A Wider Net

Vivox got Second Life. Wow - that sounds like a jumbled pharmaceutical tagline!

Vivox, maker of internet voice products specially designed for massively multiplater online video games, has now added massively multiplayer online communities to its client base. Second Life will use the VOIP technology to allow people to talk to each other without a separate conference call. Vivox technology also makes sure you can only hear the people near you in virtual space, which is pretty dang cool.

This will certainly help add a much-needed degree of communication convenience to online meetings held within Second Life. What’s not clear is if the technology will support audio reinforcement, such as a podium microphone in an auditorium, so you can address a crowd.

Second Life also made the cover of the recent issue of Corporate Meetings & Incentives magazine. Considering the Second Life community of nearly 3 million registrants has under 1 million regular users, it sure is getting a lot of media attention (including their own Reuters desk).

Ning, a service that allows you to build your own social network, made waves today on Scoble and TechCrunch. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, and Gina Bianchini, the current CEO. Ning’s social networks allow you to build a community of users who share a common passion in something, and enable them to share media and communicate. They can be public or private, and they cost next to nothing out of the box (more if you hire a company to design and reskin your network completely.)

This may be a terrific solution for smaller meetings and conferences. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but the design flexibility and low cost make it worth a try.

As Marc Andreessen said in his Scoble interview, every political campaign will have a social network. Here’s an example of a Ning network built for people who want to draft Al Gore into office:

Seth Godin wrote a nice bit on name tags done right. I agree - great name tags are essential for a successful meeting. I also agree that the art of the name tag as a service courtesy is getting lost, especially at trade shows. Exhibitors tend to use the show badges as name tags for their booth staff. Unfortunately, show badges tend to print the company name really small, making it difficult to figure out who is working the booth. I’d like to see exhibitors making professional name tags for their booth staff. You can, if you have the means, use the flashing badges or LED scrolling name tags but they do get distracting.

I think Seth has nicely arrived at the low-cost version of nTAG, the current leader in electronic matchmaking, ice-breaking name tag technology. See earlier post on nTAG. I’ve had lots of customers ask what they can do if they can’t afford a full nTAG solution and it looks like Seth may have it.

This grain of pepper, according to engadget, is an RFID tag. That means that in 2-3 years we will be able to track the position of anything larger than a grain of sand. We may be able to sprinkle these things on a carpet and analyze traffic patterns by where the tags go. We can certainly address the panicked mother shouting “don’t put that in your mouth - you don’t know where it’s been!” Now, you will. You may not like the answer.

It astonishes me that we can design a microscopic tag that can help me track the location of a baseball card from the time it’s newly born from recycled egg cartons, to the time when the imprinted baseball player has a record-book rookie year and the card reaches monumental ebay value, to the time the card ends up in a flea market after the player is indicted for doping, all the way to the recycle plant where it’s turned into those hideous yellow school pads.

But we can’t drive home without a dropped cellular call. And we can’t sell bottled water (which falls from the sky every day) cheaper than gasoline (which takes hundreds of thousands of years to make from dead dinosaurs). Weird.

Flightstats is getting some praise for it’s flight status information and mobile alert tools. I gave it a try and it’s fast and full of features. It can’t tell me if central parking is full at Logan Airport in Boston, but it has a ton of flight data, traffic conditions, security wait times, etc. They also gather user experiences to help you plan your next trip and avoid needless waiting. I hope this helps you in your next journey.

Thanks Scoble and Bruggeman.

More B2B marketing blogs than doctors recommend. Download the OPML into your reader at your own peril. Make yourself a tickler so that a week from now you can identify this list as the source of your complete lack of productivity while you rejoice that you now know what’s going on in B2B… everywhere.

This isn’t another Mooninite post - although, there is a connection between the two. Graffiti Research Lab has an exciting post (with video!) about a device that enables laser-guided video graffiti. NOTE: Some of the graffiti in the video is inappropriate for public viewing and we certainly don’t condone that. The idea, however, is terrific. It’s a system that allows you to “write” in massive letters on the side of a building using an off-the-shelf laser pointer as a “mouse”. The images are created in real time using a large video projector mounted in a truck, and a camera that tracks the moving dot from the laser pointer.

With permission from the building owner and proper notification of local authorities, this would make a great promotional stunt for an event or product launch. You also don’t want to do this if there’s an airport behind the target building. I used to work for a company doing something similar with laser projections, but it required the evacuation of the building which was, to say the least, not ideal.

GRL has some outstanding examples of public electronic communication, even if they tend to be on the anarchistic side. They specialize in Throwies, the magnetic battery-powered LED graffiti devices made infamous by the Mooninite scandal in Boston. The trick is to learn from these guys, and the Mooninites, and find ways to use it wisely.

Also see: Throwies, and Throwie Videos.

Check out this article from TechCrunch, which relays information released from Feedburner’s study of RSS Reader Vendors. Excerpt: “The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users.”

I have been one of the converted for some time, as have many of my co-workers. Google Reader makes it (relatively) easy for me to track almost 100 news feeds.

UPDATE: Try Google Reader

Adobe recently announced that Flash Lite 3, to be released in the first half of 2007, will include support for Flash Video. Exactly what this will mean to content creators is unclear, but we are continuing to head towards global flash video domination. Microsoft seems fixated on HD video, having engineered the compression code for the HD-DVD format. Flash video has enabled a revolution in web video interface design, and as phones get more powerful it seems likely that some of that revolution will rub off into everyone’s handhelds.

Dale Irvin, the worlds only Professional Summarizer, recently added life to one of our client’s meetings. As an event emcee, he can effectively summarize each segment of an event into a content-reinforcing comedic segment. He does this on site, with little preparation.  Apparently, this is partially because he’s a member of Mensa and he’s really, really smart. You can find this nugget of knowledge on his up close and personal section where you can also learn about the ubiquitous “tittle”.

I love the concept of a Professional Summarizer. In traditional speaking terms, we’re trained to communicate in three parts: Tell them what you’re about to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them.  Mr. Irvin is stage three - the “tell them what you just told them” part. And they pay better attention because otherwise they won’t get the jokes. It becomes: Tell them what you’re about to tell them, tell them, then step aside and let Dale sum it up for you.

Comedy is an ideal way to reinforce content, transition between lengthy segments, and revitalize an otherwise drifting audience.