Our final project for Enterprise 2.0 is to create a Second Life “Exploratorium” that relates to the popular book, Groundswell written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Each member of the class, save for Nick and me, will be responsible for one chapter in which he or she provide the central lessons of that chapter and provide supporting links and examples that embody those ideas.

Nick, being a graduate student, will be in charge of coordinating the entire project, ensuring a unified theme and that the project is completed. My part is to be in the role of technical support, providing help to any students that need assistance with workable links or perhaps creating prototype display stands. Essentially, my job will be to implement the general elements of design that Nick has planned for the Exploratorium. Being that I will be assisting others, my job should be quite dynamic. I’ll keep posting to show the progress of the team.

Andrew

The possibilities are endless! I found this classic Optimus Prime outfit (not that ugly, new-age one) at the All Spark Labs for 200LD. The output also features a heads-up display (HUD) that provides a button to perform gestures and to transform into Optimus’ vehicle mode. I also found outfits for all sorts of cartoons and science fiction shows. Now, all I need to do is a way to find more money. I did hear something about dancing for people…

-Andrew

Don’t mind me, i’m just hanging out at a classroom in Second Life in the IT World region. Second Life (SL) is a virtual world in which individuals can freely express themselves through open customization of their avatar and through their ability to construct objects using the built in tools of SL. With its ever increasing popularity, many real world businesses have opened up locations within SL. One business that I visited recently is IBM. Companies like IBM can hold information sessions for their customers or regular users. Another use is for holding collaborative events within the organization. By holding meetings in this virtual space, IBM is able to save money by reducing travel costs and allow for inexpensive global reach. Also, IBM is able to use in-program tools to build objects that would otherwise be impractical or impossible in real life.

Welcome to IBM Theatre I. It’s easy to see the limitless uses for this virtual arena. The possibilities, the reach, and the ease. See you online.

-Andrew

PS. This place look familiar to anyone?

Have you ever had one of those times when a product or service comes out that you fell that you thought of first? This is one of my times. OnLive was announced at the Game Developers’ Conference this year as an on-demand gaming service. The gist of it is that you no longer need to purchase a console or constantly upgrade your personal computer to keep up with new games, the latter a reason why PC gaming has decreased the last few years. OnLive does this by processing all of the game data in their cloud. The video outputted from the game is then streamed onto your PC, or if using their adapter, on your television. What this means is that you can play games that are traditionally reserved for high-end gaming rigs such as Crysis on your netbooks.

One of the biggest problems that are evident in this game delivery system is the problem of lag and IGN ensures us that although the game does not seem like it runs at a full 60 frames per second like we are used to, it runs well enough to be playable. Of course OnLive has put time into ensuring that their video compression algorithms are quick enough to eliminate any lag between the time the user inputs commands from their controllers/mice/keyboards and the time the video is rendered and sent back to their displays. The bandwith required for a 480p resolution game is 1.5 mbps, 720p requires a 5.0 mbps connection.

If you are not amazed by this yet, you should be. So what does this mean for you? This signals two important things. We’re taking an enourmous industry, one that is larger than the movie industry, and putting it into the cloud. This is going to cement cloud computing as the next technology to look forward to if this succeeds. The other is that America is experiencing a bandwidth explosion. The increase in demand for on-demand gaming in conjunction with streaming high definition video means that we should be seeing our infrastructure grow greatly. Here’s to hoping we crack the top 40 list for internet infrastructure.

This will pave the way for other applications of cloud computing given the enourmous processing going on in the backend and the sheer amounts of bandwidth required. I imagine that this will affect companies that have normally provided the hardware to backup gaming, AMD who acquired ATI and nVidia come to mind. I’m sure there are other ramifications that i’m not thinking of. I, for one, am stoked. We should be expecting a beta of the service in the summertime and then a launch of OnLive in Q4 of this year.

-Andrew

Google is an American company that earns revenues from advertisements related to its multiple services including but not limited to its internet search engine, email, maps products. It has gained popularity as the best and top internet search engine in the world, providing the most relevant sites to its users. It has even been absorbed into the English lexicon as a verb that means to query Google in search of something. Along with its internet search, Gmail, Google’s email service, is one of the most popular email providers. Also, Google Maps is widely used as a popular internet mapping service, quickly gaining on the market leader, Mapquest.

Google provides public APIs that allows developers creating applications to utilize its multiple services. Apple recently announced that as part of its OS 3.0 upgrade to its iphone, they will be including a Maps kit that allows for the inclusion of the Google Maps API. Though seemingly insignificant for the average user, the decision to include Google’s Maps API in the iPhone has great implications. What we see is a trend towards applications that use information and data that reside in the cloud. More importantly, the inclusion of Google Maps along with its custom annotation functionality allows for the effective digitization of real world objects. Normally, this kind of digitilization has been confined to niche websites but now it is contained within the increasingly popular mobile device, the iPhone. The iPhone provides an easy way for users to be perpetually connected and interacting with the internet. In summation, we are trending towards a world of ubiquitous, persistant data that is accessible anywhere. Maybe this is reading a bit much of Apple’s announcement but I believe that it is an important step towards a new web as we know it.

