Chez Serge

It begins with a little unimportant event. I was at Washington Ronald Reagan airport, having a Delta flight to Boston.

Being a Air France platinium, I used to have access to the lounge in the US, Delta being a member of sky team. I therefore thought that I could step in, even with my french card.

The lady at the entrance swipes my card, and the computer refuses the access. The reason being that I must be either on an international flight, or on a domestic flight connecting the same day to an international flight. Rules have changed since last time I flew on a US domestic flight, at that time they would let me in the lounge.

As I did not know, I started being angry, telling them that the rules are in contradiction with the french web site, eventually asking to see the manager. An old lady arrives.

The lady swipes the card, looks at the computer, and says “sorry sir, you cannot access”. Nothing new.

Then happens a series of “funny” exchanges.

“Your computer is in contradiction with Airfrance” say I

“I do not care” says the lady, “I follow what my computer says”

“If you follow the computer, what is your added value” I ask

“Sir, I must follow the computer”

“If you say this, it means that you have no intelligence, no sensitivity. You just repeat what the computer says, you then are a machine”

“Sir, I am not a machine”

“Then let me in”

“No Sir”

“So, you prefer to follow the machine rather than making a customer happy ?”

“I want to make all my customer happy”

“So let me in”

“No Sir, I am sorry”

“You are not sorry, you just pretend; your words sound fake”

“Sir I am sorry”

Etc… I was suddendly even not sure she was the manager, she may have been a comedian just hired to manage situation with angry french customer !

Of course, this poor lady was a machine. But it was not her fault, I can even imagine she was not happy to react the way she had to. I realized she had a hierarchy above her who priviledge the rules rather than customer satisfaction, and that she had to strictly obey the rules. Even worst, she could have been trapped by her manager into a double bind : “make your customer happy, but follow the rules”. But I was also thinking how employees at Apple store have much more liberty to manage customer relationship.

The industrial world has rationalized the production, by creating assembly lines, where everyone had to follow the process, and follow the rules, period.

Then came the age of knowledge workers. But the traditional managment applied the same method, whether you are a knowledge worker or not. And it leads to such situations. Everybody who needs to talk with with the hotline of telecommunication operator, an airline, a bank, knows it : customer service is just awfull, inhuman, based on process, machine. This is not normal at the age of the Internet

What should Delta, or any big corporate do ? Undo strict complicated rules. Keep simple ones : “everybody who has a gold or platinium may enter the lounge”. Period. And give the local knowledge worker the ability and the tools to manage any situation. Give them freedom to think, and act. Treat them as human, not as machines.

What sort of tools do those knowledge worker need ? Any information sharing tool, all the one that Internet provides. By doing so, local worker have the capacity to regulate the flux of people in the lounge. How ? Simple. Everyone in a lounge is waiting for an airplane, and Delta know this very accurately. So let the workers, and also the customers, have the information about the estimated amount of people in the lounge every 15 minutes, for the next three hours. Let the customer even regulate themself, in peer to peer mode.

By imposing its employees to just follow the rules, Delta is staying in an old type economy, the one of the XIXth century world. Consequence is that they make their employees unhappy, and therefore their customer who face them unhappy as well.

By changing its internal governance, by allowing them to take more local decision, based on accurate information managment tools, Delta would then really be in the 2.0 world.

Corporate companies need a huge amount of energy to do this. But they must.

By the way, I humbly suggest Delta to think about this :

The working program at Hadopi labs has now started. A first draft of the working groups has been presented to the members of the college, and work is going on. The program will be published soon, albeit in french.

This is for the official side of Hadopi. Now, there is still a lot of reluctance for many people to participate officially in the labs, for various reason : ideological (Hadopi is the enemy to be killed), practical (people must register), efficiency (it is useless procedure). As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a strong difference between the fast reactivity of the community outside Hadopi, and the slowness of the internal processes.

Therefore, my friend Bruno and I have set-up a parallel system, the 1x4x.

How does this work ?

It is inspired by mystarbuck and Dell Ideastrom, two famous early e-voting system.

Anyone who wants to contribute may go on the pool site, and propose an idea. The registration process is easy by design. And people can not only propose an idea, but also vote on other people’s idea.

The expert will regularly watch the ideas, extract the interesting ones, and introduce them into their own work. It may happen that an idea is cross labs, therefore leading to a cross lab projects.

