Ruslan Browa: Joni, please tell us how small businesses are represented in SL today. What is necessary to do for organization and success of their business operations in SL? What are the their perspectives? How can a large marketing company like yours help them in launching and running their business in SL? In what areas and with which activities you can help? Do you plan to make some special training courses for small business?
Joni West: As far as I can tell, the small businesses that are in Second Life are entirely virtual. For example, they sell virtual clothing for avatars, or houses, vehicles, furniture and the like. I am not familiar with what, if anything, small real world companies are doing SL since I have not read any media coverage about them. It is impossible to know everything that is going on in Second Life because no one, not even Linden Lab, keeps track.
When a company opens an account in SL, they don’t enter their company name. I am sure there are a lot of IT people playing around with Second Life for their large and small companies but again, we have no way to know unless they get some sort of media coverage.
The success of an entry into Second Life for any business lies first in defining the objectives to be accomplished. Second Life is a web “platform” and can be used for anything the web is used for and more, given its ability to share three dimensional spaces and empower interactions among people from all around the world. People who are put in charge of a Second Life project can either select a Linden Lab approved developer like my agency, This Second Marketing LLC, or assign the task to in-house resources.
It is difficult for clients to wrap their brains around what Second Life is and how it will help them and if they are planning to create a significant presence and be successful, I would highly recommend using a Linden Lab approved developer, at least until the original phases of the project are complete. There are currently several good books on the market that describe the ins and outs of Second Life and people working on a Second Life project should read some to start. There are also video tutorials available through the Second Life website. That said, there is nothing like getting in there and navigating around to begin to understand the mechanics and most importantly, the culture of Second Life.
If you were an American company and going to open a store in Japan, you would certainly do extensive research on the culture of the place you are putting the store so that you do not offend anyone and can align your strategies and tactics for success. Same thing for Second Life. The statistics for the demographics of the Second Life population are available at www.secondlife.com and they should be reviewed by a company to make sure the audience in Second Life is the audience they are trying to reach. There are Second Life “residents” from dozens of countries and the way that breaks down can be important to a company just coming into SL.
Companies and organizations are using Second Life for a wide variety of purposes and the ultimate success of the projects depends on how well they align their strategies and tactics to the ultimate objective. Many companies now use Second Life as a place to hold meetings, thereby saving on costs and energy consumption. Training is very popular in Second Life because you can actually “walk through” areas that would not be possible to show in real life.
For example, I read that BP was training people on what happens below a gas filling station by empowering them to walk underneath a virtual gas station. My agency works with major companies and organizations to use Second Life as a marketing platform. We have been very successful at accomplishing the objectives that we set with our clients. While the entire population of Second Life is small by comparison to say, television viewers, it is possible to garner a great deal of media attention for a relatively low budget project in Second Life. All of the marketing projects that we have done to date have received excellent media coverage in high circulation publications and blogs such as The New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News, USA Today, and Fast Company Magazine (This Second Marketing will be featured in the September issue available on newsstand Aug 19th).
The result of the media coverage is an overall enhancement in brand image. Brands that are doing creative promotions in Second Life are perceived as cutting-edge leaders in many industries.
The way This Second Marketing LLC has been helping our clients is very comprehensive. We explain and demonstrate what Second Life is, often over a web meeting service. We discuss the reasons that the client wants to get into Second Life and how committed they are to the platform. We want to know whether the company wants a long term presence or to run a 3 month promotion.
We educate, educate, educate our clients on what works as well as what doesn’t, and why. Research shows the residents of Second Life don’t mind big brands entering the virtual world, but they do have a problem with big companies coming into the virtual world without taking the time to understand the culture. For example, residents of Second Life are reported to be highly creative, tech-savvy, forward thinkers. They enjoy creating the content that exists in Second Life. Approximately 75% of residents create some form of content whether it is object or animations or art.
So when I big company enters Second Life, the last thing they should do is put up billboards, the virtual equivalent of the real world kind or the equivalent of banner ads on the web, and expect to be respected. Instead, big companies should investigate and deliver what the residents really want. That includes contests, great venues to socialize in, educational classes, and live performances. They should essentially “sponsor” activities that the residents will want to participate in. This again comes back to understanding the residents who are your audience.
