092007 IBM In The Metaverse Metanomics Transcript

IBM IN THE METAVERSE

57 MILES: Hello everyone, and welcome to Metanomics ’07, part of a series of events with

metaverse.com and Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, in the States.

I’m about to introduce you to Professor Robert Bloomfield at the Sage Hall in the Johnson

School at Cornell, where he is with Sandra Kearney of IBM and a packed live audience

there. At least I understand it’s packed. We’re creaking and groaning here on the sim with

80 people. It’s fantastic to see you all and I do thank you for coming. Please do bear with us

while we shoot between virtual worlds because this is, although perhaps not the very first

time we’ve joined a couple of worlds, it’s certainly a very, very unique technology that we’re

using to glue worlds together using IP telephony, video, virtual camera crews, live

audiences, and virtual audiences in two virtual worlds. It’s kind of hairy and kind of fun.

Without further adieu, I’d like to introduce you to Robert Bloomfield in Cornell, who will

introduce himself.

BEYERS SELLERS: Well, I’m glad to welcome all my friends who are in Second Life right

now. Here I am. You haven’t seen me here before probably. I’m in a classroom in Sage Hall

here at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, with Sandra Kearney from IBM.

Before I introduce Sandra I’d just like to take a moment to let you all know what’s going on

in this session. This is a welcome session in a series called Metanomics, and I just want to

say two things about this series. First of all, Metanomics is the study of the economics of the

Metaverse, which is not only Second Life, it includes lots of other technologies and other

worlds, including active worlds, which you’re seeing on the screen behind me here. So one

of my hopes in this session is that we really put to rest the notion that this series is all about

Second Life. It’s really about the Metaverse, and it’s really about integrating all of these

technologies, not just virtual worlds, but the Web and the collaborative Web and all the

many technologies that we see coming up.

The second thing I want to mention is those of you who were at the first session on Monday

heard me talk about the three perspectives on Metanomics. There’s the immersionist

perspective, which takes us inside the world. So we act as if we’re in a virtual world, and

that’s all that exists to us, and we try to understand the economics within the world.

There’s also augmentationist Metanomics, which is really the focus of today. It’s where

we’re thinking about real business and a new technology, a new tool--how can we use it?

So what are the business benefits today? I think we’re going to be hearing a lot about what

are the promises of this new technology.

The third form of Metanomics is experimental Metanomics, where we’re using virtual worlds

as a laboratory to study other issues, real-world issues, primarily, and that’s something

experimental economists are doing already in traditional technologies, and I hope they will

be joining us soon in the Metaverse.

I’d like to go ahead, then, and introduce Sandra Kearney, who is the global director of the

3D Internet and Virtual Business group at IBM. She has had a very interesting career, which

includes some computer science and mathematics training, some military flight work, and

some fascinating work in research on alternative futures. Also, I understand, primarily for the

military, but also now obviously a very helpful tool in understanding how the Metaverse

might be used by not just IBM, but IBM’s many consulting clients.

So that’s all I’m going to say for now. Sandra is going to talk for about a half hour or a little

more, and then we will open it up to question-and-answer. If you are in Active Worlds, or if

you are in Second Life, you can instant message your questions to the appropriate person

in there. That would be Nick Wilson in Second Life, and I think just about any of the people

hanging around in Active Worlds. Those of you who are here in the audience--by the way,

we have a packed sim here, as well, so we’ll hopefully have a number of questions from our

live audience. Sandra, take it away.

SANDRA KEARNEY: Thank you, Rob. Thank you. And I’m very excited to be here. I had

an opportunity to talk with the community in Cornell for a little bit while we were getting set

up. But I think it’s really important to sort of set the stage to say how this is very much a

groundbreaking and a profound event today. As you can see--and I can’t decide which part

of this technology I’m going to try to manage first. Not only have we now connected two

virtual environments but we’ve got the live feed that’s going back and forth. So I’m not really

sure where I’m at. Am I here in person or am in this virtual environment called the IBM

Interverse or am I actually in the Second Life environment today? And I’m having to be three

places at once. Which, of course, in flying you learn to manage a lot of multitasking,

anyway, in a cockpit, so it feels a lot like that.

I am going to show you--and I’m going to move out of the way of the live feed for a bit here

in the Cornell group just to sort of back up and say one of the things that we’re going to do

today is actually do this presentation in our Intraverse. This is the IBM Intraverse that, for us,

we’ve kind of got a mirror wall so we can show this to you today, but it actually sits behind a

firewall at IBM. It give us an opportunity to do things in this environment as well as the fact

that we’ve got many, many, many instances, islands, and builds up in Second Life and

many other platforms.

And I’m going to talk a bit about that today, but what I want to do first is just sort of navigate

my way around. So while I’m right here on the dock, as I spoke earlier, it’s not all work and

no play. We have a dock; we have a conference center here. But I’m going to move quickly

over to the IBM Dublin Innovation Center. This was built by a group of IBMers in Dublin, and

they needed to have it for some public activities where we needed meetings.

So I’m going to go ahead and move over there, and I’ll ask the folks that are in the

environment to move with me. And you can begin to see that this is some of the very

creative computing as well as the very creative social aspects of this, collaborating together

to determine what should this look like, what do we need for our meetings, what do we want

to use it for, how do we plan to use it?

On the left in the Intraverse right now we see--these are actually folks that work with me and

for me. So they’re around the world. I introduced a gentleman earlier, Ian Hughes, who’s an

evangelist in this area in IBM. He’s actually in Hursley, and if he hears me I’m sure he could

wave. And Dick Moss(?) is one of my team members there in the white shirt. As well as the

fact that there’s some camera folks roaming around that are actually taking these pictures.

This center is set up so that we can invite up to about 400 people can come into this space.

And you can see each other, and you can begin to meet. We have used it worldwide. We

just held a meeting in IBM last week with 157 people in here. So I’m going to switch to kind

of a traditional well for presentation, and I will go and give you a presentation in PowerPoint.

