Irving Wladawsky-Berger is the head of technical strategy and innovation at IBM. His job seems to be making sure the company catches the front end of any new technology waves. As such, he is leading IBMs efforts into Second Life. As you probably already know IBM has been setting up shop in Second Life sense the beginning of the year and is getting ready to open 12 new islands including the project with Circuit City I wrote about earlier. Joining their previous effort, the Almaden Research Center, which is basically a step 2 from orientation island.

In an in depth interview with CNET Wladawsky-Berger explains IBMs efforts to launch a new Emerging Business Opportunity in 3D Internet and virtual worlds. He seems to be very clear that IBM's interests are greater than just Second Life and extend to the concept of Virtual Worlds at large. When asked how IBM and Linden Lab work together Wladawsky-Berger responded with, "...we would like to collaborate with them more, especially in the area of standards and open source. I think it would be very good to get the various virtual-world communities to participate in efforts to define standards and to define what it means to interoperate across virtual worlds..." Is this the beginning of Second There, or maybe Virtual Laguna Hotel? Most likely not, because the structural differences in these worlds are rather large, but I would like to see smaller battles won. Like the ability to transfer characters between worlds.