Posts Tagged ‘ work ’

Cold Hard Cash: Second Life Coins Available

God bless IBM. Of all the big bad corporations doing business in the virtual world of Second Life, these guys — and, on an individual basis, the company’s employees — are near the top of the “most creative and ambitious” league table (mostly, I suspect, because they can afford to be). The latest: an IBM [ READ MORE ]

Seriosity Teams With IBM to Study Work 2.0

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 [ READ MORE ]

Ambient Gaming: Lifelogging in Disguise?

Cool British journo-researcher Aleks Krotoski has a couple of really good interviews up on the Guardian Gamesblog with veteran games designer Mark Eyles, who’s now in academia. In part one of their interview, Eyles talks about “ambient gaming,” and describes the thinking behind his game, Ambient Quest. (In part two, he talks about academia.) Ambient [ READ MORE ]

DoMyStuff Launches Wish Market For Chores

DoMyStuff.com actually launched in April, but it represents an interesting dovetail with some of the ideas that knock around among some of the younger metarati. In particular, a few people have been talking about wish markets: marketplaces that let buyers announce what they’re looking for and receive offers from vendors, rather than the normal course [ READ MORE ]

Mitch Kapor Speaks on Ending Bias Tonite in SL

Mitch Kapor, an early investor in and board member of Linden Lab, creators of the virtual world of Second Life, will give a talk this evening in SL, all about the Level Playing Field Institute, where he also sits on the board and which “promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces by [ READ MORE ]

Etsy Considers Crafting Its Own Virtual World

It was just over a year ago that I first blogged about Etsy, the online community for makers and sellers (and buyers, of course) of crafts of all flavors and kinds. Because they’re here in Brooklyn and because they have their metaversal aspects about them, I thought I’d go and pay them a visit recently. [ READ MORE ]

Sun Aims New 3D Environment at Business

On the heels of IBM‘s recent announcement about their new mainframe-class machines geared for 3D virtual worlds comes the news that Sun Microsystems has constructed its own 3D virtual environment for business. Currently an in-house demo project, the software could be ready for release within six months, according to a Sun engineer quoted in this [ READ MORE ]

Areae Looking at OGRE Hires For 3D Client

Areae, the start-up virtual world-maker run by veteran MMO developer Raph Koster, is looking for a “senior 3D client engineer” to “lead the development of a cross-platform 3D client” that’s currently planning to use open-source graphics engine OGRE. There had been some doubt as to how 3D Areae was going to be; would it be [ READ MORE ]

Will Collaboration Be Enough For Qwaq?

Qwaq, a company I blogged about last June, has been planning to “enable a rich ecosystem of interlinked Croquet spaces, that is as easy to navigate and extend as today’s Web.” News from the company yesterday flags its first product, Qwaq Forums, which offer customizable “virtual spaces for real work.” The spaces are built on [ READ MORE ]

SXSW Xcript: Joi Ito and Justin Hall

Venture capitalist and World of Warcraft addict Joi Ito and lifelogger Justin Hall sat down for a conversation together in Room 9C on Monday afternoon at South by Southwest. Ben Cerveny joined them midway. Title of the talk: Online Games: Beyond Play and Fantasy. Ito: I know everyone says this, but we’re going to try [ READ MORE ]

Clocking in at the Idea Factory (or the Farm)

Regular readers know I’ve been making noise lately about an idea factory that would seek to leverage (sorry, Ordinal) the skills of anyone who cared to participate in an effort to create any or all of a list of wish apps that had also been created by the community. As previously noted, I had to [ READ MORE ]

Sweden Looks At Taxing Virtual World Earnings

Add Sweden’s to the growing list of governments considering taxing monetary transfers from virtual worlds, if not the in-world earnings themselves. According to an AFP story, Swedish authorities are “planning a clapdown.” Said one Swedish taxman, “Most people play and keep their money on their game account, but if they move it out of the [ READ MORE ]

Rivers Run Red to Open California Office

Metaverse development company Rivers Run Red will open a California studio this Friday, January 5, according to Rivers CEO Justin Bovington. With a staff of seven and headed by a fellow names Ben James, Rivers’ west-coast operation will be located in San Francisco and will cater to the company’s existing clients, including Adidas , and [ READ MORE ]

Now Hiring: Become an Electric Sheep

The Electric Sheep Company is hiring. The Sheep are apparently looking for everyone from entry-level builders and texturers on up to project managers and the like. Only the excellent need apply, of course: no wind-up sheep or steam-powered sheep will likely get in the door. If you think you’ve got what it takes to become [ READ MORE ]

