Wipro Innovation = Redundancy?

Today's last expedition led me to te Wipro Innovation Isle (I guess it they'd love to abbreviate it to Wii - but that one's already taken in SL). For people working in the IT Services a well known name as it is one of India's giants when it comes to IT services.

"Wipro Tech is an information technology service company established in India in 1980. It is the global IT services arm of Wipro Limited (in operation since 1945, incorporated 1946). It is headquartered in Bangalore and is the third largest IT services company in India. It has more than 79,832 employees as of December 2007, including its business process outsourcing (BPO) arm which it acquired in 2002. Wipro Technologies has over 300 customers across U.S., Europe and Japan including 50 of the Fortune 500 companies." (Wikipedia)

Near the end of 2007 there were speculations of Wipro Technologies considering to take over Capgemini and thus Sogeti as well, but in the end it was a no show. The corporate website puts focus on 'applied innovation';

"At Wipro we have fine-tuned the science of viewing innovation through the lens of practicality to design unique solutions for end customers. Applied Innovation is the ability to infuse newer ideas and newer ways of doing things into all parts of the organization, and improve business outcomes, often without major disruptive change. It is a 360-degree business approach covering process, delivery, business and technology Innovations that help Wipro to work
collaboratively with clients for cost take-outs, speed to market and new business opportunities."

It is this theme that is the starting point for the Wipro presence in Second Life, which looks to be in the first stage of the experiment. It is a 3 sim cluster, of which only one is fully build, one only holding an expo stand and an empty sim.

Applied Innovation is the ability to infuse newer ideas and newer ways of doing things into all parts of the organization, and I can well imagine this applies to their Second Life expedition as well. I do believe we have to bring Virtual Worlds (newer ways) beyond the average marketing department (i.e. into all parts of the organization). The question remains how to do this.

Let's see if Wipro can bring the answer. The sim is filled with an assorted array of buildings, with two larger builds standing out. The first of these is the 'Learning Center' and is shaped a little like the Sydney Opera (not really, buyt you can see which building I'm referring to).

Please reread the lines on the triple sim: "One build, one half build, one empty." This is pretty much the case with the Learning Center as well. It holds two auditoria, and right outside there's an amphitheater. Also, at the second level it has several empty officerooms.

Further onto the campus we see various buildings, like a 'Client Engagement' building, a library and a datacenter each filled with several workstations / cubicles.

Finally I arrived at the second large building, a four storey square concrete office block which looked a little cramped when I walked into the hall and up the staircase. It made me wonder how much of the build is actually shaped like their real life offices... This building is labelled 'Offshore Development Center' and that is what interests me, what would bring innovation to the virtual workspace.

I was a little disappointed though when there were more rooms with workstations, and more and more. But no show. One of the great benefits I see for Virtual Worlds is what they potentially can do for the offshoring industry, as offshoring projects often require a lot of attention; extra management, extra communication, extra code checking etcetera and in the virtual workspace where you can collaborate while both in offshore and rightshore location would greatly aid this process.

Yet I'm fully aware of the limitations Second Life has in this regard. There's no real integration with development suites or management tools. Then there's always the issue of security. I can't really blame Wipro for not finding the solution for Second Life, but I had hoped for more info, more ideas.

The last redundancy in the sim was when I moved from the cantine inside the ODC to 'the Glacier', a cafe on the campus.

As for the build itself, I find it of average quality. It is a melee of textures (a lot of default SL texturing) and styles. As I said, I'm under the impression that part of it is based upon real life buildings, so maybe they had to work with what they had. Otherwise, I'd say the triple auditorium, the cramped staircases etcetera don't really utilise the 3D-ness of a virtual environment.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Wipro%20Innovation%20Isle/109/225/23

Life 2.0 in Wonderland

One of the prime Technology events is Dr. Dobbs Life 2.0 Conference. Today saw a series of talks in Second Life as well. Unfortunately I didn't have time to drop in. The good thing was that I was kept up to date through the Metanomics group IM on today's keynote;

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9:00 AM PDT - 10:00 AM PDTKEYNOTE:
Project Wonderland - 3D Toolkit for Building Virtual Worlds. Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator, Collaborative Environments Project, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Project Wonderland is an open source toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds for business and education collaboration. Within a Wonderland virtual! world, p s, interact with team members, and have chance encounters with colleagues, all using natural voice interaction. Most importantly, real work can be accomplished with Wonderland's support of X and Java applications as well as innovative telephone integration. With application sharing as the default, people can create, edit, and share documents within the virtual world.