We hope that, with this system more neutral than direct participation, the community, including strong opponents, will be able to express itself in a more simple manner and its voice will be included in the labs work.

The pool is now open, you may participate !

I have been recently nominated as one of the seven Hadopi labs experts.

I have never liked the Hadopi law. I wrote this publicly on my blog, in french and in english. I deeply believe that it does protect the past and does prevent innovation in the business models of music, and content in a broad sense. However, when I was approached to be an expert, I eventually said yes.

The implementation and follow-up of the Hadopi law is performed by a French “Haute autorité“, the equivalent of a regulatory agency or independant regulatory commission in the US, or a Quango in the Commonwealth. This agency (cf. their web site in french) has decided to set-up an original structure : an internal think tank, open to everybody, whose goal is to feed the managing members of the agency (seven people), and in turn the legislator, and the whole community, with modern ideas around the equation “Internet and digital rights”.

Information about Hadopi law is to be found in this wikipedia article. The French music industry, backed by some artists who were totally upset by illegal downloading, put the pressure onto the government to pass a law that would strongly punish such illegal downloading. At the very first start of this move, Hadopi has been highly controversial, between those who wanted to protect traditional copyright system, a trend which is also to be found in ACTA, and those who claimed it was a law against freedom, which some wikileaked document about ACTA seems to say, at least in the ACTA context. As many geeks and hackers were in the second category, it has been very easy for them to show how this law was technically impossible to work properly, because of many turn around. My personal view is that the music industry is experiencing another shift in its business model, based on an economy of abundance rather than on an economy of scarcity, and that this new paradigm shifts away from traditional marketing based on famous artists, a model opposed to the long tail model. And, of course, the traditional music industry protects itself from such a shift, with the fear to lose power and business.

Back to the labs. There are five of them (sorry for the web site in French only) : one devoted to “Network and technology”, one devoted to “Digital economy of content creation”, one devoted to “Online Usages”, one devoted to “Internet and Intellectual Property”, and one devoted to “Internet and Society”. Even though I was against Hadopi, I was approached by Eric Walter, the CEO of the agency, to manage one of the labs. My first question was “should I say yes”, but as I am more a man of bridge than a man of wall, I found funny to change things from inside Hadopi, rather than criticize it from the outside. I am not alone in this situation, two other of the seven experts, Bruno Spiquel and Jean-Michel Planche, are famous for being against the law. My second reaction was that this structure was in a traditional silo mode, which has proven to be inefficient when it is about managing the complexity of the world. And, for sure, the music industry in the Internet era is a complex system. As Bruno had the same reaction, we both of us have been named “associate expert in charge of transversal coherence”, whatever this mean. The other experts, Nathalie Sonnac, Cécil Méadel, Christophe Alleaume, and Paul Mathias, are academic people who did lots of interesting research on the topic of their respective labs.

The labs are supposed to work in an open cooperative mode, and to produce content co-created with anyone interested in the topic, and willing to bring value. Needless to say that many opponent to the law have criticized this process, and rejected, sometimes in very rude terms, the call for co-production. However, contributors have started applying, and the redaction process will start, with the goal to have by mid year a first bunch of content available.

The adventure is only starting, the official launch of the labs was February 2nd. It is not an easy task. One of the mission we gave ourself, as associate experts, was to introduce the philosophy of the Internet in both the working method, and the output of the labs. Apart from the rejection by a part of the community, against which we cannot do anything, one of the major issue is the difference of speed between the internal production of document, and the external reaction.  This was quite obvious the first working group day, and it reminded me why you should never go to the première of an opera : the lower part of the audience is low in energy, while the upper part is high.

I will keep on publishing about the life of an expert on this blog.

The Labs can be followed on @labshadopi or on the #labs hashtag.

The mathematicien in me, who never really slept, says that 2011 is a prime number.

This will be a prime year.

What to wish, then ?

• To the enterprises, to switch to collaborative mode, for Internet is not an issue, but the solution to create more value
• To the world of politic, to increase the necessary speed and momentum to reach Government 2.0.
• To everyone, to trust in the future, as there is no innovation without risk, and there is no risk without trust

Let us not forget thet the future is not in the stars, but in the head of those who build it.