This Second Marketing LLC has a team that literally spans the globe. We believe we have the best of the best working on our clients’ projects. That includes builders, scripters, human resource directors, graphic artists, and more. My background is in live real world events and creating events in Second Life and showing them at real world events is new and captivating to many audiences. People who have read about SL get a chance to see it in action at a real world meeting up on a screen. It is also possible to stream a live meeting into Second Life. Focusing on the audience and the message you want to communicate is key. The technology is just the means to an end. In the case of Second Life, a very compelling means!
We are currently in the process of expanding our practice to help companies get into Second Life for purposes other than marketing. Yes, we will be doing training and creating best practices and guides for companies that want to take advantage of this new and exciting platform. It is only a matter of a few years before everyone who uses the internet will have an avatar and a Second Life of some sort.
Interview with Mat Small, “Millions of Us” PR Director. Interviewer: Ruslan Browa
Ruslan Browa: Mat, the government institutions in Second Life - we believe that this is a quite interesting subject with a poor coverage in media. Please tell us about the current situation in this area. Do you know any examples of such kind of projects? Have your company had any experience in doing them? Do they have something specific? Do you plan to make any training courses for government organizations how to make such projects?
Mat Small: Many governments have been experimenting in Second Life. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA both have presences. State and local governments have done trial disaster relief projects in Second Life.
The US Congress is increasingly interested in virtual worlds in terms of both capturing revenue (taxing) economic activity and in ensuring security.
Other governments, like those of Sweden and the Maldives, have established “embassies” in Second Life, while some local tourism authorities (I am aware of Galveston, Texas and the Republic of Ireland, among others) are using Second Life to market their locales.
We have received many inquiries from public sector entities around the world looking to familiarize themselves with virtual worlds and we have done some confidential consulting work with governments.
This time I want to talk about rapidly growing popularity of widgets - what they can do now and what they would do in the future.
What is widget? Widget (a.k.a. gadget) is a mini software application designed to always stay at the user’s field of vision. Widgets make certain information or functionality more accessible - so they are always visual. There are two types of widgets: desktop and web (mobile widgets are on the horizon as well, but it is too early to talk about them). They differ from each other considerably. I want to do my homework telling you about both because there are some gaps in the common picture those make me think that there are many interesting things to come.
Now Who’s On [Desk]top?
As it comes from their name these are widgets those reside on your workstation and dealing with its applications and environment. This is not a full-scale application because usually it does only a few functions (may be even only one), such as notifications, monitoring system resources and so on. Historically desktop widgets usually work on the top of widget engine that gives them some general-purpose API and eliminates the need to contact host operating system directly. Thus, widgets are OS-independent, that is great. Widget engines usually come with several pre-installed widgets and supported by a portal where developers can distribute their products. Probably, one of most known widget platforms is Konfabulator, now Yahoo! Widgets. There are also Apple Dashboard (works on Macs as a part of Mac OS) and Windows Sidebar (that is a part of Windows Vista) and Google Desktop. But Konfabulator is strictly dedicated to widgets and available for many platforms.
Of course there are other engines (see here) but the goal of this post is not to compare them. Let’s think about their nature instead.
This is an aggregated list from various sources of most popular widgets by their nature. It tells a lot:
System resources monitoring: memory, disk and CPU load information, Wi-Fi signal strength.
Media player management (remote, album/song info, etc)
50% of widgets are not interactive, they only collect, structure and display information (1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13).
Near 40% of them connected to Internet (5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13).
Why not to use tray icons instead of widgets? They are just too small and require some additional actions and time to display info you need. So widgets are faster.
Widgets panel has something common with airplane or car dashboard. This dashboard is not only for management of your computer, but for many things of your life you want to control.
Usually desktop with widgets looks nice. I am serious - this is something important these days.
All of this sounds great, but I have a strong feeling that something is missed here. I mean - it is great to know how much fuel you have, how fast you go and have a shortcut to breaks, but it still looks like a toy. You can live without it (and you cannot live without the dashboard in your car).
Also, there is something in Internet that is more interesting (and more complex) than news and weather (oh yes, I forgot about dictionary and games). But if we connect widget to an Internet service - will widget remain widget (mini-application)? If yes, why your-favorite-instant messenger-client-name is not a widget? GTalk exists a widget, by the way. I mean, it is not necessary for widget to use widget engine - this is not what makes application widget.