Wonderland is built on top of the Project Darkstar game server platform, which provides enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and flexible integration with other enterprise systems.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Surprisingly enough, synchronisity strikes again. Thursday I have to give a presentation on collaboration and project management in Virtual Worlds, and one of the options I will discuss is the Wonderland project as it is one of the most advanced platforms when it comes to collaboration at this point in time, I think.

Perhaps we have to clarify a bit on the names used, as it sometimes causes some confusion.

• Darkstar: (also referred to as project ~) The game server platform which is the foundation of the technology
• Wonderland: (or project ~) The open source virtual world produced by Sun, which is built on top of the Darkstar platform.
• MPK20: The wonderland version Sun uses as its own private development VW.

Some bits and pieces on Darkstar / Wonderland from the speech:

Darkstar permits users to participate in one space without sharding. In addition to Darkstar they use jVoiceBridge for audio. It also permits interacting with telephone systems. They are also trying to get their artwork to be open source or CCL. Part of Wonderland includes collaboration capability that can be extended to enterprise software.It can interact with business data. Darkstar also scales down...an instance with 2-3 users can run on a laptop

There are external worlds live today: and some coming up fairly soon. They have tested some already. Small wonder; Wonderland is not planned to interact with SL... However, except maybe in the interoperability space (transportable avatars, etc.) and they will cooperate as much as possible.

For a complete schedule of the Dr. Dobbs Life 2.0 conference in Second Life click here.
More info on the Wonderland click here.

New HOAP for Second Life

I had lost a little faith in Second Life, but there's new hope coming about when it comes to Second Life being a serious tool for business: Html-On-A-Prim.

Gwynneth Llewelyn wrote an excellent article on this new feature and its implications, here's a short extract:

"A few months ago - not many in terms of “real life”
hours, but an eternity in Second Life® - a brief discussion with Linden Lab exposed the rumour that they were planning to integrate an HTML browser inside the Second Life application client. This is not a revolutionary breakthrough - things like ActiveWorlds or OpenCroquet have done it ages ago, and the world did not shatter and end at that time.

Some eager residents of SL were happy about the idea. At the very least, you would be able to exchange notecards with “rich text”. Perhaps even have a way to browse a bit while in-world - no more need to open up your browser to check the Help pages, do some forum posting, or even insert events directly from in-world.

On a second stage (according to Linden Lab®), HTML may be directly drawn on top of a prim face. This would mean, for starters, a way to get outside information on top of a 3D world. Older platforms already allow for this usage of HTML. Things like proper text management on top of a prim are finally possible - books, slide-show presenters, coreboards, even clothes vendors, will be able to get away with textures for writing text, and use HTML-rendered text instead.

The third stage is full integration. Prims with HTML pages (and LL is still thinking on how this will happen) will be point-and-click browseable. Neither we nor Linden Lab have yet figured out how exactly this will be implemented..."

HTML on a Prim boosts options for virtual workspace

Although the features at this time are pretty basic, it has brought Second Life back into focus for me as a possible platform for serious collaboration. My frustration with SL was mainly caused by lack of real collaboration possibilities.

What it all boils down to is that you rez a prim and put a webpage on it. Now you can look at a webpage with others. Nothing spectacular, but it gets more serious when you can look at secure webpages. I've done some tests with a colleague displaying secure content. Through the built-in media browser you can access and log into secure sites, then use the option to 'send current URL to parcel' and it will display set itself at the parcel media URL and display at the screen. Your fellow observer won't see the webpage unless he's logged in as well. Today we started working through some of our project tools (like JIRA) in which we can monitor our projects.

It works. We could both look at 'classified content' and discuss the status of a project, manage service calls and have a look at the time budgets for the project at hand. At the end there was one question nagging me: Security? Anyone?