So I need to move here up to the actual stage where I will be giving the presentation in

order to move the slides. I’m going to hope we can see the slides as we’re up there. If not,

then I’m going to maybe ask Margaret to come up and flip slides for me while I move down

so that the camera can be seen.

Each one of the environments has some things that you need to learn, so that’s kind of an

interesting piece. I know Queen Bee(?) is in the world. Could I come up and ask you just,

from where you are in Active Worlds, could I ask you just to flip the slides? And then what I’ll

do is be able to give everyone in the room the visibility of the slides. Because otherwise I

think the folks in the Second Life build are going to see it here, but for now we’re not.

So if you’ll just move up and begin, there’s some buttons up there. Slide one is where we

are, and I’ll just ask for the slide advance, very much like a real operation.

Here we go. What happened is we’ve designed the conference center. In this environment

you can actually move around and change your view, as you saw. Different platforms allow

you to do different things. So some of this in Second Life you see a lot more of your avatar

and there’s a different kind of a zoom in/zoom out capability. In the Active World’s platform I

actually can change that by the Windows-based controls at the top. Margaret, do you want

to hit slide two?

This is really what IBM’s focusing on right now, is this next-generation Internet, or making

this 3D Internet fit for business, government, and society. It’s pretty common. As Rob

identified earlier, I did alternative features for the Pentagon, for the military, in the ‘90s. We

know that things come from the fringe, and they’re mainstreamed, right? We’ve seen them,

and I could give you 100 examples. You’ve already got those. What’s the interesting

transformation process that occurs is that not everything on the fringe is acceptable for all

areas, right? So it goes through this sort of transformation process as it becomes

mainstream, and that’s making it fit. We saw it in the Internet, in the early Internet days, and

we’re seeing it today in 3D Internet.

Now, I could talk probably for a whole hour on the naming _____ Internet; is it Web 3.0, is it

3-GI? You know, that has yet to be determined. But what we do know is that there’s this

new environment out there, and it’s 3D kind of perspective of this landscape. And I’ll talk

about that as we move through. But we’ve got a perspective on that and, as leaders in this

environment, we feel like it’s really important to continue to drive standards, to drive this in a

fit-for-business, fit-for-society, and fit-for-government way.

So I’m just going to talk about our perspective about the things in Virtual World, which is

kind of a poor piece, but I’ll touch on a lot of landscape pieces as well. Some of the

applications I’d like to--for those of you who think there are no real business applications,

I’m going to show you there are. I’m going to show you where they’re going on, at least to

the extent that I can.

Slide three, please. So anybody experiencing this: struggle to survive information overload?

I gave some statistics earlier as we were eating lunch that I get about 350 emails an hour. I

rarely can manage that, and that’s just email. You know, that doesn’t include all the other

ways that we’re getting information today, right? And I think one of the things that we’re

looking at now is what I’ll call consumable content. It’s been very familiar to me in aviation,

right? I mean, there’s no way in aviation that I could have received volumes of text data and

decide anything in an airplane. I needed for it to be consumable. So they designed a cockpit

and a world for me that made that consumable. And that’s what we’re seeing today in 3D

Internet.

Or, as one of my colleagues, whom I admire very, very much, Dr. Wladawsky-Berger, says,

“It’s broadband to the mind now.” So think about that. We’ve had the whole technology

broadband piece, and now we’ve got this broadband into the mind.

Slide please? So what’s different about it? Well, obviously the visual piece is different. And

we’re going to talk a little bit about what’s the difference between 2-D and 3-D, and why we

think there’s business value here, as well as all the things that people are doing. I think this

will build out. Margaret, so if you can hit the next slide I’d appreciate it.

There’s some core pieces in 3D Internet that are very different, and this is one of them. The

social interactions feel more like real life. Is anybody in the Cornell environment? I guess I’ll

ask those guys in Second Life, are any of you in virtual environments today? Anybody here

in these environments at all? Okay, I’m sure you can attest to the fact that it feels more real.

So it’s something that’s more of the same type of an instant message chat or an email, but

it’s less than face-to-face. Can we get agreement in the room for that?

I often say--and I brief extremely senior folks in corporations, and I’ll say it again, “Okay, just

count the number of times you apologize when your avatar gets too close to another avatar

or bumps into them.” And it’s funny you have that sensation. So there’s that social space

that we’ve respected, and all of a sudden, “Oh, I hear it. I just landed on their head. I’m

sorry.” But I’m thinking to myself, “But it’s an avatar,” right? So if it didn’t feel social and if it

didn’t feel more like real life, you probably wouldn’t react like that.

The gaming folks have done lots and lots of research on why it’s more like real life, what the

connections are, lots and lots of studies about that. This visual piece, I think, is what’s

helping us as well. So not only do we get the social interaction, but we’ve got the visual--

which is the consumable field, the content.

Slide please. I usually have this slide build out, but for the sake of time today, as well as just

the fact that we’re doing this loop which is in three environments here, I thought it would be

good just to have that there. This is the evolution of the Internet. This is not something that’s

standalone, above, beyond. All of it’s built on--you know, we’re in now our second decade of

a network-enabled society, and it’s going global. Everybody knows that. There was a day

when you had the long [tail?] of learning in the Internet, when folks had to learn how to use

a mouse or a keyboard or a computer or email, or all those things. Not the case with all of

us today, right? We’re tech-savvy. It’s expected.

I often give the example, I have a six-year-old son. He thinks that the PC is an appliance.

It’s like the refrigerator: I open the door, and it better have something good in it. And he

really, frankly, could care less to the extent that I might have to go to populate that PC for

him. And he’s very involved in this environment. We look at our generation; we look at the

generations above us. Think about the generation behind us, the expectations that they’re

going to have. We started out very much a one-by technology collaboration, right? You

could go and search information, you could do research, you could type, you could do email,

those things. Moved into this individual, where you and I can now connect and we could

have

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be doing that by various tools--Web 2.0 tools, or even Web 1.0 started that.