-Andrew

I will be taking a trip up to New York City to visit my grandmother this weekend for her birthday. Apparently, all our relatives, including ones I am pretty sure I have never met before, will be there so it is somewhat important. Anyways, I was looking up restaurants to go try when I fly up and I stumbled across Grand Sichuan

The front page of the website includes pressing stories that relate to their customers. The first story on the page said this:

An Apology Letter to our Jersey City Restaurant Customers

This Evening, Feb 9 2009, one customer came to our Jersey City restaurant and ordered barbecue spareribs take out. The new female cook we recently hired touched his spare rib using her bare hands and then used the same hand to touch her own mouth while preparing the spare ribs. This was very wrong … this wrong thing is fully our restaurant’s responsibility. This employee has quit her job tonight after what happened.

Though it is an earnest attempt to be transparent, I feel that it comes off as fake and overly extreme. Some of the commentators agree:

no warning. just fired like that? that sucks. i like restaurants that treat there employess w. respect too. i understand the cleanliness thing and of course what she did was wrong, but dont over react.

I am trying to find a good Chinese source in my new hood. I am big on cleanliness and quality, but am also sure that this was probably not a big deal compared to what goes on in kitchens

Another post on the sites talks about a recent incident regarding a customer having an allergic reaction to MSG in the food. The posts end up sounding like a pity party and I am not sure if they are using the right kind of communications when attempting to engage their customers. What do you think?

-Andrew

Dove’s campaign for real beauty uses advertisements showing graphically untouched, women. Their aim is to break down the conventional idea of beauty as thin, blonde, tall, et cetera. One ad in particular shows a young girl and then a fast paced montage of beauty advertisements, medical procedures enhancing beauty, and images of women going through the process of fitting into society’s view of beauty. The advertisement shows these images in a way that portrays it as brutally superficial, negative, and even harmful. It then instructs people to speak to their children before the beauty advertisers do.

This campaign highlights different aspects of our interconnected world. The first is the convergence of opinions into a single idea of beauty. This was spurred on by the advent of modes of advertisement that have more visibility than ever before. Regarding society, it shows that Dove is trying to engage their marginalized customers by specifically targeting their body images and contrasting it with the unattainable model of beauty.

Greenpeace showed the power of subverting Dove by replicating their own effort to embrace a specific demographic and juxtaposing the original images with images that show the deforestation caused by Dove’s creation of products containing palm oil. My takeaway from Greenpeace’s efforts is that we should not discount the power and efficacy of anyone with the ability to distribute messages as easily as Greenpeace. This episode should give us pause when we consider how we interact with each other, particularly businesses with their customers. Visibility is the new paradigm of this business generation as the internet ensures that business practices transparent to everyone.

-Andrew

LUGNET is a fan-based website dedicated to adult fans of legos (AFOLs). Lego famously recruited AFOLs to become ambassadors for their products, becoming liaisons between the company and their customers.

LUGNET since the writing of Groundswell has continued to grow. A quick glance at Alexa, a web information company detailing traffic, shows that over the last 3 months, LUGNET has managed to increase the number of global users by 20%. The number of page views per user increased 3%. The data shows that most (73.4%) of the visitors go to guide.lugnet.com which shows that the “Creator” content is the most valued part of the website.

A look at the forums of LUGNET show that the ambassador program is still working. An ambassador named “Andrew”, who is in contact with Lego’s community manager, is looking for information regarding upcoming 2009 lego events. Lego’s goal is to have a better understanding of the upcoming events so that they can better allocate their resources and involve their lego employees. Other posts include “Improving the adult image of legos”. Clearly, LUGNET and lego’s program to connect itself with AFOLs is still working, attracting interest and expanding.
-Andrew

Many of the comments that I read in the post where I found this video conveyed their cynicism for the vision saying that this world can not possibly exist in the next 10 years and I am inclined to agree with them.  The issue is not our imaginations, creating these fantastical technologies, nor our ingenuity, or turning translating our ideas into real world creations.  The problem is that people are still far too resistant to the idea of technology.  People do not fully grasp the benefit of technology and how it can enrich and improve their lives.  It is this uncaring and conservative attitude that prevents these visions from being realized.  

But this problem is two pronged.  It is usually the businesses that drive innovation but in this cut-throat world, everybody seems to want to avoid taking that first step, afraid to take the risk of being a first mover.  Institutions have taught us that the purpose of business is to profit or maximize the wealth of its stakeholders.  I would disagree with and challenge that belief and I encourage everyone to do the same.  The purpose of business, to me, is to provide goods and services; profit is merely a reward for doing the job well.  Instead of punishing businesses for being bold and adventurous, we should reward them and encourage them to always push that frontier.

For those skeptical of the technologies imagined here, let me say this: people have always tended to categorize futuristic ideas such as these as “science fiction” but what people forget is that time and time again, we have surpassed our expectations for what we can achieve as a people.  The printing press, computers, mobile phones, and our space program.  These are all things that our predecessors would have scoffed at.   

Here are some screen shots of the video:

Here’s the full 5 minute version of the video (digging the tunneling glass wall for classrooms):

-Andrew

Mobilism is an advertising company that allows local companies to offer special promotions.  This service is specifically geared towards college campuses and the communities around them.  Special deals are text messaged to students based on their subscription settings that change the frequency of the advertisements.

Right now, Mobilism is only available at select campuses.