I wish everybody to introduce joy and beauty in our common constructions !

time past, and time future,
what might have been, and what has been
point to one end, which is always present
…

Only through time time is conquered.

The information system of any enterprise is generally a closed system. This is not necessarily for fear of intrusion, or malicious, but because the basic philosophy of the industrial world is that there is life in the company, and a life outside of the company, and that the boundary between the two should be simple: as closed as possible, with only few crossing points well monitored. This was the birth of IBM who, in 1912, invented the time clock, some sort of prehistorical information system. On a temporal vision also, the logic was based on schedule, which allows a temporal barrier between an inside and an outside.

The world has obviously changed. All usual boundaries, between inside and outside the company, between private and professional sphere, have soared. On the temporal plane, nobody is really concerned with the duration as a measure of value creation, except employees who work in shifts. The ability of companies to restrain as much as possible their information systems, from firewalls to banning social networks through the blocking of any video (worse than the Chinese government …), sends employees working from home, where they have much better IT equipment and condition than at work.

Information systems, traditionally closed, were impacted by the open philosophy of Internet. It took several years before companies started making public up part of their information system. I remember the revolution when UPS decided to open its intranet on the web.

In 2010, it would be suicidal for a B2C company not have a website which, at least, offers information and can perform transactions. But this not enough, and I think enterprises should open APIs, which are programming interfaces, of their information system.

Let us observe what is happening in the world of politics. The movement of the Open Data is born from the desire of some politician to publicly open government data, or rather, to use the excellent statement of Nicholas Gruen’s report delivered to the Australian government, to move from a logic where “the government protects its data, except if he wants to publish them”, to a logic in which “the government opens its data, unless there is a compelling reason not to do so.” Thus the U.S. government has opened its data portal; it was also the first decision of Cameron when he was elected, leading to the UK portal, followed by many countries or jurisdictions. Even the Russian government has opened a portal making public the expenses of his administration.

When government open their data, they are delivered in several formats, from simple pdf documents to excel spreadsheets. Publishing data is interesting, but making them useful is even better. The logic has been to go from opening the data to opening programming interfaces that allow programmers to build applications interacting with information systems.

The principle is the following: let us imagine a municipality who opens the APIs of its information system. Then, to start the process, it creates a public competition, rewarding the best applications using these APIs. The community is motivated to create such applications. The city has multiple interest in doing so: it focuses on its core business, which is to manage the city; it does not have do develop a lot of applications, since they are made elsewhere, the taxpayer’s money is better spent, and services are becoming very numerous.  A set of municipalities moreover decided to standardize these programming interfaces, giving rise to Open311, site where you can see the list of applications developed by third parties.

The business world should learn from this movement. Consider Home Depot. They have developped an interesting iphone app. These applications costed money, and forced Home Depot to create an app, which far from their core business. Now imagine that Home Depot decides to open its APIs. There will be for sure programmers, amongst the community of customer, who will develop applications user oriented, because they are customers themselves. People can invent usage that Home Depot had never thought of, and, as a consequence, increase usage, and buy more to Home Depot.

Another example: would banks open their APIs, the community could develop innovative applications, to better manage their accounts, conduct transactions, etc. from within the application. The bankers would benefit more flux, and customer would have a greater diversity of services.

Is this utopian? This is what Amazon is already doing with the Amazon Web services, some of them accessing directly the ordering part of the Information system, and the Amazon widgets that allow anyone to put a little part of Amazon on its site. It is also the latest innovation from paypal, paypalX, a set of open APIs associated with an economic model of revenue sharing. One might think of other applications in the automotive world or all industries, or all services.

The Internet world is an open one based on cooperation, collective intelligence, and value being in the flux more than the stock. Opening the APIs is, for companies, a good way to understand where value lies and how to exploit it intelligently. I remain convinced that the first one who will do so will have a competitive advantage. Following what I wrote in 2008, the concept would be “Business as a platform”, to follow ”Government as a platform“, as coined Tim O’Reilly. The french writer Auguste Detoeuf, in ” A propos de Barenton O.L., confiseur”, wrote in 1936 : “it is not your patents, but your speed of execution, which will protect you from the competition“. Opening the APIs would certainly be good way to improve speed of execution. Corporate companies should consider crowdsourcing not as a ressource, but as a partnership.

Louis Monier is french (I happened to meet him), living in the Silicon Valley, and is well known for being the creator of Altavista.