And then all of a sudden we became a connection of one [dimension?]. Like today, I’m

connected many to many today. And that’s this next generation of this 3D Internet. Which

means that the effect that you have in your network, your social environment, your

enterprise social platform, can be profound. And I think that’s really obvious in what IBM has

done. I’ll take a show of hands in the room--I’m in here. Who would have imagined that IBM

would be stepping up and saying we’re all about 3D Internet, and we’re going to go figure

out these virtual environments?

Okay, there’s not a hand up in the room--for anybody that’s on the other end of this. And yet

we have over 6,000 employees who are dedicating a large amount of time today to this, and

more. I mean, that’s only the ones that we know about in the community itself. So we’re

definitely in this many-to-many relationship piece. We’re doing business in society things

and it’s now enabled by all this technology, whether it’s the wireless or the PCs.

Margaret, slide please? I’ve had to answer this question probably thousands of times: “Why

now? All right, Sandy, what makes the difference, what made it so special now?” Well,

wireless did help, broadband has helped. But in addition to that, you have all these things

going on with the social networking space, right? All of you, I assume, are probably

connected in some way in a social networking space: Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace. I can

go on and on, and some of there are age-specific, some of them are geographic-specific.

But the bottom line is you’re figuring out a way to formalize those networks in the past that

were sort of built by “I worked in an office with someone,” or, “I went to school with

someone.” “I may never see them.” And by the way, IBM’s extremely virtual. About 50

percent or so of us never even go the office, don’t have an office. We work at home, we

don’t work in a building at all.

So I think the timing is such that--this flat world. Anybody read Friedman’s “It’s a Flat

World”? Well, you look at where you can impact now and sort of skip some of that mid-level

of the old hierarchy and begin to do things, and I think that 3D Internet is clearly an example

of that. There’s real-time implications around this. Business, societies and governments are

now starting to operate. So you can now be running a business in another country from

here, but you’re actually interacting with those people in the other country, right? You’re not

just sending a stream of information back and forth or doing things like we did with _____.

You’re actually collaborating. You don’t necessarily go in with a preconceived answer, but

you collaborate for that.

Also, they’re easily disrupted right now. These systems are pretty sensitive. I was with

another professor earlier today and he was talking about it, and he used the traffic systems

as an example, aviation systems as an example. So anyplace where you have volumes of

people now, and you’ve automated and you have these complex adaptive systems, you

have the issues of possible disruption. And the sensitivity becomes pretty obvious there.

So it’s really important now. We’ve got to make it stable, and that’s not always easy to do.

And you have to do that in light of the fact that you have what I’ll call “loosely-coupled

environment” that goes across geography, hierarchy, and [functionality?].

I’m a pilot by nature, so I use this acronym of RICH. These are RICH environments. They’re

real-time, they’re interact, they’re collaborative--and I think today shows that. I’m today

talking in two virtual environments to people around the world. I’m doing this real-time.

You’re going to be interacting with me. We’re going to collaborate on what’s next. And, oh,

by the way, all kinds of systems, whether they’re homogenous systems or heterogeneous or

hybrid or whatever. Real operations are being conducted in here. Whether it’s government

operations--pick a platform, pick an environment, an industry, and I can tell you that there’s

a company doing something in these environments. They’re doing them for a couple of

reasons. Some of them are doing it because they can optimize business. Some of them are

doing it because you can globally collaborate. IBM is a globally-integrated enterprise.

There’s nothing better than for me to be able to manage my team, who is around the world--

all right, Sandy’s team, where are they? Well, I have folks in Australia, I have folks in

England, I have folks in Ireland, I have folks in Brazil, I have people in Canada, I have

people in Asia, I have folks in the United States. They all work for me or with me, and

there’s no way, day by day, week by week I could collaborate to get things done with those

groups. We are working in the virtual environment. They spend most of their time, as I

pointed out--I introduced you today--they spend a good bit of their time in here. We have

offices in this space. I spoke about it. I oftentimes will have someone come to my office, play

a game of chess--all right, I have a chessboard in the virtual environment--and we’ll talk.

They’re not in the United States. They could be anywhere. They could be in India or

somewhere else. But the advantage now is that I get the feel of the old way of doing things

just like I’m meeting you here today face-to-face in that social interaction piece.

And I could go on. There are all kinds of collaborations going on here. You can just imagine

some of the government things in that. Simulations, modeling, process rehearsal now being

able to do these things.

We are in IBM research looking at things really moving into the Gordy(?) space now. You’ve

been talking about some of that. So what happens if I program my avatar and I’m no longer

here, and it’s going off and doing things? What happens when I can fast-forward

environments now and play those things out? Social science aspects. Remember, in the

gaming environment we didn’t capture a lot of that data, and you can’t go in. It’s very large

amounts, so to see what the human being might do, those anomaly factors, if you will.

I know there are some pandemic studies going on where they’re actually infecting the avatar

with a digital virus, watching where they carry it. And you can get that virus and then you

carry it on. Of course, you don’t even know you have it. And they can track that, and they

can begin to see what the effect is for pandemics.

These are just some emerging applications that we’ve got and that are also around. They’re

not all IBM. And that’s another thing. This is driven by the marketplace. You know, IBM

recognizes that the market says we’re going there. Large consumer environments--

everybody knows that, right? Consumers are starting to drive things. We talked about some

of the statistics earlier today and the economics of it. But, you know, the U.S. clearly got--

the Baby Boom is up and coming, but there’s also this global Baby Boom that’s occurred,

and they’re going to be in their teenage years in 2010. So for those of you who have

younger siblings that basically is going to hit worldwide, and it’s all a large group of

consumers. And they’re very much driving this market with their demands and the things

that they want. I think, again, this visual environment is one where you see that.