So now, let’s try to go to outer space and try to imagine - what widgets can do else. Whey could “concentrate” vital application functions, so user can operate them apps in a “brief” form, without opening a whole window needlessly. They could be web service clients working without launching (or keeping opened) the web browser. You can control an external device from the widget. A new way of application design, huh? Drag and drop one widget to another, upload it to Internet, buy, sell, connect, and so on.
“The software is changing. I feel it in applications. I feel it in the web. I smell it in the news”. Let’s take a break, next time we will talk about web widgets to see what’s going on there.
Our guest today - Anatoly Bambizo, Director of KsanLab’s “Internet-services”.
Ruslan Browa (RB): What is Amazing UGC Services? What tendencies in behavior of consumers led to appearance of such services?
Anatoly Bambizo (AB): It is Internet multimedia services those enable people to do cool things, such as creating exciting artworks or animations by very simple actions, clear to everyone. Some examples of their implementation are e-card creator, multimedia tests, and so on. We’ve made an interactive e-card creator for Yandex.
The project name is Yandex. Colours: just a few clicks to choose a background, characters from the clipart, titles - and user gets professionally looking animated e-card.
People appreciate personalization, “hand-made things” and at the same time each person is more or less creator inside - we only enable people to unleash their creative skills, even a minimal ones, to make a hand-made things and please themselves and others.
RB: Can we say that Amazing UGC Services is a tool that realizes the modern marketing concept of “consumer involvement”?
AB: Certainly! How, if not through activity, not through interest in action, in new experience, consumers can be involved?
Besides it, they share results of “self-involvement” with other people who, receiving unusual things or unusual experience become involved too and start to use their creativity as well.
RB: Tell us about Amazing UGC Services’ abilities: for solution of what kind of tasks can these services be used? What companies can use them? Please, give us some examples.
AB: First, they are required for users’ involvement in content creation process.
Recalling the Yandex case: initially Yandex has come to us with an order for creation of 100 to 200 e-cards, but after negotiations and conversations we have understood (Yandex people where quite open and innovative here), that strategically it will not solve a problem of filling by e-cards the Cards section at Yandex site – we had to find a different solution.
Thus was born an idea to create a designer of cards that then was developed by KsanLab. It was designed in a way to inspire people to draw e-cards, they like to do this. Among those cards we’ve seen real masterpieces – products of a collective mind, those we just could not imagine when developed this service.
At second, these tools generate a viral wave that brings us new users. It works by the following scheme: service is made to create useful and fun things, which people will want to show their friends, to boast or to please. So the user makes a piece, insert it into the blog or any other personal media and that brings to us his or her friends.
At third, it is simply a pastime, an entertainment for users. Services for rest, and so on.
Amazing UGC Services can be employed by Internet portals to give their users additional useful service, to get more users, to create interesting paid services or as tools for content creation.
They can be used in promo campaigns. The first example that comes to my mind is services where users can upload their photos, e.g. recent Burger King campaign where they have suggested to glue to portraits a cowboy’s moustaches, just a very funny moustaches and have fun with friends.
RB: Building of communities using such services: is it a side-effect? Or such result is planned? What is vitality of communities built by a UGC service?
AB: There are different UGC Services, some can build a community, and some just do not designed to do so. For example, if a service generates the great content like e-cards, it will lead to appearance of card ratings, will emerge leaders and fans that spend a lot of time making e-cards and send ideas about service’s development. Eventually they can form a community to communicate with each other.
RB: What viral potential is incorporated in Amazing UGC Services?
AB: Amazing UGC Services has huge viral potential. It is a distribution of content via blogs, competitions of users, memes born by users and spreading in the Internet.
RB: What else you can say on the subject?
AB: In my opinion, it is important to allow people to use their creative skills where it is possible and appropriate. And it leads to wider use of Amazing UGC Services.
Ruslan Browa (RB): Please present yourself and your service. The representative of what country VCASMO is? :) Have authors of service had an experience of work with modern presentation technologies?
VCASMO is developed by Luar’s Production, a Hong Kong based web and multimedia development and consulting company. The chief developer of VCASMO, Luar Yen, who is also the founder of Luar’s Production. Luar Yen is renowned as Adobe Flash specialist in Greater China region.