He then moved to ebay, and Google.

And he just created Qwiki.

What is Qwiki? from Qwiki on Vimeo.

At first glance, Qwiki is supposed to be your talking personal assistant. A sort of modern Dobby, who would be at your “info” service, and would search and tell you everything about any given topic. A synthetic visual & talking information system,

But not only. Everybody can set-up his own qwik, and create use cases. Some are displayed on their web site, still unaccessible.

So, Qwiki looks like a sort of combination of services such as liveplasma, pearltrees, paper.li, all those systems which somehow help you to create the synthesis of a whole bunch of information. Each owner of Pearltrees must order and arrange himself, but paper.li does it for you, based on your tweets and hastags. Qwiki could be a multimodal combination of both.

However, here is the disruption : story telling. Everybody knows that the best way to learn is by having fun. One way to do this is serious games. The other is to hear stories. This is how we all learned when we were young, we all remember the little red riding hood, who, by the way, is interesting only because of the existence of the big bad wolf… I recently met a CEO who had posted a 4 minutes video of him talking about his company, and who then received a lot of people wanting to work for him only because they liked the video. None of them had read the content of his web site…

So, if Qwiki is good enough to tell beautiful stories instead of sending links or sentences, then this service will be a killer one.

Now, back to two intellectual questions :

• what sources will Qwiki search for ? Wikipedia is named, but what about youtube, dailymotion, twitter, google, blogs, the entire web, etc…
• Is it a sharing tool, or only a personal tool accessible through many devices. How will I share my Qwiki with others ??? On which platforms?

And a last comment : I wish Qwiki to become a beautiful story !

I registered as an alpha user. I shall test.

Facebook is, apparently, a social network. Let us point out that a social network is not a directory of persons, but a directory of links. The underlying principle is the Six Degrees Of Separation theory, which says that between any two people on earth, there are no more than five intermediaries. Take a bushman, for example:  you know someone who knows someone who, etc. who knows the bushman. All online social network are the same, in that they are not that much interested in people, but rather in relations. The proof is simple: if someone quits Facebook definitively (which is not that easy), what disappears is more than one entry in the directory, it is all links and all interactions with one’s 130 friends (the average number in mid 2010).

We shall not dwell on the amazing Facebook statistics; 500 million members, whose half connect every day, thus contradicting a sentence I hear quite often: “I am fed up with Facebook, and I quit” (sentence putting Facebook equal to the television). Actually, the celebrity on Facebook who lasted the shortest time was a charming English Lady, Ivy Bean, who joined Facebook in 2008 at the age of 102, and died in July 2010 with 5,000 friends, and also 56,000 followers on twitter.

Facebook is fundamentally different from other social networks, by at least one aspect: its open APIs. Most social networks, including professional ones, have very poor semantics in respect to the links. Linkedin, for example, allows two main definitions for the link : “we know each other“, with a few parameters (we are colleagues/one is the boss of the other/we have contracted work between one another , etc.), and “we are part of a same group“.

In Facebook, the semantic of the link is open through a set of programming interfaces, thus enriching the relation between two or more persons. Users can then calibrate their interaction, for instance they may poke each other, send flowers, play together, invite one another to an aperitif, or even share a kitty to buy a common gift. This opening of the APIs is what attracts brands, with the hope to make low cost viral marketing.

Facebook was, from the outset, designed to be an applications platform, something much more sophisticated than a simple social network. And so, little by little, Facebook overflowed out of it’s platform, and, as a cuckoo, positioned itself on sites beyond its own, each time bringing with it, a very interesting function, albeit a little intrusive.

The first one was Facebook Connect . The principle here, is quite straight forward: when someone develops a web site which requires authentication, why bother developing this feature, when Facebook offers it for free, and at low integration cost. The interesting side effect is that the end user is no longer obliged to enter one more time their own identification. It is a real win-win-win deal : the user avoids burden, the web site owner avoids development, and Facebook gains not only more users, but also more knowledge about usage. One should remark that, on Facebook, one has usually a single identity, which is contrary to the basic usage of the Internet: why should one be the same in a professional bulletin board, a forum of enthusiasts, on dating site, or as an avatar in Second Life? Facebook is always chasing for people taking another identity than his own; Facebook is anything but anonymous.