The thing is, Second Life doesn't have the reputation of being a safe and sound business environment (remember ABN is partly moving to Active Worlds because they need a secure environment). What happens with my username and password when I enter this info in the built in browser?

A Quick HOWTO:

Maybe it's me, but it took me some time to fiddle out how it worked. And because there's a little bug (it can crash your sim) I thought I'd do you the favour of a quick 'howto'.

The feature only works with the new Release Candidate 1.19.1 client (March 6th) and there are a few new features that are obvious - such as the extra media tab next to the talk settings - and some little settings to tweak in the 'Preferences' bit.

The basic element for displaying web content is in the estate management settings, the 'About Land' configuration where you have the option to set the media url for the parcel. The downside is that you can only set one URL per parcel. Remember to select the texture that will be used on the prims to display the content as well. If you're working behind a firewall or proxy, you now have the option to set proxy stuff as well in the preferences bit (pic right)

Then build the prim, select the desired texture (in this case the new *default media texture) corresponding with the texture set at the media options in the previous step. Then go to the general tab and select prim properties. Where you used to have buy, open and sit options, there are now two extra's: Open Media Content and Play Media Content.

Siemens Solid Edge to enhance Second Life 3D design

PLANO, Texas, Feb. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of Siemens Industry Automation Division and a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, today announced a new interactive tool that enables users to create their own 3-D Razor Scooter in Second Life. The tool is easy to use like Siemens PLM Software's Solid Edge(R) software and meant to expose Second Life residents to the possibilities of CAD software.

In the real world, Siemens PLM Software hosts "test drive" Solid Edgeseminars to illustrate how easy the software is to use. Solid Edge is apowerful hybrid 2D/3D design system and a core component of the VelocitySeries(TM) portfolio.

In the virtual world, the new interactive tool provides companies a glimpse into the use of 3-D modeling software inproduct development. A transparent screen guides Second Life residents to click through a range of selections to create a custom-built scooter in less than a minute. "

In our industry it's important to be able to vet out design ideas as quickly as possible," says Bob Hadley, product development manager, Razor(R). "In the real-world, with Solid Edge, we're able to introduce at least two or three times as many new products each year as we could previously. To compete in our industry, that's essential. Siemens PLMSoftware is taking this to the next level by integrating real-world design experiences in virtual worlds."

According to a recent report, "Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds," Forrester Research, Inc., Jan. 7, 2008, "Virtual worlds like Second Life ... are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools ... " Thereport notes that virtual worlds have advantages over other approaches to communication and collaboration. One example is "they allow people to work with and share digital 3-D models of physical or theoretical objects. Many disciplines rely on 3-D models and designs: Surgeons, architects, engineers, and product designers all use CAD models or sophisticated visualization systems to explore and create complex real-world objects ...You can release near-final designs to a limited external group of users and solicit feedback before starting fabrication." The report predicts that within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today.

"This new tool is a great example of how companies can use some of the unique characteristics of the Second Life platform to create interactive experiences for their products," said Chris Kelley, vice president, Platforms and Partners, Siemens PLM Software. "Our goal in Second Life continues to be to find new ways to collaborate with our customers and partners in an effort to provide a more immersive way to experience our software. The user experience in Second Life is based upon our successful Solid Edge Dare to Compare Test Drive events where you learn first-hand how easy it is to use Solid Edge compared to competitive products."

In the real world, Solid Edge Dare to Compare Test Drive events guide users through key stages of 3D design: part modeling, sheet metal, assembly creation, drafting and documentation, plus analysis and full motion simulation.

To reach the Siemens Innovation Connection on Second Life, visit http://www.siemens.com/plm/secondlife.

To attend a real-world Solid Edge Dare to Compare Test Drive, visit http://www.siemens.com/plm/daretocompare.

Source: PRNewsWire

Widgetting at Google SL

Real life has been very busy in the past weeks. Holidays, and now a busy project and trying to redecorate the house in the evening hours have kept me away from blogging. It shows though. Sad to say my ratings dropped drastically.

Before I went to work this morning I noticed a blogpost over at KZero's; Google Island now open to the public….but not for long which drew my attention. I jumped in and took a look and a load of snapshots before I went to work. Now I just washed off the plaster from my hands and am picking pieces of stucco from my hair and sat down to blog this build.