New Metaverse Services Firm Already Busy

Trinity Unviersity professor and Terra Nova author Aaron Delwiche sends word that he and SL resident Adri Saarinen have started up a new metaverse services firm, known as Metaversatility. The company has already recruited a number of SL residents and others to help out, and has a small but growing portfolio of projects — including [ READ MORE ]

Ogoglio’s Trevor Smith Talks 3D Web

Trevor Smith of the Ogoglio project (“exploring shared 3D spaces in the context of Web-enabled work”), will discuss the synthetic world he’s developing for businesses, on Tuesday, December 5, at 10pm Eastern time, in Second Life. [UPDATE: The event has been moved to Sheep Tower, at »Sheep Island (134, 134, 113)«. A former Xerox PARC [ READ MORE ]

Second Life Business: Nothing Virtual About It

Business Week has an interesting article about the challenges faced by “real-world” businesses setting up shop in the virtual world of Second Life. The piece is perhaps the most forward-thinking of any that have appeared so far in the popular press, as it acknowledges that large corporate interests are beginning to view Second Life as [ READ MORE ]

A Virtual Chamber of Commerce Takes Shape

Second Life resident Chili Carson is launching what could be a great boon for SL’s business owners as well as their customers: a Chamber of Commerce for the virtual world. While news of the venture first surfaced at the Second Life Community Convention and on New World Notes, 3pointD has some fresh details from Chili [ READ MORE ]

Getting Business Efficiencies from the Metaverse

Add terrorism and politics to the list of world-historical factors now driving people into the metaverse. Several links in this VRoot post discuss “how travel restrictions have given a boost to telepresence and effective visual collaboration as alternatives to physical travel.” Add to that high fuel prices that may simply make it cheaper to hold [ READ MORE ]

Log On, Rez In, Drop Out: The 60s of Technology

Virtual snail race, or mere hallucination? A week or two ago, I found myself describing the greater metaversapolitan area to a friend who had never heard of things like Second Life or There.com, virtual worlds or massively multiplayer online games, and who had only passing knowledge of apps like Google Earth and the concept of [ READ MORE ]

Play With Julian Dibbell’s Money in Second Life

Well, read about it, anyway. Dibbell, a journalist, Terra Nova contributor and author of the new book Play Money, Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, comes to the virtual world of Second Life today — not once, but twice — to promote his new publication (which is sitting [ READ MORE ]

After the Great Boredom: Gaming 3006

Go now and read this piece in Gamasutra to see how one the UK’s (or anywhere’s) best games journalists, Jim Rossignol, envisions gaming (and more) circa the year 3006. A taste: Neuroscience has long been aware that the brain is little more than a pattern completion engine, so like all 31st century denizens I carry [ READ MORE ]

New SL Business Mag to Launch August 1

While browsing the Second Life Podcast blog I found this link to the upcoming SL Business magazine, due to launch in-world and as a PDF on August 1. According to the mag’s media kit on SLExchange, it’s quite an ambitious undertaking. The media kit was posted by resident Dalian Hansen, but no staff is named [ READ MORE ]

SL Travel Agency Seeks Paid Contributors

This is a cool idea: SL resident Spin Martin (aka media-maker Eric Rice) is starting a Second Life travel agency, tpTravel, and is seeking people to contribute content to its blog, for which they’ll be paid US$10 per (approved) post. VTOR linked the news, which came from the SLProfiles site. We’ve created a new company [ READ MORE ]

IBM: Learn to Play, or Die Trying

IBM exec Linda Sanford gave a big shout-out to “the gaming generation” today at the Supernova conference in San Francisco. Sanford, a senior vice president of IBM’s internal On Demand Transformation and Information Technology initiatives, talked about some of the principles of innovation that IBM has been using to guide its business recently. In mentioning [ READ MORE ]

3pointD Goes Supernova

We’ll be on the road next week (or, more accurately, in the air), headed to the Supernova conference in San Francisco, where I’ll be moderating a workshop on the social, business and work-oriented lessons we can learn from massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. We’ll have two hours to fill, hopefully with plenty of [ READ MORE ]

Help Wanted: TI Looks at Gamespace

Texas Instruments is looking to hire two positions into what sounds like an effort to get more TI product into games on both the harware and software levels. TI recruiter Brent Rogers tells me the company is looking for one “3D software design engineer” (an entry-level position) and one “gaming professional,” who would presumably help [ READ MORE ]