the way we see it
Changing The Game:
Monthly Technology Briefs
August 2007
Virtual Worlds: The Internet in 3D
Read the Capgemini Chief Technology Officers’ Blog at
www.capgemini.com/ctoblog
Second Life, Calypso: The next
generation of Business
capabilities or Gaming?
IBM and MIT recently co-hosted “Virtual Worlds: Where business, society,
technology and policy converge,” which witnessed a strong presence from global
corporations spanning diverse industry sectors, from Bank of America to BMW,
and General Motors to Target. Toyota stated they were investing six figure sums to
reach—what they perceived to be—the next generation of consumers in their
own environment.
Virtual worlds are creating massive—or as some would say, disproportionate—
interest, with the most popular name in the business today, Second Life, home to
nearly one hundred globally or nationally recognizable leading enterprises in addition
to its 4.5 million registered citizens. (There is even a Swedish Government embassy
for Swedish nationals.) CyWorld is used by 80% of South Koreans under the age of
20, and now the Chinese have announced that they are establishing a virtual world
for up to 150 million Chinese nationals to use. For those who wish to keep up with
the news in virtual worlds, Reuters has its own bureau in Second Life, and its
business reporting service can be found at:
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/category/second-life/business/
“What is a “virtual world?” is the usual question from those who are not naturally
familiar with the Internet. It is formally defined as, “A computer-based simulated
environment intended for its users to inhabit, and interact via avatars (computer
generated replicas of people)” (source: Wikipedia). This habitation takes the form of a
three-dimensional graphical representation of the various aspects of a “normal,” real,
physical world with rules such as gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time actions,
and communication—until recently only in the form of text, but now real-time
voice communication using VOIP is also becoming available. A virtual world is a
persistent environment that continues to exist even after you leave, unlike a
user-defined application.
This type of virtual world developed through massive online multi-player gaming,
where role playing through the creation of personal avatars was a major part of the
attraction; particular examples being World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Ultima Online
and Lineage. The attraction started by Second Life was that it does not involve
gaming but rather the creation of a world that develops in response to the wishes of
its “citizens’’ to provide the kind of environment that they want to “live” in. This has
led to the advent of a new term, “Networked Virtual Environments” or NVEs, which
are being used to describe online platforms where participants are immersed in a
three-dimensional representation. NVEs are potentially the next stage of development
of collaboration tools and particularly add extra value when objects are involved, as
they can be “seen” more clearly as 3D representations.
Second Life is the easiest to understand commercially, as its proprietors Linden Labs
have released historical data showing it to have nearly 2.0 million active users, known
as residents (who have been there in the last 60 days). Sales between residents are
transacted using Second Life’s own unique currency, the “Linden dollar,” (L$), which
had a fluctuating conversion rate of 260–320 to a US dollar in 2005 to 2006.
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the way we see it
The Linden can be converted into US dollars by several well-known banks, and
some—ING Group as an example—even allow purchases to be made in Second Life
on their standard credit cards for recharge to the cardholder in their national
currency. Linden Labs makes its money from the sale of “land” to residents, who after
purchase have to pay a subscription to continue to own the land. It’s the owners’
challenge to decide how to use the land, which runs all the way from individuals
creating their own buildings as “homes” to which they invite their friends for
socializing (creating a consequential market for furnishings, etc.), through to business
use (IBM has over 5,000 employees working in Second Life). The Second Life
economy in 2006 was estimated at more than $600 million by an analyst tracking
virtual worlds and their growth.
A quick round up of activities in various sectors shows a variety of reasons for their
growing presence in the virtual world. Automotive represents a good example to
analyze, with most global brands present. General Motors, Nissan and Toyota were
early adopters of the ability to offer test drives, which in reality were more like
driving games, but this has now broadened into making Second Life a part of the
overall marketing mix complete with links into first-world activities. The use of
Second Life has now become an industry-wide shift, driven by experimenting with
new ways to use 3D experiences to interact with their existing or potential customers.
For the automotive industry with tangible physical products, it is the addition of 3D
to represent their products on the Internet that provides critical new capabilities.
Launches of new models are made at manufacturers’ sites in Second Life in the same
manner as at their own physical premises, including “free gifts” to encourage visitors
to attend the launches. The recent launch of the Mercedes C Class saw visitors who
registered and visited being offered a free set of Mercedes Racing overalls complete
with a helmet for their avatar to wear! Marketers say that the issue is how to market
to, and engage with, a generation that has grown up with gaming and being online as
a major source of their entertainment and information. On Second Life they can now
buy the car of their choice as a 3D model that they can use to drive around and visit
different locations in the virtual world.