Here's Nic Mitham's (KZero) pick:

"Built by the Vesuvius Group for Google as part of their Zeitgeist bi-annual event, Google Island opened for the public today. The island has been up since October, just for some Google employees and attendees of Zeitgeist.

The island was actually spotted by a few people several weeks ago, some assuming it was an unofficial build. Well, the mystery has now been revealed.

The venue is based on the real world Google campus and focusses heavily on interaction and socialising. Various Google products and apps such as Earth, Checkout and Analytics are on show - visualised where appropriate. Speaking to the guys from Vesuvius Group, the island has been sold already and is coming down tomorrow. So, here’s some images and the SLurl if you’re quick."

In itself the build does raise a couple of questions, which probably makes it the pick of the day for a lot of bloggers. As Nic said, the build is based on the Real Life Google Campus, but the official reading that it has been intended for internal use only doesn't fit the build. It's got a promo feel all over it, or as Aleister Kronos puts it:

The one thing I found strange about this build is: Why furnish it with all manner of models and links to existing Google products when the sole users of the island are Google employees - who should know all of this already? Indeed , time has been spent constructing working models of some of these - such as Sketchup and Checkout.

Perhaps the answer is a simple and prosaic: "because they could."

Maybe the answer is just as simple and prosaic, but there's more to this build. First, let's take a look on the Google campus, if the sim isn't down yet, grab yourself a Segway to move around

The central plaza has the typically Google-colored tables and is lined with several event pavillions, each with a different theme such as 'collaboration' or 'networking'.

Perhaps the most interesting part on the plaza is the Google Garage which shows the first signs of serious Widgeting with links to Google Analytics. Inside the main buildings it gets more interesting though:

In one of the halls you'll find a number of celebrity photographs with links to bio's and the option to message these people. Another room shows a cartographers table with a Google Maps interface, further on you'll pass file cabinets with links to Google Docs and a counter representing Google's new Checkout.

Of course, Sketchup is a must for the SL community, to prove it works as good as any other 3D designer and finally Google Earth rounds off Google's widgetting in Second Life.

Like Aleister said, it might be just a thing for Google to prove it can interface like this with Second Life and that this build served no other reason than to offer a place for the Google employees for the Zeitgeist celebrations but I personally find this build very attractive. Not because it's a high quality build though.

The most attractive point in this venue is the widgeting. Probably unintentionally, I think Google did the SL community a service: Many people and companies do not deem Second Life fit for business. One of the reasons is it is too open and too less secure an environment to do serious business.

However in interfacing with Google Maps and Google Earth (as a Paraverse) it opens up opportunities for integration with GIS data (geospatial information system), i.e. integration with Real Time Real World data it puts Second Life forward as a serious option in disaster training (like play2train) or as base for a virtual control center (see Ugotrade).

On the fun part, you could start using GIS information (e.g. Traffic Information) to simulate traffic in Real Life Cities in Second Life, or use Damanicorp's Weather Station to let your sim use actual weather data.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Google%20Island/128/128/0 (as long as it lasts).

Virtual Banking (13): BCV

Sharp readers will have noticed I skipped no. 12 in the series of Virtual banking. No. 11 in the series was Crédit Agricole and no. 12 is Cofidis, as French banker and insurance company. That blog was titled "Have a little Cofidis" due to the Tour de France debacle.

Bank number 13 is a Swiss bank, called the BCV (Banque Cantonale Vaudoise). Here's their profile from their website:

"BCV was founded over 160 years ago to serve the people of Vaud, and we have kept our strong community focus to this day. We offer a full range of services, including retail banking, corporate banking, private banking and asset management.In addition we engage in BCV has trading activities in various financial markets. "

The island is quite craftly landscaped, stepping away from the 'normal photorealistic' trees and stuff, but doesn't hold much more than BVC's virtual Headquarters, but for a venue dating back to 7 februari 2007 it's part of the early bankers in Second Life.

In a second stage - a second Island - they've must have started looking for deeper involvement with the Second Life community and opened up BCV island 2. On this sim you'll find different venues, maybe from partners, or maybe collaborative builds but of lesser quality and inspiration than the main venue.

