The witty and engaging Professor Robert J Bloomfield, JGSM, of Cornell University will be running a subject entitled Directed Studies in Business and Oversight in 'Second Life'. Professor Bloomfield is offering a 1- to 3-credit directed study to students interested in exploring and reporting on business and regulatory oversight in Second Life.

Second Life is a fertile ground for studying free market business in an unregulated environment - either because regulations do not exist, or the regulations that do exist for bodies claiming to be banks and stock-exchanges are not observed by proprietors - who may be dismissive or ignorant of the applicability of physical world regulations on their virtual businesses.

Or so they say. Metaversed's 57 Miles has the podcast up from the panel with Gartner. Attending were 57 Miles, Steve Prentice of Gartner, Robert Bloomfield of Cornell university's Johnson School, Fiona Gallagher, Sun Microsystems' lead in Second Life, and Joel Greenberg, VP marketing and innovation for Electric Sheep Company.

Skype was off for some hours around the time of the event so it was handled in voice. Miles has heroically edited it all together in a 50MB MP3. Go grab the audio file from Metaversed.

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 Mystik business-school professor Robert Bloomfield (Beyers Sellers). Sadly, Skype was down all this morning and the panel had to resort to using SL Voice. This meant, at least for me, that the conversation faded in and out every few seconds. I'm sure 57 Miles will have more detailed notes up on his blog soon. Until then, here are two ideas that stuck in my mind:

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.