VCASMO is a joint project between Luar’s Production and Japan based company System and Management Computer Consultancy Inc. (SAMCC). Currently, all the VCASMO operation and marketing is based in Japan. Therefore, VCASMO is the trade name for this joint project in Japan and worldwide.
Before VCASMO, The team have developed a video presentation solution since February 2005. To serve our clients for putting video and PowerPoint presentation on web. It is an order to build business, we help clients from shooting video, converting PowerPoint and synchronize with video manually, provide hosting and video streaming service. It was a successful and proved solution for clients who want to put the video presentation online.
RB: Why have you chosen this area of service: an Internet-service for creation of multimedia presentations? What tendencies of business life and in which areas have you considered for making such choice?
At May 2007, the team started to study how to expand the business and make it more user-friendly and automatically for the clients. Therefore, the team came out this web-based version of the video presentation solution. This is now called VCASMO. After two month, VCASMO launched at 30 July 2007. VCASMO can expand our existing video presentation solution by providing the clients a self-served method to create their video presentation. As a result, VCASMO can reduce the cost in creating a video presentation. It makes the product more price-competitive to other similar existing solutions in the market.
RB: What is the mission of service? If it is a commercial project, tell us about its business-model; do you plan to charge for work with VCASMO?
Seminar and conference is the focus of VCASMO, we will help them archive the speakers presentation online, provide the seminar organizer another media to expose extra income and get more future attendance. Academic is also another focus of VCASMO, we will work with universities to help them transform the classroom teaching to an online e-learning presentation. Professors can broadcast their lectures in VCASMO. Students can present the homework to the tutors with a simple video explanation.
For normal users, we will provide paid account soon. We will keep all features free to use, but for paid account users, they can get more. For example, increased upload bandwidth limit and more storage space, same features but with enhanced work flow or functionality.
RB: What advantages have VCASMO got in comparison with other software for presentations’ authoring?
For presentation authoring software, some of them are act as plug-in in PowerPoint for recording sound and create a presentation. Most of them are not free. We are web-based, we are free, we can create presentation not only from PowerPoint, we can use any images, photo and PDF. Most important, we simplify the process of create a presentation, users can easily create a presentation.
Moreover, VCASMO is a web 2.0 site, it means users can share video-photo-slide with public or their own social network.
RB: What advantages and benefits VCASMO’s clients get when using Internet service for creation of presentations?
A web-based service mean users can use it anywhere, anytime. Users do not need to buy and install extra software. Moreover, there are some presentation recording hardwares in the market and they are expensive. If user use VCASMO, they do not need to invest money in hardware (except a webcam and microphone).
RB: VCASMO offers its clients an opportunity to create a complex multimedia product. What kind of advantages this kind of presentation provides? What results we achieve with multimedition?
VCASMO is created a new experience of multimedia delivery solution. Dual-screens is the killing feature of VCASMO. In the past, when you recording a presentation, you always have to switch the camera between presenter and slides. So, finally, the video is mainly focus on slides, seldom see the presenter. We think a successful presentation, the expressiveness of presenter in the important factor, so with VCASMO, we can make audience look at presenter. Moreover, using video to present slide, due to compression problem, the text is not clear enough in video.
You can always see using some silent captions to increase the expressiveness of video. With dual-screen, you can put the captions side by side with the video. http://vcasmo.com/video/bobboynton/743
RB: Now the basic VCASMO’s components are video and slides. Do you plan to add to your service any other features in the future?
RB: If yes, what is your plan for the site functionality? Do you plan to add to VCASMO an ability to use interactive functions (animation, etc.)?
For paid account users, they can add Flash in the slide side. For example, a static chart in a slide can be replaced as an animated Flash chart.
RB: Tell us something about VCASMO work process. What should a client have “in hands” to start creating a presentation?
They should take video by digital video recorder or webcam, when they shoot the video, please take some shot on the slide screen, it is more easy for them to mark the cue point time in the editor. Otherwise, they need another people to mark down the slide changing time of the presenter.
When VCASMO live recording feature launch, the process will be more easily.