Right here you’ve got, in the upper left, is our Circuit City and Sears build. We built a store

for Circuit City, and this happens to be a Second Life build. And we actually collaborated

with Circuit City on that. If you were to look back in the corner there’s actually a sofa back

here. How many people have an HDTV in their homes or use them? Most people are

starting to move in that direction. Well, I didn’t realize how many returns occur on HDTVs

because they bought the wrong size television. So just that simple prop in there now: I can

go in there, I can touch a button and basically move a piece of furniture up and back, and

the TV moves to the appropriate size. And it’s got the real-live specs on it. So now I can go

say, “Okay, my room’s about this size, my sofa’s located about here. I need to buy this size

HDTV.”

We’re beginning to see in the retail space and the consumer product goods space where

they’re thinking about, “How can we use this and how can we touch these larger markets?”

Sears did some similar things, only they did that with their garage areas.

On the lower left--I’m spending a good bit of time with the chemicals and petroleum

companies. They’re wanting to train interns in these environments. They’re looking at safety,

they have a retail channel, all the things that they can think of. Because, again, it saved

them from having to--it takes about five years for an engineer to be trained, by the way,

especially on the offshore stuff. How do I get you into the field? And oh, by the way, this isn’t

one of those places--unlike aviation, where I have a lot of simulators, I can’t just let you

tweak the dial until it’s to a certain point, because it’s disastrous, right? Now I can let you

make those mistakes and learn from them in these environments. We can introduce

disruptions, we can introduce other things. So very big in the training environment there.

And, of course, you have the medical field. It seems today like these environments are kind

of getting broken up into thirds. We’re doing a lot of research on many, many platforms, but

the early observation says you have the consumer environment like Second Life--which

would be like a public marketplace--and we would expect to see new things and taste new

things and experience new things. You have specialty environments. You can see down

here I want to try to do pandemic studies, I want to do emergency management, I want to do

healthcare training. There’s a lot of themed environments called Penguin. A themed

environment was just bought, what, about a month ago now for $700 million? Right? And

that was a place that was built--a product that was built by five families. They put a little

more than $1 million into it to build this.

Whyville, Webkinz; so lots and lots of themed environments. And oh, by the way, you’ve got

the music-themed environments. Those are common. You’ve got cities that are doing their

branding and building their entire city so that you can now experience the city. Like digital

tourism and all these things; we’re on the cusp of that.

Up on the upper right, that’s an air base we built. It took about two hours to be able to pull

that together. We wanted to do a military demonstration.

Slide please. I get asked this question as well: “What are the similarities to 2-D? What do we

need to do? How do we make this work? Why would I want to do this?” And then, “What are

the things that are different?” It’s very much like 2-D, in that when you get there--an

associate of mine, Raph Koster, often says, “When you get there, you have to have

something to do.” And I think his statistics say that in the first five minutes, if you haven’t met

someone and you haven’t figured out something to do in these environments you’re

probably not going to stay.” And wouldn’t that make sense? If I came to this campus and I

walk around and I never meet anyone and I have nothing to do, what are the chances of me

staying on the campus? Not too likely.

So you’ve got to have something to bring the traffic there. It has to be simple for the end

user, right? And we’re seeing that in these platforms where they’re very complex, not every

user can use them, and they’re driving towards simplifying the experience for the end use,

much like the Web. So as an evolution of this, this is very much like the early Web days. I

remember in ’94 actually sending emails to senior executives where I was working. And they

would print them out for the secretary, and she would answer the email and send it back to

me. And they rode that wave because they were a few years from retirement.

But now what you see is these generations are saying, “But wait. You know, I can retire

from this business and go do another business.” The city Dublin in Second Life, the

gentleman that’s running that has a whole crew of people around the world that he’s using

to help him. He’s an airline pilot, so he flies part of the time, but most of the time he’s

running the city of Dublin in Second Life. He’s got a bar, they do all kinds of streaming

music, and he runs it just like it would be a facility that you would expect. So he manages

behavior in there and does all those kinds of things.

I think emotive network is huge. What’s in it for me? And if you don’t think that, then think

about how much time you spend on your avatar, if you do. I highly recommend for those of

you who are not in any of these environments, go in. In the environments where you can do

something with your avatar, like Second Life. I’ve been forced, by the way. My team has

forced me. And I’m absolutely intrigued by this that the guys on my team have said, “You

have to go get new hair.” “Okay, well, take me to get new hair.” I'm trying to explain to my

colleagues and my associates that I’m going shopping with a guy that works for me, and I’m

going to go get new hair.” It just doesn’t [flow?], right? It’s very atypical in U.S. society.

Or skin. “I need new skin.” I’m like, “What do you mean, new skin?” “Well, yeah, we’ve got to

go get new skin.” So, you know, nine, ten months ago they were busy worrying about how

my avatar looked, because persona is extremely important. And then I found myself saying,

“You know what? I actually do care about this,” because I care that I want to have the right

clothes on when I go someplace. I found myself, in Second Life--well, okay, where do you

go get dressed in Second Life? I’m asking questions like this. “I’ve got to go behind the

bookshelf,” because you know what, I’m really getting dressed.” So there’s that sense of

real.

I think the fact that then I wanted to modify that content--about 5 percent want to create.

Most of these environments, you see, it’s really the Wikinomics mentality. And we all use

Wikipedia. How many people in here--and I’ll let Nick ask that group--how many of you

actually contribute to Wikipedia? So what did I get? About one, two?

About 5 percent.

Okay. How many of you use Wikipedia? Okay, I just got the whole room in here, basically,

minus a couple folks, and I’m going to guess Nick got the same thing there. So, you know,

we’ve got that group and they’re really important because they seed the field for the rest of

us. But you know what? I want to modify things. I’m compelled, if I go into Wikipedia or I go

in here, I want to fix something or I want to change it to be my taste. Emotive network is

huge. User-modified content goes on that. Single interface for all participants.