In a past life I used to do some webdesign and one of the deadliest sins in the business was - and still is - putting a visitor counter on a professional website. On BCV island 2 there is one ! It's on a building which counted me as visitor no. 63 since june 17.

(Okay, it's nice if you're called Esmee Denters and get 0ver 40 million views on youTube, but it's a bummer when you're a big corporate name and get only a few visitors).

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/BCV%20Island/156/121/60

Virtual Banking (11): Crédit Agricole

There's another bank in Second Life, after BNP Paribas the second French Bank in SL is Credit Agricole. I've never heard from them other than that they're sponsoring one of the Tour de France teams, but that's about it.

Here's a little Wiki-knowledge on them:

"Crédit Agricole SA (CASA) (Euronext: ACA) is the largest banking group in France, second largest in Europe and the sixth largest in the world by Tier 1 capital according to The Banker magazine. It is also part of the CAC 40 stock market index.

Crédit Agricole SA is a semi co-operative bank, being majority owned by 41 French Caisses Régionales de Crédit Agricole Mutuel. Its subsidiaries are:

• Calyon, the investment banking division of Crédit Agricole.
• Calyon Financial, global futures and options brokerage serving institutional investors.
• LSA, the Asian securities brokerage division.
• Predica and Pacifica, the insurance divisions
• LCL (Previously Crédit Lyonnais), the nationwide retail banking network, acquired in 2003.

Okay, enough of the promo. We understand they're pretty big in Real Life. But I'm not sure they're big in SL yet. Their focus, like ING, is not on banking in this virtual world, or establishing a presence but on collaboration, mutualism as one of their hosts, Caliel Writer told me.

The Institute for Mutualism (have to watch typos here or it'll get mutilated) also exists in the Real World, though this isn't a replica.

Other parts of the sim are the boat, which is a part of history, space to set up future franchises and a piece of nature "where we can relax and which we should save and cherish" according to Caliel.

I'm by far too exited on getting out some new info on Rezzable, so I'll keep this short. I have to, since I logged out of SL so fast I forgot to save my transcript of the conversation with the kind Caliel. For more info, read Ambling in Second Life's Credit to Crédit Agricole.

One last remark though that should be mentioned. Right now everything is in French, but they're working on getting out the info in English as well.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/CREDIT%20AGRICOLE/119/150/23

Eco Savvy Eolus

Although I was stressed because of my doubledate (which later evolved into a triple and even quadruple date), tonight's main venue was the sneak preview of Eolus One.

The best way of introducing Eolus is by quoting another excellent Ugotrade post:
"I met Eolus McMillan from Implenia on Second Life yesterday. And, I heard the extraordinary story of how creative minds from different backgrounds, IBM, SAP, Wago, Zumtobel and Implenia amongst others, have come together to make a major leap towards 3D internet. The fruits of this collaboration will be unveiled on July 6th, on Second Life. The picture above shows a birds eye view of EOLUS One on Second Life.

The most important aspect of this breakthrough is the EOLUS focus on Real Life and Second Life interactions that serve to make a better world - addressing many aspects from CO2 Reduction, Energy Management, Health, to Education, Collaboration , Networking, and more."

[read full article]

After this excellent blog, the story was quickly picked up by Nick Wilson of Metaversed who quickly arranged a podcast interview to give us a lowdown, followed up by today's Things to Do outing.

Our host was Eolus McMillan, or Oliver Goh gave us the grand tour of the site, which started at the museum:

"Here you can see the story of how we came up with the idea of Eolus One. It basically started one evening at a European computer exhibition. Ansi and myself met there. She had a booth at the IBM stand showing digital divergence and I was there for the energy management part.

We met one evening and found that we had a common vision to merge the projects and we sketeched out a plan on a napkin, you can see it in the corner. The idea was to bring partners from cross industries together to form a think tank."

Well, on the pics below, you can see that it worked out, there are many well known names participating in this project.

"In this building we have many aspects of every day life that we cover shopping on the first floor an exhibtion/ innovation area in the second offices in the thirs together with residential and an executive floor. Behind me you see a model of a house (still in the museum), a house that I live in in RL. The house can be fully controlled from SL"



















When we came to the control room, Oliver showed us what he meant by controlling his house from Second Life.