VCASMO convert all video to Flash video (FLV) in 432×320, so if the video is already in FLV format, when it is uploaded to VCASMO, user can more faster to get the asset ready to use.
RB: Tell us please, about VCASMO’s clients. Who they are - large corporations, usual Internet users or medium-size business? Who is a potential user of your service?
We find large percentage of VCASMO active users are coming academic.
RB: What each group of clients can use at VCASMO? What tasks they are able to solve using VCASMO-presentations?
The usages of VCASMO is very wide. Apart from traditional presentation. I love to see user share their travel photo here, if they can record some audio to introduce their photo and share the experience in the journey.
Business users is our mainly focus area. Firstly, VCASMO can expand our existing video presentation solution by providing the clients a self-served method to create their video presentation. As a result, VCASMO can reduce the cost in creating a video presentation. It makes the product more price-competitive to other similar existing solutions in the market.
RB: Do you know how your clients use the final product? VCASMO allows to embed the presentations into sites and blogs - are there any opportunity to receive a paper copy of presentation for off-line use? For example, to burn it on a disc, or distribute at conferences?
I am also curious about how users use our product. Sometime, I never think about they use VCASMO in some way, for example, create some flipped animations. http://vcasmo.com/video/sim_irv/144
Offline version is planned in our roadmap.
Interviewer: Ruslan Browa
2. P.S. 28.03.08
authorSTREAM is a powerful online presentation sharing engine that not only allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations online for free, but also assists you to share them with your friends, students or co-workers located across the globe. You can find exciting presentations on just about any topic, rate them, post a comment and even embed them in your blog or YouTube.
1. P.S. 22.10.07
In directory of web 2.0 applications and services “Go2Web20.net”, under tag Presentation you can find a lot of web 2.0 on-line services for making cool presentations.
There is a plenty of news about web applications doing all the PC tricks in the browser. First time I faced a “page loading-free” web app at Gmail and it is still the best example of Web e-mail client and active web site interface. The power of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) approach is obvious and I do believe all sites are going to work like this some day. Actually it is not a new thing - first time I heard about this technique in 2002 at CeBit and it was called X Internet (Executable Internet). But now sites become so complex and number of Internet users is so big so the way people access information in Web has to be changed.
Although I do not believe that all software should to be moved to web (why I have to load it each time I want to use it?), I think that the next generation of software will employ web installation and smart caching technologies to use the best of two worlds - ease of software updates and accessibility of web applications and benefits of speed, persistence and hardware access of local applications.
It’s all sounds like a natural way of progress, but I want to notice another tendency. Traditionally software development (including web design) was for specialists. Now people can make Internet mash-ups having no special knowledge at all. Look at the Microsoft Popfly - you just connect application blocks (e.g. user input to search to image roll and you have your own image search engine. Add blogs and maps to your taste). Look at Wikipedia - you do not need to know HTML to write articles there.
There are two web technologies I want to talk about in this post - Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR (former Apollo). These technologies are targeted to help people develop the next generation of Web applications.
Both projects are intervention to each other’s land. Microsoft Silverlight is an interactive multimedia browser plug-in (just like Flash) and AIR is a set of technologies to make rich multimedia client applications (looks like Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation). Both technologies blur the edge between PC and web app. Silverlight demo looks quite like a desktop app but runs in a browser. AIR demo shows how to connect desktop application to the internet and work both in offline and on-line mode. Both technologies are cross-platform and allow to make amazing user interfaces.
Let’s start from Adobe. AIR is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich internet applications using Flash, Flex, HTML and AJAX and those can be deployed as a desktop application. AIR uses Flex that was developed to build business applications with Flash. A very cool demo of site using Flex is Sony Ericsson product catalogue.
See what AIR is about:
Here is the demo of E-bay application:
Microsoft Silverlight (former Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere) is a runtime for browser-based rich internet applications development, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. In turn, WPF was the implementation of idea to split application code development and user interface design. These tasks could be done in parallel and the result should look and work just great.
See the Silverlight announcement:
And here is the video editing demo:
What can I say? Adobe has an army of Flash guys those would be happy to harness the power of Flash, AJAX and Flex. In turn, Microsoft has a strong community of developers and powered Silverlight with .NET. Let’s see who will be more popular. But already now the future of web application is something very spectacular, convenient and juicy.
