Q&A: Mark Kingdon on Second Life for business

The chief executive of Second Life thinks virtual worlds will be the future of work.

By Nicole Kobie, 5 Mar 2010 at 16:06

With teleconferencing and meetings, what benefits does Second Life offer that web conferencing or that sort of system doesn’t have?

This past this week, when we launched the new viewer in beta, we added a really important and revolutionary new feature, which is called Shared Media, which allows you to go to the web browser and drag any URL to any surface in Second Life and that content or that page will appear.

What’s powerful about that is it offers a new level of collaboration around document sharing than we had before. And I think that’s what Second Life offers.

The other thing it offers is a persistent space because people can go in virtual offices from any location. It allows people to connect from home or from a café or anywhere they have decent internet access.

Oftentimes with video conferencing, people need to be in a fixed location so it’s not as mobile as it could be.

The other thing that’s powerful with our virtual meetings is that with our voice product it’s very high quality sound, which is typically better than you get typically with video conferences or speaker phone.

If you put the fact that you can share documents, that you have high fidelity voice product, and you have something that’s really really powerful, from a meeting perspective and a collaboration perspective.

A lot of people don’t associate Second Life with all of that. When they think of it, they’re thinking about the negative ideas that people go there to have sex or have goofy little avatars. What would you say to try to convince a business user otherwise?

I think that all new technologies go through the same adoption cycle. There was a time people thought the internet was weird.

The simple message I have is you have to try it to understand the benefits, but they’re incredible and powerful. Some of the largest companies in the world are using Second Life as a routine part of their business.

There are 1,300 organisations and companies worldwide using Second Life as part of their business, for meetings, conferences, complex simulations, distributed learning – many, many applications.

Read on for more news from CeBIT 2010.

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4 comments

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Second Life will eventually replace webex for conducting business meetings

Second Life browser is constantly being improved, and it is quite possible that in a year or two it will feature polished user interface ideally suited for conducting remote meetings. Corporations like IBM already established Second Life regions (for example, http://www.threadmap.com/index/region/1/15606) to save on travel expenses.

By NormanGladstone on Saturday Mar 6

Second Life...

For me (Aad Menges avatar´s name), one of the most important lesson learned there and applied outworld (our first life), was and is a great experience at hardware/software knowledge today, using a very good 3D browser like this. Inworld, i knew and know news forms of lifestyle, and improved my level of share communications between people around world. I hope any day, when the changes comes for hardwares, a viewer where all residents may feel and see inside the grid, all things happening like a movie, a photorealistic way of sense.

Since Brazil, living at Amazon ¨rain forest¨, in a city called Manaus, Antonio Adolfs Filho.

Good luck Mr. Martin Kingdon !

By Aad2day on Wednesday Mar 10

KnowItAll

Well they figured him out and then they sacked him even though he tries to gloss over it by saying he "stepped down". He got his ass fired, that's what happened.

By KnowItAll on Tuesday Jul 6