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The Upfronts are the week when television networks show off the season’s upcoming shows to advertisers, hoping to win them over and grab fistfuls of their cash. For that reason, they’re very important, and the networks make sure their presentations are top-notch and designed to entertain. CBS made its showing yesterday afternoon at Carnegie Hall — and kicked it off with a machinima piece (produced by the Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog) showing an avatar of JoAnn Ross, the president of network sales, flying around the virtual world of Second Life, according to Paul LaMonica of CNN/Money (who wasn’t sure it really was SL, apparently). CBS hasn’t posted the video on YouTube yet, but it will apparently be up there eventually, 3pointD hears, though it could take a week or two. The network is definitely taking a brave step into the future with the use of machinima in such a context, but it isn’t yet moving around the present very quickly, it seems. You can look for more good stuff in this vein from CBS, I’d bet. What I like about it is that it’s the kind of thing that will drive adoption of virtual worlds.

There’s so much metaversal news these days that it’s impossible to make a blog post out of everything that crosses my browser. (It was impossible before, but it’s getting more impossible now.) In an attempt to cram yet more news onto the blog, then, 3pointD is happy to introduce “D-Briefs,” an occasional roundup of short news items, some big and important, some trivial but interesting. Look for D-Briefs to appear on a consistently every-so-often basis. Today we have news of a Sony/ClubPenguin deal, a new immersive world from Shanda, IBM getting Torqued, and a million bucks tossed at a startup world. (more…)

For those of you still skeptical about the value of game consoles as a social and communications channel in an age of virtual worlds, I offer this Variety story, which describes young Hollywood execs networking and talking about deals over Xbox Live. Voice chat means they’re undeterred by the lack of a keyboard. And the games provide the engaging activity around which social functions are organized: “Nobody is yet selling a script or getting cast in a movie on Xbox Live. But like any social activity, the bonds formed in a game of “Gears of War” — currently the most popular game on XBL — carry over into other areas. In an incestuous industry town like Hollywood, most people’s social circles primarily involve people in the biz; so tagging somebody with a grenade at night can make it easier to give them a call about a project the next day.” World of Warcraft may be the new golf, but Live seems to be the new Chateau (or wherever’s more hip these days). Romantically, however, it’s not so hot: “Xbox Live is not a universally appealing way to socialize, even among the under-35 set. The games are predominantly male; the rare female voices are often girlfriends or wives in the background asking when the player is coming to bed.”