Then came the like button, which was also free to put on any other web site. If someone browses a site, and likes it, they can very easily share it, by making a single click and have it then appear on their Facebook wall. It is the same win-win logic, the web site developer sees his own viral promotion done for free. The same logic applies for other plugins : recommendations, videos, and so on. They are all offered by Facebook, under the obvious term “Social Plugin“, with the intention to be the viral marketing enablers; not only on Facebook site, but on any other site. This is a big shift from other social networks, and is in the same spirit as the Amazon set of widgets which were invented 5 years ago.

The very last one, still under test, is the button subscribe to, which allows users to follow someone else’s messages; a service directly competing with Twitter.

Facebook is forging its expansion in creative ways. In what is perhaps the strongest signal yet, it made a significant shift in its relationship to virtual goods. Those little virtual objects, which are to be found on social platforms, and hugely in 3D immersive platforms, represented, only in the US, a 3 billion US dollars market in 2009. Facebook started selling them in 2008, but the revenue was low, a few ten million dollars, almost nothing. Facebook therefore decided, earlier this year, to totally change its strategy, stop selling virtual goods, offering instead, a virtual currency, Facebook Credits, which allows 3^rd party virtual goods to be brought and sold inside the platform. If the same logic applies, this virtual money could, one day, be used on other platforms. Will Facebook become the apps store of virtual goods? Will Facebook also be interested in the market of real goods, trying to do better than Google Checkout, an attempt to be a front-end, unique payment system, which never really took off?

Then, very recently, came Facebook Places…

The market of local information is the biggest battlefield of the Internet nowadays. Being straightforward: I can quite easily, owing to twitter or blogs, know what happens in the street of Tehran. But it is 5 to 8pm on Sunday in Paris, there are three boulangeries which close at 8, I have not enough time to visit all of them, and I don’t know which one has remaining bread…

Many actors are in this market of local information. Google with Google maps, Yellow Pages, Craig’s list, Tripadvisor, Aroundme, and the last one, Foursquare. Facebook is now clearly entering this arena, and wishes to position itself on geo-localized data . Mobile Facebook apps already offer this function, albeit in the US only, at the time of this writing.

The difference between Facebook and Google is striking. We must not forget that the power of the Web is in peer to peer relations. Google, counter-intuitively perhaps, has never been 2.0. Google groups, is a revamping of the Usenet hierarchy, through the acquisition of dejanews. It is the only Google service where users are interconnected. On the other hand, Facebook Places, like Foursquare or Aroundme, allows users to exchange information on a wall. Google Maps does not.

If Google is still heavily controlling search, and advertisements on the Internet, Facebook is positioning itself more and more in crucial places: authentication, virtual goods and why not one day real goods payment, exchange of information, local information; and all this not only on its own platform, but everywhere, through its plugins. For Google, the search engine is free, and makes its income by leveraging other products, such as AdSense or AdWords. Facebook is now doing what Google has done so well, giving away its core service, to allow side businesses to come in. The difference is that it is doing it where Google is not that present: peer to peer.

Facebook is clearly taking control of some crucial applicative layers of the internet, specially the viral ones, with a probable desire to be, one day, the operating system of the Internet.

I have had a very interesting discussion with Trevor Barr, professor at Swinburne University of Technology. Trevor in an expert in Telecommunication, and is often consulted by the Australian Government, with a recent focus on the National Broadband Network (NBN) initiative.

Trevor is developing an idea which I find very interesting, and innovative. He says the Internet should be divided in three types of services : the basic Internet services, the managed services, and the publicly supported (government) services.

The basic Internet services simply entails IP packet being delivered to the users, who then manage the range of services as they wish. They may use Skype, email, iTunes, youtube, or any web site or portal that they wish to subscribe, needing only the internet connection, if possible at a monthly flat rate for an unlimited amount of data, as it is the case in some countries like France.

The managed services are in addition to the pure Internet, and are provided by the Internet service provider (ISP). At the beginning of the public Internet, ISPs tried to set-up walled garden, with a full range of owned services, thus threatening to reduce the basic Internet layer to almost nothing. This did not work, and consequently the ISPs had to reduce their managed services to a few ones. Today, there are principally two :

• telephony, which is done using voice over IP, thus totally escaping the traditional commuted network (the famous POT; Plain Old Telephony);
• television, using IPTV specific protocols.