I know I talked to you earlier about the visual parts of the _____. It’s really nice to have one

place to go for everything. I don’t have to go to my instant message; I don’t have to go out to

this social networking tool. I actually have had to go, on teleconference calls for work--and

Fred can fess up to this one because he’s on the other end of this--and he was supposed to

be on a teleconference call with me. I said to the folks, “We’re not in a virtual environment.

Hold on a minute, I’ll go get him.” They’re like, “What”? It was like going up to the office,

right? Up the corridor to my office. I went into the virtual environment, I found him. I said,

“Oh, did you forget about the teleconference call?” “Oh, yeah, I did. I’ll be right there.” And

he joined the call. I had to go get him. It felt the same to us as going up the hall to an office

and getting my coffee.

So I think those things are really, really important. There's a lot of technical issues and a lot

of technical things and a lot of ground to cover in these environments. So it’s very early. It

does use additional protocols because you’ve got a lot of discussion around graphics, a lot

of discussion around digital content. And, you know, the technologist--I happen to be a

business person, but the technologist could spend a lot of time in that area.

We know the platforms need to be more robust. We know right now there’s lag time. But

what’s amazing is, despite all of that people are going in here and trying things and they are

doing things. And I think that’s a really interesting piece.

We already talked about the fact that it uses Web. We’ve seen much quicker acceptance of

this than we did in the Internet days. And I give this statistic a lot from an IBM perspective: it

took IBM about a decade to get the eBusiness thing going. It took a lot of us that time. And if

you look at the study again there’s this real long tail of learning, right? Had to learn to use a

mouse, had to learn to use a computer--or had to get one. That was cut off, right? So we’re

seeing this move very, very quickly. Not to mention the fact that now I follow the sun. I

clearly follow the sun. So my teams hand off to each other. I’ve got 24 x 7, 365-day

coverage; things move very, very quickly. People have said to me, “Sandy, I need a project

and I need it by the end of November.” And I said, “That’s a lifetime in a virtual

environment.” Forty-eight hours--my typical expectation for things to turn in here is 48 hours.

It levels the playing field of a culture. Because it’s so cultured; it really is. I can be anything. I

can be whatever gender I want, I can be any race I want, I can choose to be a character. I

can choose to be a person. And, of course, that depends on the platform. Some platforms

are more controlled. Feels a lot like 1994 in the early days of the Internet, for those of you

who were not around for that. Many, many companies and organizations had intranets

because they had the Internet. And they wanted to explore and experience, and we’re

seeing that today. Intraverse, where companies and schools and groups want to have

enough privacy to experiment and be able to work with that before they out go to the

Extraverse or the virtual universe, or whatever that is in the 3-D landscape. And, of course,

it’s very robust; it’s very multi-threaded.

So I would suggest to you, though, that with this collaboration piece what’s really interesting

is that you’re not stuck with the many-by-many collaboration for this, and you’re not stuck

with the one-by technology collaboration for this. It’s that flexible. I can choose to do things

by myself, I can choose to do things with just you, or I can choose to do things with all of

you. It’s just a really great social piece for that.

It’s all about this evolution. We’re evolving to this 3D Internet. Whatever the name is, I don’t

know; could be anything. But what we do know is it’s immersive, it’s extremely social. All the

attributes are social. We see a large move towards open standards. We see these kinds of

interoperability challenges. And today is one of those, where we are seeing two major

platforms come together in a new way, being driven by this group, being driven, much to

Rob’s credit, and the team in Australia, as well. Things are faster. Graphics, of course, more

bandwidth. Those things are all in the evolutionary states.

We are moving beyond proprietary. Raph Koster just released Metaplace, and Croquet? has

got something up on [Quack?]. And those things are all very much this universal feel so that

you’ll be able to move around, move back and forth. More than just virtual worlds, by the

way. That’s only one piece. Anybody in here using Google Earth? Google Earth, another

piece of the 3-D landscape, all right? Virtual on the world, and we’re seeing that bridge.

Really important pieces. If you decide you want to go into any of these areas to study or to

work or to do things. Building a bridge for people’s very successful. The two things you can

do to help yourselves--and I know there’s a lot of projects going on here--is, one, don’t

create barriers; try to remove them, and then build bridges. And we’re really beginning to

see that today as well.

There’s significant potential, and it’s not just industries. It’s government, embassies. We see

presidential candidates in here now. I can’t even begin to tell you. I’m talking to numerous

government agencies. And that’s around the world, by the way, okay? Not just U.S., it’s

around the world. Although the platforms seem to be leading in the U.S., the statistics say

that it’s actually coming from outside the U.S.. A lot more participation over the last five

years or so coming from Europe, coming from Australia, coming from South America.

They’re embracing it. I’m sure the statistics in two or three years will tell us why. I don’t

know, it would only be conjecture on my part, but it’s moving pretty quickly.

And then, of course, the fact that [4-D?] isn’t far behind. What’s that mean, Sandy? Well, it’s

the temporal aspects of this. You know, what if I program this avatar to go do things, and 3-

D continues on and what does my avatar do when I’m long gone. This fast-forward piece

that I can now run through processes. You’re in programs where you’re looking at

economics. You can now run through those, you can actually see the social science piece of

what you can’t capture in just an intelligent, expert system that’s automated, right? There’s

something about that that the human being has that doesn’t quite make the difference.

I want to now switch over, and I’m going to take you over to--I think they got that at Second

Life. We’re going to go over to one of the campus areas where we do a lot of breakout work

in IBM. So for those of you that can hear me, I’m going to go to campus one. I hope I don’t

end up below the floor. I’ve done that once or twice. This is a campus area. We bring

customers and academic groups, and just about anybody that’s learning about this, to this

environment. It gives them an opportunity to have a discussion about this, how might they

use it. We’ve got a few things up there.

