IBM Throws Itself a Party in Second Life
I recently had the opportunity to have a drink with Ian and Roo from the always interesting eightbar blog and learned that there were more than 200 IBM’ers running around in the virtual world of Second Life — not because they’d been sent there or were part of a project, but just because IBM is full of curious technologists and many of them have ended up with SL avatars. One very cool result of this, and of the interest of IBM technical strategist and innovation guru Irving Wladawsky-Berger, has been that Roo and Ian are now officially charged with checking out SL on behalf of IBM, rather than simply stealing a few virtual moments when they’re meant to be working on more important stuff. Another result is that IBM are throwing themselves a “virtual block party” in the virtual world tomorrow, on their Almaden sim. I don’t think it’s open to the public, but it is open to IBM alumni (of which the company has several hundred more as of a few days ago). What will be interesting will be to see exactly what kind of development work these kind of events can galvanize.
Feeds
What if Microsoft does a Google and buy SecondLife. Sounds to me as a logical extension to their LionHead/ Massive acquisitions.
Mark:
Glad you took notice of our Greater IBM event…the intersection of two part of my work on social networking and virtual communities. One of the most interesting aspects of what’s going on in our own company is how the Virtual Universe Community group we’ve formed internally has sort of self-assembled in the last few months.
What’s more, our interests have coincided with those of many of our clients.
But the bottom line on the alumni event was that it epitomized what we hope Greater IBM will grow to become….a true intersection for innovation and collaboration. The virtual front is just one of the ways we hope to enable new ways to work together.
IBM alumni who want to join Greater IBM can do so now with this link
http://www.openbc.com/premiumgroup-6291.d26b7d
They will need to create a profile of themselves, and their affiliation, before they are confirmed into the group. Cheers,