There have been attempts to deliver more specific services, like ftp, hosting, file sharing, but none of them are on the scale of that which will be the next huge service in this category : “mobile phone”. Using Femtocell, an ISP can put a 3G antenna on the home gateway, like the bewan one. This allows its community of users to call or surf, using a mobile phone, anywhere there is an available connection, offered by a customer from the same provider; which is very easy in dense areas. Some ISPs are already providing this feature with WiFi, it would be easy to switch to 3G. This is probably what the French ISP Free will do, now that they have the license to use 3G wavelengths. In this respect, the managed services part will convey the three services which, with the pure Internet, forms the quadruple play.

On top of this, Trevor says the Government should use part of the bandwidth for its own services, the publicly supported services. This includes e-health, e-education, e-government, or any other type of services which are provided by an administration. This is a brilliant idea. As Trevor says, how come the government creates a network without taking part of it for its own services? However, this scenario implies a very important second question: what would be the impact on the network architecture? Or, to put it in another ways: does the introduction of a Government set of services compromise the principle of a neutral network?

The design of the Internet was meant to put no intelligence in the network, and to distribute it to the extremities. Therefore, the Internet network processes any IP packet in a purely equal manner. So far, the focus on bandwidth is on the last mile, because of the slowness of ADSL, and its asymmetry. Its backbones, owing to the Internet bubble investments, and the availability of Content Delivery Network (CDN), are not saturated.

Then, came the debate about network neutrality. The telecommunication providers, who were looking for ways to increase their revenues without impacting on end user bills, thought about introducing classes of services in their routers, thereby asking content or service providers to pay for privileged services. As Tim Wu explained it, amongst all impacts, it could lead to stop the innovation that created the Internet. All pure Internet players complained, and, so far, the debate is still open.

Now, Governments start embracing a very innovative approach to the Internet, such as Opendata, Government 2.0, Government as a platform. Therefore, one can imagine in the near future that they will develop a whole range of truly useful services. Will such Governments accept the “best effort” traditional philosophy of the Internet, or will they require some sort of reserved bandwidth inside the network?

Let us make two scenarios.

• The first one is tele-medicine. A very important remotely performed clinical operation requires specific high broadband end-to-end communication. If the network is congested, because, as an example, people are downloading movies, leading to a failure in the remote operation, how would the public react to this ?
• The second one is an emergency situation, say earthquake, bushfire, flood, etc. In two major crises, namely 9/11, and the Haiti earthquake, the Internet proved its resistance to stress, by being the only alive communication network. So, it may well happen that, in case of a crisis, emergency services require that the network is devoted entirely to its management, and I don’t see any counter reason to do so.

In both cases, it would imply introducing classes of services in the network. And, if this is done, I can hardly imagine the telecommunication operators not using those classes of services in other, more commercial, contexts.

How to solve the issue while keeping the Internet neutral? I see three solutions. The first one is to say that Government creates a specific network for its own services. This would be highly costly, and totally counrary to the mutualisation principle of the Internet, which led to low price adsl access, and the whole Internet economy. The second one would be to insure a high availability network whatever the situation, something that would lead to an under used network in normal time. This is the case as of now, but what happens to the backbones when fibre-to-the-home is, at last, available everywhere? CDN is not a solution, as it is of no use for a synchronous peer to peer communication. The third one would be to rely upon civic behaviour; not an easy solution…

I sometimes wonder if keeping the network always neutral is feasible, or if it is utopia. Now that the Internet is an essential service widely used, shall we be able to continue the spirit of its inventors, something like “a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site”.

How have I done this ?

FIrst of all, I found a very reasonably priced site for downloading scores : pianopublicdomain.

Then, owing to dropbox, I have put those files on the cloud.

I finlly used goodreader to uplod files from dropbox onto the iPad.

Overall, let us not forget the splendid half grand pleyel from 1898, number 118020…

Second Life has recently generated a lot of buzz. It all starts with a post on their web site : restructuring. More precisely, 30% of employees are fired, and their Singapore office closes.

I have seen many analysis of this, talking about too much business orientation, or a step back to B2C.

