If you’ve been watching the development of videogame technology and user interfaces, you might have noticed that we’re getting closer and closer to the point where the Matrix becomes a reality. At some point in the future, most of us will be socializing, working, and having fun in a vast virtual landscape — also known as the 3D Web, the metaverse, or the hypergrid. Read full column at Internet Evolution. … Read more »

I love the idea of Chromebooks — superlight laptops that do nothing but access the Web. And I love those Google commercials where a guy’s Chromebook is destroyed over and over again in various imaginative ways, and he picks up right where he left off after each disaster. Where tablets are a great form factor for consuming content (e-books, videos, email, games), Chromebooks could be an alternative for folks who need to create a lot of content on the go. Read full column at Internet Evolution. … Read more »

The Internet has killed voicemail. I hardly ever get voicemail messages anymore. If someone wants to reach me and can’t get me by phone, they’ll send an email, or a text. In the last month, I have had zero work-related voicemails. Zero. Ten years ago, there would have been several dozen voicemails each day. That’s when I was working as a staff technology writer in the midst of the dot-com boom, and public relations folks were scrambling for any bit of coverage they could get. Read full column at Internet Evolution. … Read more »

Cutting support desk costs by reducing staff, cutting hours, or outsourcing can help an IT department’s bottom line. And it can hurt the company overall if it reduces employee productivity. If employees can’t access critical systems, cutting support desk costs can also cut into billable hours, damage customer relationships, cut into production schedules… all sorts of bad stuff happens. (Think about the time wasted when an employee who needs help turns to a co-worker instead of IT.) The answer may be to design applications in such a way that employees can help themselves. Read full column at Internet Evolution. … Read more »

When it comes to business-focused virtual platforms, customers typically have to choose between platforms that are completely customizable and difficult to use, or easy to use but not particularly customizable. The recent crop of Web-based, enterprise-friendly virtual environments like VenueGen,Web.alive, Assemblive, ReactionGrid’s Jibe, and 3DXplorer have made great strides in the direction of usability. The previous generation of virtual world platforms – ProtoSphere, Teleplace, and SAIC’s Olive — requires that the software be installed on corporate servers, and that end users download heavy clients. Read full article at Internet Evolution. … Read more »

As travel budgets continue to stay tight, virtual meeting platforms are gaining in both financial appeal and usability. However, as the choices multiply, it can be difficult to choose the right tools for the job. Every company should have some kind of videoconferencing system in place for very small meetings, whether it’s a simple Skype connection or a Cisco telepresence room, or a feature included in its unified communications infrastructure. Every company should also have picked a Webconference platform for making online presentations to employees, customers, and investors. And companies should be considering the use of immersive 3D platforms for training or collaboration. Read full article at Internet Evolution.   … Read more »

More and more companies are going virtual, which allows employees to telecommute, work from the road, and be based anywhere on the planet. This approach saves money in office costs, improves productivity and morale, and allows the company to benefit from accessing talent in low-cost countries. But how can a company provide technology to these far-flung employees? These days, the answer is to use cloud services. Read full article at Internet Evolution.   … Read more »

Many companies, both small and large, are wary of doing business with cloud providers because of concerns about outages, data loss, and privacy issues. These are all serious concerns, but addressing them is a straightforward process. For example, many cloud providers undergo security audits (the most famous of these is SAS 70), and many are compliant with SEC, HIPAA, and other regulations. Since cloud applications providers such as Salesforce.com focus on just one thing — providing that one application in a Web-based environment — they can typically focus many more resources on solving associated security problems than their typical customers. Few small and medium-sized firms, however, can afford to hire security PhDs or monitor network traffic around the clock. The big cloud service providers do just that, and they spend a great … Read more »

If I told you that in the future we’d all be living in a virtual world, chances are you’d imagine one of the following two scenarios: The dystopia. We’ll be living in a virtual world created by some outside organization. Like Disney, say, or the government, or our alien overlords. (It’s hard to say which would be worse.) Our possibilities in the world would be severely constrained, and our primacy trammeled. It would be hell, and there would be no escape, since our environment would have been destroyed by pollution and global warming — or occupied by aliens. The paradise. We’ll be living in a virtual world completely of our own creation. Everything will be perfect, just the way we want it. All other occupants of the world would be our own creations … Read more »

If you’re thinking about trying out virtual, immersive environments for your business meetings or training sessions, but find Second Life and OpenSim too difficult, and ProtoSphere andTeleplace too expensive, you might want to take a look at some business-focused, browser-based virtual worlds. The idea is that you send someone a link, they click on it, and, maybe after downloading a plugin, they’re in the world, ready for your meeting. No software to install, no complex interfaces to learn. Don’t expect to see the same breadth of features as you do in a full, standalone world, however. In fact, calling it a “world” would be a misnomer, since there’s no world in there, as such — just your meeting room. Read full article at Internet Evolution.   … Read more »