Stanford Research Institute – Consulting Business Intelligence (aka. SRIC-BI http://www.sric-bi.com) today released results from a survey taken amongst the members of their own  Virtual Worlds Consortium, SDForum’s Virtual World SIG, Boulder, Colorado’s  Serious Second Life, and Stanford’s  MetaverseU.

The  download is available at: http://www.sric-bi.com and directly linked here (link opens .pdf document): http://www.sric-bi.com/news/VWCcollabwksurvey2008-03.pdf

The groups questioned largely focus on collaborative work (serious games) more than entertainment uses, and the survey was geared towards that.  Members of these groups are definitely motivated to use virtual worlds (70% see significant potential) and cite security and eases of use as key to adoption by enterprise and government customers.
The respondents were split 50/50 on whether Second Life would remain the leading VW platform in the next 2-3 years.

At least one quarter of the respondents use virtual worlds over 20 hours per week.  Another quarter only use them 1-5 hours per week.
Another 36% use virtual worlds in a 5-20 hour range, and the remaining 12.5% barely log on and use less than 1 hour per week.
<1 hour           12.5%
1-5 hours        26.3%
5-10 hours     15.0%
10-20 hours   21.3%
20+ hours       25%

That’s as far as I’ve had time to dig into this but there are a lot of forward-looking questions and interesting conclusions  in there – so take a look.
Thanks to  Dr. Eilif Trondsen of SRIC-BI  for conducting and sharing the survey.

-Bob Ketner

Here’s that list from 03/19/08 from Mike Rhodin  of IBM Lotus that references 5 trends to embrace in the virtual workplace.The press release is here:
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=834515&sourceType=1 

Here’s my own description of them:

1) “The Virtual Workplace will become the rule.”
Laptops and mobile devices will allow us to move beyond the “desk – typewriter – phone” model of the workplace. For many people of course this is already a way of life.  Social networking aspects of the virtual world will give the feeling of community.  The need for business travel will be reduced as virtual worlds and telepresence tools get better.

2) Real-time collaboration will become the norm. 
Email is too slow, and should be used (as it is in Second Life) as merely a cache of stored messages which arrived for you while you were asleep.  Again, already many young workers consider email too slow, having grown up on texting on phones.

3) “Beyond Phone Calls”. 
If you value productivity and time, the telephone is one of the least effective ways to communicate. Here IBM again mentions IM as being a tool for replacing many phone communications.  Now, of course the telephone is not going away, that’s not the point.  But there are huge benefits available in shifting select communications from phone to IM.

4) Interoperability desired.
IBM focuses on interoperability and open standards as inevitable as the space matures.  A lot of this just hasn’t been figured out yet and may not be, since platforms are generally competing business entities with different competencies. They are not necessarily interested in interoperability, whereas business just requires a coherent set of tools that does a few basic things flawlessly. That might not be found in any 1 platform, hence the cry for openness. They also mention increased ease of finding resources which could refer to ease of finding things in virtual worlds or better access to the correct individuals.

5) “Meetings” replaced with new models.
Fewer meetings – Woo-hoo!  It’s a conceptual leap – “gaming technologies will significantly influence online corporate meeting experiences”.  As I said at Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 in San Jose “gamers are using it now” and in fact, “collaborating ” much more effectively and with less cost.

-Bob Ketner

Hello Virtual Worlders…

Read all the blog coverage on the Virtual Worlds FALL 2007 conference:

http://www.djcline.com/?p=3107 

http://www.djcline.com/?p=3059 

http://www.djcline.com/?p=3097

There is so much blogging on this event I don’t know where to begin, but also check out:

http://metaversed.com/15-oct-2007/future-content-watching-detectives

http://metaversed.com/12-oct-2007/business-age-avatar

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2007/10/post-conference.html

 The conference organizers: Chris Sherman, Tonda Bunge , and Tim Williams were excellent hosts and put on an event like no other…thank you!!

 Now, for those who would like to keep the conversation going: 

On Oct. 22 we will be featuring a panel review of the year ahead in virtual wolds.
Scheduled guest panelists will include technology providers IBM, Forterra Systems, eFrontier, Multiverse, and Linden Lab and more.

Following up on some of the insights from the Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 conference, please bring your points of discussion and questions to this   interactive forum.

Find out how to best implement virtual worlds for business, networking, and entertainment, on the eve of several major promotions that will surely propel virtual worlds into the mainstream like never before.

We will organize the key points using scenario planning methods and reconnect with many of the speakers from the conference.  Not to be missed!

Media and teleport links:
https://www.virtualworldsig.com

SDForum link:
http://sdforum.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Calendar.eventDetail&eventID=12941

Location
Pillsbury Winthrop Office Silicon Valley
2475 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1114

Agenda
6:30 PM Registration and Networking
7:00 PM -8:40 PM Presentations

Price
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
No registration required
See you there,
Bob Ketner

Business week has an interesting article “The End Of Work As You Know It -
Increasing connectivity will change how and where we labor—even the very notion of an employer”

The article mentions upcoming Virtual World SIG presenter Seriosity and also touches on augmented reality, Mechanical Turk, telepresence, and distributed workforces. We have discussed it in virtual world circles before but it’s the first big publication mention I have seen of how work processes could be deconstructed, distributed, and completed by contractors working around the world.

I’ve also tossed around the idea that work processes themselves could be deconstructed. For example: the task of identifying a tumor on an x-ray could be represented as a map or other image and then “acted upon” or spotted by a player (contractor) for a digital currency reward. Couldn’t other data manipulation tasks be abstracted as well? I can imagine a future of monotonous data entry or auditing being accomplished by a workforce that only viewed the data as “a game” or as elements in a virtual world. The source data would be even be somewhat encrypted by virtue of this “virtualization”. Great things to consider as we continue to redefine “virtual worlds” as they emerge.

Let’s continue the discussion at the upcoming SIG and I’ll also be speaking on the topic at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference enterprise track where SDForum will have a presence with a booth and a VC forum.

Book discussed in the article:

The Future of Work