"What you see here it the control center of Eolus One. It is actually tied to a number of rl buildings. The idea here is to show how companies can improve Facilities management services
to make the processes more efficient and improve the failure rate.

I will be able to show you the technical parts when the exhibtion opens (which should be open by the time this blog is done). The system is linked in to ERP2005 (SAP) and the whole maintenance process is shown here. You can monitor the hvac systems, change schedules, programm the building automation system and so on. The idea of the control room is that it knows the identiy of the avatar and represents the data in the context of this person. So for example if a finance person sits here he would receive other info on the screens as a technical person"

We're closing in on 7-7-7, Earth Day and Eolus is one more climate savvy project trying Second Life as stage. Yesterday I blogged on the Spanish getting climate savvy in SL as well, and today Philips was giving out energy low lamps.

However, Eolus does hold some extraordinaire potential in making real and virtual worlds interact. This is a show to watch!

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/EOLUS/128/128/0

Robert Jordan contest

Robert Jordan, author of the legendary the Wheel of Time series has set up a competition for the 2009 calendar, announced on the Dragonmount blog. The money raised by the calendar sales will go to benefit Amyloidosis Research at the Mayo Clinic where Robert Jordan is receiving his treatment from.

In Second Life a group named 'Wheel of Time Fans' has been around for a while now, and me being a total tWoT fan am a member of this group. It seemed like a good thing to get the group together to build an entry for this contest in collaboration.

Several group members have already signed up to participate .

IM VeeJay Burns for more information.

Looking for sponsors:

The group is looking for a piece of land where we can set up a build.

Here's a few more pics of what The Wheel of Time could look like in Second Life.

A'Lan Mandragoran and the Malkieri banner

a Whitecloack

Downsizing Big Blue

The Register reports that IBM could lay off upto 100,000 employees of it's total of about 350,000 and that this weeks 1300 is just a start. The mass lay off project is codenamed LEAN -which gives me the idea they'll try to run it LEAN and MEAN.

The question is, will they drop the masses, or are they going to outsource? A complete 100K lay off would give rise to speculations, perhaps even riots. Outsourcing, or transferring the labor to cheap labor countries (offshoring) seems a more likely scenario. IBM has been investing big time in Second Life collaboration research, having a very strong presence. Are these collabs so successful that they trust Virtual Worlds as their bridge to offshoring?

Anyway, Big Blue isn't getting leaner in Second Life, as on thursday, May 10th, will see the opening of a new IBM sim. This time it's the BeNeLux R&D

Cisco Community Center

Triggered by one of the things I read earlier today about Cisco, I decided to go in for a look.
Cisco has got 4 islands, actually I should say sims. The sims are a terraformed like a cluster of smaller islands with gazebo's and nice bridges crossing the waters

Cisco's really getting into community, also giving some room for their partners if you're able to read the signs below. Trust me, there's a lot of different areas, no real events or fun thingies, but plain old community building and collaboration.

I like the build, the general setup of different islands, quite open but with a sense of privateness. The architecture is a little simple though.

NGI opens up

April 26th will be the opening of the "Isle of NGI". The NGI is a dutch organisation for IT-professionals and will be hosting a series of events in Second Life.

The NGI sim is meant as a meeting place for IT professionals for knowledge exchange and collaboration. As far as I could tell the sim is build from several prefab offices.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Isle%20of%20NGI/128/128/0

Third Life Foundation

The Third Life Foundation is a group dedicated to the exploration and development of synergies between RL and SL, with an eye to supporting experiences that help people come to a deep appreciation of their interrelatedness with each other and nature.

That's a nice promotional text, isn't it, but what does it mean? Where is the interrelatedness?

When flying around I saw some idyllic spots on the island, some spiritual ones, but the centerpoint of attention is a whole jumble about Arthur M. Young's Proces Theory.

Teamwork and Collaboration projects are certainly processes that could be carried by Second Life as a medium, but I didn't gain much new insights here. I hope one of the members can shed some light.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Third%20Life%20Lab/106/82/64