3pointD.com

View22 has been inking some interesting deals lately, and today comes the announcement of another one: the company, which makes a 3D eCommerce solution called Immersiv, has just struck a co-marketing deal with design software maker Autodesk to cross-promote View22 for sales and Autodesk for design. “Autodesk will recommend View22 as a preferred partner for providing web-based, thin-client 3D sales automation solutions for its current and prospective customers. View22 will recommend Autodesk as a preferred partner for 3D design and engineer-to-order products for its current and prospective customers,” according to a press release. This kind of browser-based 3D eCommerce stuff is likely to become a bigger part of the 3D experience going forward. It’s a lot easier to get in front of people through a browser than it is through a downloaded client. Not that this means View22 or Autodesk necessarily win loyal customers and clients through such a deal, but it could help open the market by getting the browsing public more acclimated to useful 3D.

Huge global marketing and communications company Publicis and big 3D design company Dassault have teamed up on a new plugin-based 3D browser tool called 3dswym, which will “offer a collaborative Web-based platform allowing marketers to connect directly to consumers in order to jointly create and adapt new consumer goods and new retail environments using advanced Web and 3D tools.” You can plug in and mess around with an early version of 3dswym, but it doesn’t seem to offer anything special at the moment. That said, it sounds like it could be cool once it’s spun up. The tool is based on an interesting premise, though: “Successful marketing must permit consumers to enter the product creation process at a much earlier stage, so that products and services are in fact co-generated with them” according to a press release. Thing is that the global reach and sway of these companies could well help drive things in a more co-creative direction. Keep an eye out for 3dswym coming to a consumer products company near you — although not necessarily soon.

Meet the new boss

Good news, all you obssessively grinding World of Warcraft addicts: “Success as a business leader may depend on skills as a gamer,” according to Jim Spohrer, Director of Services Research at the IBM Research Center in Almaden, California. IBM has just done a study with Seriosity (one of the cooler companies at the virtual goods summit) which found “significant parallels between online gaming and the future of work,” according to a press release. “Today’s gamers are learning collaboration, self-organization, risk-taking, openness, influence, and how to earn incentives linked to performance and be flexible in the way they communicate.” That’s a lot better than the hand-eye coordination that most people think as the limit of what games have to teach. More below. (more…)