As previously reported by Tateru, 57 Miles from Metaversed.com moderated today a panel with Gartner's Steve Prentice (ST Mensing in SL), and representatives from Sun Microsystems (Fiona May), The Electric Sheep Company (Joel Greenberg), and
Steve Prentice explained that his prediction that 80% of people will have a virtual life by 2011 was referring to the increasing popularity of virtual worlds/online gaming/social media as a form of interaction and entertainment. He was prompting companies to take note of this trend and explore with care as they learn. His subsequent attempt to caution companies mostly focuses on security issues and risk management of these platforms.
Joel Greenberg of the Electric Sheep pointed out that the problem is not security. There are some ways to get around that with private islands/restricted access. However, there aren't enough collaboration tools for enterprise use. And he's spot-on. I can count on my fingers what you can do in terms of collaboration in SL: build together, watch a movie/video, listen to music/audio, and present a slideshow of images. Many are trying to create gadgets that enable other types of collaboration, but the infrastructure is often times the limiting factor.
1. There's nothing like someone predicting something then telling people to start looking into it. It's self-fulfilling prophesy just like the "the chance of X happening raises fears among residents of the economy crashing".
Think-tanks are masturbation.
In this particular case it wasn't much of a prediction once he explained that he essentially meant "using the internet to communicate and interract" constitutes a virtual life. I could have told you that and I don't belong to any group with an important-sounding name!
Posted at 6:35PM on Aug 16th 2007 by SqueezeOne Pow