It is a serious issue for all people who, like me, believe in the business of virtual worlds. We need to remind the history of Second Life. At first, Linden Lab was created by Philippe Rosedale with the aim to build a software that would be sold. Second Life was created as a showcase, a proof of concept of the capacity of the platform. However, Philippe is more and more interested in the social aspect of Second Life, to a point that he may have forgotten the business issue. Not a good thing to do when you have Mitch Kapor, Pierre Omidyar, and Jeff Bezos at your board. Well, facebook is in the same mood, but facebook is over 400M accounts, while Second Life is around 16M, which is low, even though the peer to peer transactions amount for 567MUS$ in 2009, a very nice result in my view. So Philippe was replaced by Mark Kingdon, who decided to go back to the basics, and create an enterprise solution. Well, he created two enterprise solutions : the first one is just owning islands in the main grid, with specific features such as more flexible avatar naming, the second one, “second life enterprise beta”, being beyond the firewall.

This is, in my view, the main issue: it is not possible for a company to have both a B2C offering, and a B2B one. Amongst all issues, two are huge. The first one is about culture; sales process are not the same, sales people are not the same, pitch are not the same, eventualy it means having two different teams, which is costly. Let us remember the excellent words from crossing the chasm: “better have three customers who talk together than ten who don’t”. The second issue is about product roadmap; obviously, the requierment from a social network are not the same as the one from companies, specially the corporate ones. This leads to tension on the product. Moreover, social networks are not that much the friends of CIOs… Consequences are dramatic: the residents are more and more disapointed by SL; the B2B inworld offer seems to offer a low level of reactivity (friends of mine talk about many weeks before having an answer), and Second Life enterprise beta business model, 55k$ per year for 16 islands but only 8 simultaneous, looks outrageous, specially compared to other collaborative tools.

What is emerging now looks like a willingness from resident to step back from SL. For those close to the original spirit of Rosedale, opensim seems a good candidate. However, remains a big problem: what about all assets inworld? Everybody has in mind the closure of metaplace, and the resulting loss of assets. Maybe this is why VenueGen has offered to migrate enterprise assets into its own world?

Shall we assist to a Second life crash ?

Whether it happens or not, I still believe in virtual worlds. This excellent post made after Thinkbalm decision to widen its scope (we must all thank Thinkbalm for their constant support to Virtual Worlds), shows many positive coming aspects. In the hype curve, Virtual Worlds are clearly at the Trough of Disillusionment. Time is now on for technology to show its real potential.

What are the positiv aspects?

• The most important is the vgov initiative, lauched by US administration, whose aim is to manage virtual worlds for all US administrations. The Internet exist mostly because of the important role played by US administration, the same story may happen with Virtual Worlds. Four platforms have been selected : Web.alive; Forterra (acquired by SAIC); teleplace; and Vastpark, a very innovative opensource platform. Second Life has not been slected.
• Education already makes a huge use of virtual worlds. The special issue of the journal of virtual worlds research shows interesting results.
• Healthcare sector is also a place where virtual worlds have had big success, in SL, but not only. A study performed by doctors showed the great advantage of virtual world as a training tool.
• The enterprises are more and more interested in serious games. I can’t imagine serious games without a virtual world. With this respect, the openness of the technology becomes a key success factor…
• Tradeshows, conferences, are more and more moving to virtual worlds, with big success. Not only cost of travel is lowered, but the quality of interaction is superior to 2D tools, as shows IBM case study. Robots have now their virtual conference; and even wine producers go for it !
• On the social side, Kids and teens are massively in virtual worlds. Almost 400 millions users in the range 8-15 years old are in virtual worlds, comparable to the number of facebook users, but who has a larger scope in terms of age.

I would like to add a personal touch. Many times, I have met people very reluctant to the internet, people who did not understand the importance of social networks, forum, for whom the web was no more than an online content tool. I was always able to change their perception by showing them machinimas realized in corporate situations. Their reaction was always the same : “at last I understand what it is all about”. Well, let us be honest : facebook interface is amongst the most complicated we can imagine. At least, a 3D interface is easy to understand.

The immersive web is now entering a time of obvious concrete realizations. On the technological side, tools are diversified, some close to games or social networks, some close to corporate intranet tools. The biggest improvment is their availability through the browser. I It is now obvious thet the browser is the entry point to the Internet, and 3D plugins are the preferred solution to clients download. WebGL norm, when available, will be a huge step.

Virtual worlds are now entering their mature phase, and we shall all thank SL to have shown its potential value.