But what I’m going to do today is show you one of the other things that IBM’s doing. This is

just one of the many. I could give you lists and lists of projects that we’re doing, everything

from putting some molecular structures in here that researchers are working on and then

collaborating with, to creating new things, to looking at complex data systems.

We have a data center in here that’s connected to a real data center. It shows us what the

power situation is in the data center, which is really important. It’s got a financial situation or

a financial system that all of the transactions have been mapped out, and they’re colorized.

So we’ve actually had some discussion on that with the customers around: why are all these

processes there, and how do they work? So a lot of visual clues that you maybe wouldn’t

have picked up.

But one of the other really important areas in here is education and training and learning.

One of the things we’re doing very early on now is on-boarding new employees around the

world so I’m just going to let you see this slide real quick. It’s actually a video.

[VIDEO]

IBM is experimenting with the next generation of internet technologies to enable richer

collaboration and learning for individuals, teams, and communities in a multi-cultural, multi-

time-zone world. In this demonstration, the virtual environment, Second Life, is used to on-

board new employees. The new employees are physically located in India, China, Europe

and the United States. But the Second Life environment brings them together in one place

to learn, collaborate and become a team. The new employees arrive at IBM's virtual on-

boarding centers and are greeted by an HR advisor who is physically located in Europe.

They go inside the orientation center and sit down in a conference room to start the session.

The session includes presentations and discussions that facilitate common understanding of

IBM's strategy and values. Participants can ask questions using voice or chat. The new

employees the teleport to another location of Second Life for the next set in their orientation.

In this session, the new employees receive detailed information of IBM's benefits. The

information is provided by a benefits advisor who is physically located in South America.

Once again, multiple collaboration tools are used so participants can view the presentation

material, ask questions and interact collaboratively with the advisor. The new hires now

move to kiosks in Second Life where they learn about specific benefits that apply to them.

After the participants have time to review their benefits, they move to a more social setting.

The Second Life lounge is designed to consult an informal collaboration, build rapport and

develop social networks. The new employees talk about where they're from, their hobbies

and work interests. The Second Life lounge helps employees make the personal

connections that will enable new communication and collaboration in the future.

Globalization has caused IBM to look for new ways to integrate _____ to operations and

build more effective global themes. Second Life and other advanced technologies offer the

opportunity to help organizations bridge cultural difference, extend social networks and

collaborate effectively.

[End of Video]

SANDRA KEARNEY: So you can now see that’s actually what’s going on today, and we’re

literally on-boarding thousands of employees using this tool.

What I’d like to try to do now is--I think no time in a virtual world would be--hmm, you can

see some of the build things going on. Be complete if I can get to the ski area. We’ll go

back. They’ll probably come looking for me, but I think it would be nice to just show you that

it’s not all work and no play. I might also suggest, if some of you are interested in that little

tour in here, we can certainly--and they’ll have to see this, I guess, from the television. But

we very often take out customers in the lab and have a little fun at the end as well. We just

sort of race down the bottom of the hill here with skates. We show them that it’s not all work

and no play.

BEYERS SELLERS: [Like to understand the thing in Second Life?], but usually

unintentional.

SANDRA KEARNEY: I want to make sure we leave enough time. I’ll stop on the ski slope

there, and I’ll ask the group and turn it back over to you.

BEYERS SELLERS: Are they back with us in Sage yet; can you tell?

SANDRA KEARNEY: They’re not making any noises.

BEYERS SELLERS: We’re going to go ahead anyway; they’ll catch this eventually. So I’ve

been listening and kind of quasi-producing, and one of the things I’ve been doing is getting

an excellent set of questions from Second Life attendees. I’m going to read them here so

people can hear them, and then step back and let you answer.

The first one is from Duncan Riley of techcrunch.com. He says he heard a comment by the

CEO of ICAM--Tomey, I think it is--who says the future of global Internet commerce is going

to be through the 3D Internet. He was just hoping you could comment on that statement.

SANDRA KEARNEY: Well, we share that. I think the fact that you look at a global

integrated enterprise like IBM, who now has found a way to keep their enterprise social

platform very well connected--you can see how fast it’s allowed us to move. You can see us

moving into new business. It makes a statement. I can also tell you that I know publicly it

tells me the same statement. So when you begin to see other major organizations and

companies go that direction I have to believe that what he’s saying is [not going to?] be true.

You know, I don’t think it’s going to replace face-to-face any more than the Internet replaced

face-to-face. However, I do think that it’s going to be one more medium that we’re going to

be able to use, and we’ll be able to use that _____. If you believe what Peter Drucker says,

then you know you’re going to move the work to the people. So this really is a huge step in

that direction.

BEYERS SELLERS: I have a question from a Second Life resident, Prokofy Neva. Some

people know Prokofy. The question is, “Are the employees of IBM--are you sure that when

they’re using these virtual environments that they’re using them productively? It’s obviously

easy to have fun. And are you actually taking metrics and actually getting some data on how

this is helping productivity?”

SANDRA KEARNEY: You know, this is interesting because, in an innovative environment,

you can’t necessarily determine what productivity is, right? So rather than us try to, quote,

track that, what we did early on was try to lay the protocols out to just say, remember, this is

about business, there are business conduct guidelines that IBM’s got, and one of the

initiatives we took in place was to build a virtual world guidelines book. And that guidelines

book, I think, gives people that boundary that they need. You know, whether or not they’re

productive I may not be able to determine absolutely. And I certainly wouldn’t want to have

to follow them around. So instead we’re basically saying we trust you, our employees, we’ve

got conduct guidelines. It falls to that. It’s business as usual for IBM.

