Virtual Corporate Change

By Greywolf Mornington

In a time when belts in corporations are tightening, companies such as IBM, Dell,  Cigna Corp., Intel Corp., and Wells Fargo & Co. are increasingly looking to Second Life as a setting for trade shows, employee meetings and other corporate events such as training sessions.

IBM Business Center

International Business Machines Corp has invested deeply in the virtual world. Last year in October, IBM hosted a three-day annual gathering of its leading thinkers in Second Life. An event would have otherwise been scaled back because of the recession. The event, which peaked at about 250 concurrent users, helped demonstrate the promise of virtual reality to many within IBM who were having doubts about this method, “We turned hard skeptics into true believers,” says Neil Katz, Senior IBM engineer, who noted that these venues have since been used for other IBM events. IBM says it saved about $350,000 by hosting its October conference in Second Life.

The IBM Business Center located with-in Second Life, created 3 years ago, is a place where people come together and come alive in an environment that makes it easy to learn about complex processes in a visual way. Hold a meeting, share your opinion in a forum, attend a presentation or visit the library stocked with IBM Redbooks®.  Concierge Staff are available 24 hours a day/ 5 days a week.

Dell Business Center

Dell has an island within Second Life, complete with avatars who, can help consumers assemble the perfect computer for a perfect virtual world. Still, Dell believes its island on Second Life will be different from the other companies setting up shop on the virtual world. Dell will enable its customers to come to the Dell Island and visit a virtual factory where they can build a customized PC and have it delivered to their door.

In addition to the factory, Dell is building a computer museum on the site, along with a virtual copy of Chairman Michael Dell’s old college dorm room, where he founded the company. Visitors will be able to check out Mr. Dell’s old bathtub, where he used to store the computer parts he assembled into finished PCs for his first customers. “The content is fundamentally created by the people there,” said Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale. “We’re learning how people’s relationships with each other keep them coming back, seeing the power in numbers. We want to understand that better. It will be fascinating to see what Dell does with that.”

If desired, companies can hire a virtual conference organizer, like Dan Parks, a real-life conference planner who has created Virtualis, a Second Life “island” on which he has built a giant dome, various exhibit halls, ballrooms, an outdoor entertainment center and even a yacht. “Anything your mind can imagine, we can create in here,” Mr. Parks says. For about $7,000, he will run a two-day conference for 75 people from around the world. A similar event in real life would cost about $150,000, he says.

Intel Business Center

Linden Labs is giving extra focus to making Second Life more business friendly, says Linden CEO Mark Kingdom. Creating a site to introduce Second Life to business users and it is redesigning the “first hour experience” to make it easier for users to create accounts. Linden is also planning to launch a service allowing people to call into virtual meetings from their landlines or mobile phones. Linden Research is developing new applications targeting business users with new products and services, including a feature that will let users call into virtual meetings from their cell-phones. It is also testing hardware that companies can plug into their computer networks to create private virtual venues and will continue to develop new applications to further meet the needs of both residents and corporations as new uses for the virtual world are discovered.