirtualWorlds Conference at the Javits Center.

For the virtual worlds crowds, these are dark days, not unlike what things were like for the web generally in 2002.  After flying high in 2006 -- including making the cover of Business Week -- Linden Labs' Second Life, the poster child for the category, has hit rough patches on several fronts, including usability and, security, and scalability.  Electric Sheep, the leading interactive agency helping corporations build and pimp out their VW experiments, recently cut back its staff significantly.  And as most of us have seen, even mighty IBM, the corporate pied piper of the VW movement, has been advertising against its own efforts.  The remaining bright spots in the "classic" rich-client VW world these days seem to be in applications for kids:  Webkinz, Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel -- virtual babysitters for kids that parents are willing to pay for, perhaps partly as diversions to keep them away from first-person shooters,  MMORPGs, or perhaps as training for earning the big bucks playing WoW.  Though 1300 people registered for the conference, things seemed quiet even for the cavernous Javits, with few attendees from big-name companies/ brands in evidence.

My overwhelming impression remains that this is an industry whose technological reach and ambition greatly exceed its grasp of imaginative use cases for which this medium is uniquely suited.  Kevin and 500 Mirrors' CTO and founder Bob Flesch get this in spades.  Kevin tells a story of a recent conference in SL that illustrates the state of things:

• with a limited number of avatars each island (server instance) can support, the conference inevitably had an empty feeling;
• lots of power and flexibility for moving around means too much power for newbies and the less experienced;
• P-bombings have been an unfortunate reality;
• functionally, the experience's complexity exceeds its theoretical information and communication advantages -- for example, it's hard to read expressions when an avatar -- if human -- is programmed by default to look ironic and bored, if hip.

500 Mirrors' name reflects an approach to scalability it has developed that has effectively solved population limits for any practical enterprise and even consumer scenario.  (Proof comes from production instances that unfortunately Kevin can't disclose without unpleasant consequences.)  On the usability front, Kevin and Bob are focused on providing more by enabling less -- pre-scripting movement sequences to get someone into the right place in the right space, for example, or by turning off flying, or by simply making it impossible to get trapped in a corner.  Finally, since each instance they set up for a client is isolated (whether hosted by 500 Mirrors or installed behind a client's firewall), attendees can't jump out to inappropriate places, and intruders find it harder to get in.

But the biggest insight comes from conceiving of use cases that make sense, and Kevin's got a separate business going that's nailed one of these.  More about this in an upcoming post...

Upcoming Talk: Carlson on Metrics (Minneapolis, May 23)

I'll be speaking at the "Carlson on Metrics" conference in Minneapolis (May 21-23, my talk is on the morning of the 23rd).  I'll be talking about "multi-channel marketing optimization".

Here's the premise:

• as people spend more time in digital channels, marketing dollars are following them
• this is challenging for marketers, since these channels are also much more fragmented (for example, we've gone from a handful of broadcast networks, to hundreds of cable channels, to millions of websites with embedded videos)
• there's a silver lining:  these channels are much more trackable, targetable, and testable
• but, in practice, this means a typical marketer is now faced with a fire hose of information to process from each of these channels
• so, what happens is that in most cases, firms end up "locally optimizing" their marketing spend within each channel
• this might have been fine if the typical "customer experience" for any given target segment was limited to a single channel -- say, physical stores vs. online storefront
• but, with channel fragmentation, the average "customer experience" through any given buying process now crosses many different channels -- see the infomercial, go online to research the product, ask a friend, go back to the site through a search engine to buy, and then maybe pick up in the store
• so, firms can't really afford to "optimize locally" any more -- they have to make sure that all these channels are working together effectively
• this is hard; it requires integration of data and coordination/ cooperation among functional organizations with separate, often different, and sometimes conflicting metrics, budgets, and cultures
• since it's hard, many firms are tempted by silver bullets: "If we build a data warehouse, the clouds will  part and the angels will sing multi-channel insights to  us."
• but in practice, such efforts often collapse of their own weight, and unfortunately it takes time to realize that prospect, since "If you don't know where you are going any road will get you there."
• there are ways to do better, and folks who have done better...

Hope to see you there, or hear from you about your experiences before, during, or after.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

OpenACS Zeitgeist Next Stop: Brazil

Following the recent global user group meeting in Guatemala,  o resurgence de OpenACS/.LRN will next pop up in Brazil.  Here's Eduardo Santos'  summary:

I'm happy to announce the first (or the second, if you consider this) OpenACS Brazilian users group meeting. The event will take place at the 9th International Free Software Forum (FISL 9.0) in Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, from April 17th to 19th.

The Brazilian community is growing and we already have 607 members from many different states in country. We also have a lot of translated documentation, which is an effort to make the OpenACS framework popular among Brazilian developers...

Here are some of the OpenACS/.LRN based services they will present:

1. OpenACS history in Brazil, by Rodrigo Proença
2. OpenACS projects in Embrapa by Orzenil Silva
3.  Citizens' Territories Portal, by Alessandro Landim
4. SPU Colaborative Portal, by Vitor Silva
5. Virtual Public Market, by Eduardo Santos

See his post with details here.  Please pass the word into your favorite e-learning/ online community/ web development forums/blogs/ listservs, etc. !