So we’re very much using all the tools today that exist, and then we just address those other

little things as they come along. Like business attire. You know, you may have to make that

statement in a virtual environment, right? We pretty much have allowed the community to

police themselves in that environment, and I think you can see that in Second Life.

BEYERS SELLERS: So if I can follow up a little bit, I know one of the concerns businesses

have about the Internet is, yes, it’s great to have instant access to all this data, but it also

means you can read the newspaper and play Word Twist or whatever you want. Do you see

that as an issue at IBM?

SANDRA KEARNEY: No, I haven’t seen it here. I have the exact opposite problem, the

teams and the people that I’m working with in IBM. Because we’re all high performers. So

what I actually end up doing here is not managing their on time, but managing their off time.

I have to tell them to take a break. I will go in at 2 o’clock in the morning and see people in

the New York time zone that I know have been there since 2 o’clock the previous morning

working, building something, working on a problem, collaborating with others in other time

zones. And I will have to say to them, “Go home.”

So I have not personally, as a leader in IBM, experienced any of that. I’ve had just the

opposite problem. Now I manage a team of high performers and a lot of new employees that

are coming in and working--and they will. They will just work themselves to death because

it’s now their passion, they’re having fun, and a little bit of play at work isn’t actually

negative.

BEYERS SELLERS: And then the last one before I open it up to the local audience.

Actually, it’s questions from two different people. One is an educator who’s saying

educational institutions are just starting to take research on virtual worlds seriously. So the

question is, “What directions would you suggest they go to sort of demonstrate proof of

educational viability, proof of success early on--you know, to get that quick win?” And then I

have a very similar question from someone from the business community saying, “What

would you say about which particular activities are most suited the early expansion into the

3D Internet?”

SANDRA KEARNEY: Okay, there’s two parts to that question. One of those, if you look up

virtual environments, is where you have existing things that worked, and you have study and

information, is we’re using that. Where there are differences is where you need to now think

about applying those things.

For example, we know already the value of platform instruction, right? There’s plenty of data

around platform instruction. So is it too far to extrapolate that this is nothing more than a

platform instruction mode, or media, and how does that then play out?

So in our group I have someone who’s in education training and learning. I’ve asked them to

do baseline study and say--because we’re doing large volumes of training, so we can do

that preliminary study to see did they get as much as we would have expected? What

happens after the training? And, of course, we can compare that to the current and the past

ways we’ve done that training. So we’re doing that, and there are lots of groups that are

doing that, both corporate and academic.

So my first recommendation would be use the valuable data that we’ve already got and

extrapolate where you can, and then go after the differences. How do you go after the

differences? Just go do it. This is one of those--again, depending on which environment that

you’re in--if you want the security of an Intraverse or you want to be in the public

marketplace, the best thing you can do is try it out. And, of course, be smart about that. You

know, you would never do risky things in a public marketplace. You’ve got a little bit of

sense about it, more than you would in just an average space.

That’s it. I mean, that’s what we’re finding. And the groups that are in there early on are the

ones that are really leading the way and they’re getting more value. That’s in business and

academic. So you get a very good crossover.

BEYERS SELLERS: Okay. Let’s open it up to questions from the Cornell community. I’ll

step out of the way.

MALE VOICE: Is there evidence yet that issues around security or trade secrets or

proprietary information? How [that it gets sampled?] in this world versus the real world are

different enough to make a difference?

SANDRA KEARNEY: Oh, there’s lot of discussion around that, right? And again, that gets

back to why IBM created virtual world guidelines. Because it’s a public marketplace if you’re

in Second Life versus our Intraverse, which sits behind our firewall, has access control. You

know, you can talk about any kind of things that you want. You can conduct those kinds of

meetings because it’s the same as if you were sending email on our classified system.

So I think that feels, to me, like the early Internet. Until we iron out some of those things,

whether they’re governance things or geopolitical things or whatever, be smart about what

you’re doing and know that if you do these things in the public environment then you may

lose out some later.

But then again, there’s huge value in the community, so I see companies trying to kind of

balance that today. And we have a very active Intraverse. You’re seeing the environment

now. We have a very active Intraverse environment, so we can do a lot of work in there and

we don’t have to worry about those issues. But we also have the ability to sort of leverage in

the community by doing things in the platforms like Second Life or Entropia or there.com.

There’s a slew of them.

MALE VOICE: So it’s not inhibiting?

SANDRA KEARNEY: No, it is not. It is not at all. I would say, if anything, it’s picked up the

pace because now we’re finding the creative aspects of people we may not have known.

We’re actually seeing a new surfacing of skills for people that have always done--I mean, I

can’t believe the number of people in IBM that have come in and said, “Well, I was actually

in TV production at one time in my life,” but they’ve been doing technology. Or, “I was

actually doing this”--gamers, creating games. So they’ve been allowed now to surface and

really bring those skills to it.

MALE VOICE: Do you see the Metaverse moving into more a peer networking component

where you can move between Second Life and your Intraverse or creating a doorway to

kind of make that cross between the two worlds in the Metaverse? And kind of following

along with that, then what issues do you run into between a social avatar in a second world

versus your business avatar in a second world, and how do you manage that?

SANDRA KEARNEY: Two parts to that question, and one of them is this whole identity

management discussion. That’s a big discussion. Because now you have to worry about

things like your persona, right? It’s not just about who I am, and you have to validate who I

am, but now I also have to protect my persona. And by the way, there are other industries

that have dealt with this in the past. Radio personalities, right? They have the whole

persona that they keep by their radio personality that may not--because you don’t see them-

-it may not be one and the same. So we know there are things to manage there.

The other one is about the standards and interoperability piece, and absolutely I think

there’s a lot of work to be done there. There are different opinions out there as to do you just

connect all the worlds together? Do you connect the environment where--and there’s some

great work being done here at Cornell. I just spoke with Kim Berman(?) today on it, just

some distributed activity going on.

