I flew to Los Angeles yesterday to speak at and attend the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo - finally. This is the fourth such conference and I’ve never quite been able to swing it to get here. So, I sprang at a chance to fill Roo Reynolds’ spot on a panel talking about enterprise use of virtual worlds after he moved from IBM to the BBC - thank you Peter Haik for asking me!
Day 1 has just wrapped up. I called home to tell my girl goodnight and hubby asked the “how was your day?” question, so I thought I’d share a bit of that here before I forget.
I suppose it actually started yesterday when I attended the VIP reception for speakers and other such important folks. (I almost typed that without laughing - seems strange to be in the same “VIP” designation as some of the other folks here) It was a great opportunity to meet some of the people I know through Second Life and Twitter, such as Ian Hughes, in real life. Congrats on your award for virtual world innovation in the enterprise, Ian!
This morning started off with a keynote from director John Landau. I’m looking forward to seeing how his movie Avatar turns out. Sounds like they’re blazing new territory to create it. He also talked about a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer virtual world.
Next up was my panel, Virtual Worlds in the Workplace, where I was joined on stage by two CEOs and a PhD. The crowd looked a little sparse to me at first, but it filled in a bit more. And, as I looked around at the rooms of other panels later in the day, it seemed to be pretty well-attended in comparison. I think I managed to sound reasonably intelligent, and heard some good feedback from audience members after we were done. There was a reporter from Cox Newspapers there who asked me some follow-up questions, so maybe we’ll all read about it in their Sunday papers this weekend. [Update: the article ran in my local paper today - check it out here.]
Next, I went to the session titled “How to Convince The Boss You’re Not Off Your Rocker:
Getting Buy-In For Enterprise Immersive Internet Initiative” by Erica Driver. No big takeaways for me, but she did have a good point about focusing on one business problem/one audience at a time. What I remember most was that she quoted me from my panel session before when answering a question from the audience!
After that I thought there were no more sessions that interested me, but decided to stop by the one about bringing celebrity brands to virtual worlds. It turned out to be rather good, with several big names in the entertainment industry such as MTV and the William Morris agency represented.
Then, I went to make the rounds of the exhibitor booths and must say I was rather disappointed in the lack of promotional giveaways. Not to sound greedy, but it just makes these things fun to get t-shirts, notepads, pens, or other nifty new knickknacks. There was still plenty of conversation and lots of demonstrations going on, however, which made this a rather odd choice of venue for the last keynote of the day.
I felt so sorry for Steve Parkis, Senior Vice President, Disney Online when he started trying to speak with all of that going on behind his audience/in front of him. But, I must say (and told him so) that I was very impressed with how well he pulled it off. He was engaging and entertaining. It’s all that much easier to do when you’re talking about things like a new virtual world for the Cars movie characters coming next year, but still no mean feat.
After that, I grabbed another free beer - something else that Steve had competing for his audience’s attention, but he worked nicely into the presentation - and thanked many of the exhibitors I saw using Dell products in the booths. Hey, it keeps me employed! And now, after finishing this recap, I’m heading over to the Metaverse Meetup a couple of blocks away. More to come after tomorrow!