So I think when you begin to look at this--I’m not quite sure how it’s going to end up. But I

know it’s on the hearts and minds of everyone, and I know there’s different people going

different paths to try to get there. I think, in the end, everybody would like this to be like the

Internet, right? We’d like to not be held back by client downloads. And, you know, I don’t

want to have to go change my avatar 60 times or register 100 different times, or figure out a

learning curve for each platform. I mean, I think the end user wants it to be very, very simple

and that’s what I’m seeing.

MALE VOICE: That seems to be the one piece that hasn’t been taken care of on the

Internet as far as the communication _____ [setting?]. [Chat obviously?] still has that issue.

While you can get to the basic pages, [sort of?] basic distribution, the [motivation?] _____

communication haven’t really kept up with that [that peer relationship?].

SANDRA KEARNEY: Right. And that’s a beautiful thing because that’s the kinds of things

that all of you can begin to try to figure out, right?. And as we go full court--and I suspect the

timeline on this will be pretty quick; I don’t think it’ll take nearly as long as some of the

standards work took on the Internet. But clearly there’s work to be done, and IBM’s trying to

lead some of that along with standards in technology and interoperability. You can talk a lot

about just the avatar, right? We only spoke today about virtual worlds, but there’s lots and

lots of sole avatar work going on.

Again, a lot of this has been around for a long time, too. We’re seeing this whole resurgence

from off-the-shelf things being repurposed or used now because were too soon to _____ the

program.

MALE VOICE: It’s great to be on-board _____ at IBM. How many employees do you have

there _____ themselves _____?

SANDRA KEARNEY: You know, we haven’t had--I got to say this. If there’s been any

resistance it’s probably in the United States. I know _____ our education, training, and

learning guy we’ve had some long discussions about that, right? Where does the resistance

come from, and why? But most of the employees we’re on-boarding right now are in other

countries, and we’ve not had that. What we’ve actually had is, they’re so excited because

this is so leading-edge and they really want to be in the leading edge of things, right?

I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to be going to manage a server by myself right now, so it’s like

I get to go be in Second Life or Intraverse doing exciting things, and that’s your choice. And

we have folks that are perfectly content to do those things. I haven’t run into that kind of

resistance [in that space?], I really haven’t. It’ll be interesting to see as we grow this, even

beyond on-boarding new employees that don’t know anything about it or are just learning

about IBM to managers, manager activities. That’s coming, and even to the senior

executives.

BEYERS SELLERS: I think we have time for one more question, and it actually comes from

our Second Life audience. Actually, I’ll move over here so that people can hear it. Craig

Cmehil(?) is the community evangelist for SAP. His question is, “For a company that’s just

trying to start out in 3D Internet, what are the three things you would tell them to do first?”

SANDRA KEARNEY: Craig, I’m going to tell you the same things we did at IBM. First off is,

don’t go out and try to figure out how to create all this complex architecture. The IBMers

would tell you that we went out and we just did things. As you _____, we just found some

space to work. We happened to have a place that is being worked, but we found a place to

work. We began to meet in there, we began to do things. That’s what I would suggest that

you do.

Once you do that piece, then you can kind of figure out, what is I want to do? Do I want to

do the public kinds of things, or am in really interested in doing some things behind the

scenes at my company? Or do I want to do both? We’re looking at all those things. So if

you’ve got things that you want to do, like sales and marketing and those kinds of things,

then you’re going to want to experiment in the public marketplace. If you’ve got some things

that you want to be building out intellectual property and doing things like that, then you’re

likely going to want to be doing an Intraverse. Chances are if you’re moving pretty quickly

you’re going to end up in both spaces. So those would be the three really big things I would

suggest.

The most fundamental, important piece of this is your community. Start to build your

community now. Of course, we did that with a few tiger(?) teams in IBM, just pockets of

people, had the meet in the virtual environment. So when you talk inside the [image?] you’re

not talking to somebody that sat back and just read a book about it; you’re talking about

somebody that’s been in, that’s experienced setting up a meeting like Dave Komalsky today

and like Craig and those guys that are on my team. I certainly don’t settle for, as a leader, to

just say, “Okay, go read up about it and they go tell someone about it.” It’s, “You’ve got to be

doing these things.” It’s very, very participant-oriented, not so much spectator.

BEYERS SELLERS: Great. Well, thank you so much, Sandra. Thank you for showing up

here. And thank you for many of you who are in Second Life or in Active Worlds watching

this. I just want to say real quickly to everyone that--well, I totally buy into Sandra’s

recommendation that it’s all about building community. What I’m trying to do is build a

community of people who are interested in the serious academic study of the business and

policy issues and economic issues in virtual worlds. If you are a researcher, if you are a

business, if you’re looking to talk about these things, if you want to help support us with

content on our metanomics.tv website or you have an idea for a speaker or you have

questions you want to ask upcoming speakers, please get a hold of me. You can do it

through metanomics.tv, our web site.

Thanks to our global team for putting this together. Thanks to SLCN-TV, sited in Australia.

Thanks to our local Johnson’s School technology services group that put it together on this

side. And special thanks to Nick Wilson of metaversed.com for really being the lynchpin

around which all of this is happening.

So I’m Rob Bloomfield, and Beyers Sellers in Second Life, signing off.

57 MILES: Thank you, Rob. I want to say thanks for coming everyone here in Second Life,

and please do join the Metanomics group in World. It would be great to have you members

of that because, of course, you’ll get to see all of the events coming up.

If you have questions, comments on the series please do IM either Beyers Sellers--that’s B-

E-Y-E-R-S Sellers--who is Robert Bloomfield, whom you’ve been listening to today. Or feel

free to IM me.

Thanks for coming everyone. Bye-bye.

[END OF AUDIO]

Document: cor2002.doc
http://www.hiredhand.com
Second Life Avatar: Transcriptionist Writer

092007 IBM In The Metaverse Metanomics Transcript

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