Johnson Controls see a different approach, with a representation of your house created
in a virtual world that you can access from anywhere in the world via an Internet
device in order to check if everything is okay, adjust the heating, reset the alarms, etc.
In the meanwhile, consumer companies are experimenting with how to extend the
rapid growth in “social networking” (Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc.)
into something that connects to their “brand,” and its use in a virtual world. To
summarize, there is a strong belief that virtual worlds will develop as the medium in
which the current “Internet Generation” will increasingly combine various aspects of
their lives as they link social networks to gaming, to making choices on what and how
to buy. Come to think of it, the title of the MIT and IBM event was well chosen indeed.
The impact of this and other technologies are discussed in the Capgemini CTO blog
Changing The Game: Monthly Technology Briefs (August 2007) 2
Leading Company Results (Revenues)
Leading Company Results (Revenues)
Full CSC 15% @ $14.9bn Fujitsu 4% @ $4.6bn Microsoft 15% @
Year: $51.0bn
Q4: CSC 4% @ $4bn Microsoft 13% @
$13.4bn
Q3: Accenture 15% @
$5.1bn
Q2: Google 58% @ $3.87bn eBay 30% @ $1.83bn SAP 14% @ $2.4bn
IBM 12% @ $2.26bn
Q1: Red Hat 42% @118.9mn Infosys 40% @ $928mn Wipro 23% @ $723mn
Movements by Industry Leaders
Cisco—no significant technology announcements. www.cisco.com
Oracle adds to its Business Intelligence offerings with BI Standard Edition One,
aimed at providing a fully integrated BI and Data Warehousing system for up to
50 users at $1,000 per user. Oracle Database 11g shipped with 400 new features
including some very substantial additions to management. The acquisition of
Bharosa, an identity theft software provider, provides Oracle with real time fraud
tracking and identity management. www.oracle.com
Sun—no real-time significant technology announcements www.sun.com
HP—no significant technology announcements www.hp.com
Intel has taken a 2.5% stake in VMware, the market leader in server virtualization
technology with a jump in revenues of 82% in the last 12 months to $703 mn.
VMware has a history of close cooperation with Intel and is backed by EMC with
plans to go public late in 2007. www.intel.com
IBM is acquiring Telelogic, a provider of modeling and testing software in certain
vertical sectors, and Watchfire, provider of compliance, and security, testing software,
both of which will boost the IBM Rational family. The new addition of IBM Metadata
WorkBench extends the existing IBM Information Server products capabilities in BI
with new visualization and management functionality at the Metadata level. The
acquisition of DataMirror adds information management capabilities to the IBM
information-on-demand strategy. IBM has changed its policies and released the next
version of it Unix OS AIX upgrade as a public beta. A new version of IBM OmniFind
Enterprise Edition widens the search capabilities and links internal file with external
Web searches. IBM is planning to build a 80,000 sq ft “Green” data center in Boulder
Colorado to allow IBM to reduce its own carbon footprint and to host for customers
who are sensitive to the “Green” issue. www.ibm.com
Microsoft has added two new Windows Live services as beta offerings in Windows
Live Folders—a free 500MB storage service to add users sharing documents and
photo sharing in Windows Live Photo Gallery. www.microsoft.com
SAP has released NetWeaver Mobile to allow the building of mobile SOA applications
with integration into both SAP and non-SAP environments. A new ID management
suite is being launched to fill a current gap in the SAP range using the technology
acquired from the purchases of MaXware and OutlookSoft. www.sap.com
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the way we see it
What’s Happening with Standards
OASIS has introduced the Digital Signature Services v1.0, DSS v1.0, which
defines an XML interface for the processing of digital signatures to allow their
wider use in Web Services. www.oasis-open.org
Intel is proposing a new High Performance Cluster standard under the name of
“Cluster Ready Platform Definition” that will set standards for hardware and
software interoperability. www.intel.com
The Joint Electron Device Engineering Council, JEDEC, has published the
standards for the new Double Data Rate 3, DDR3, standard with Intel and others
stating their satisfaction with the improvements in memory access and power
utilization this will bring. www.jedec.org
Microsoft is seeking an ECMA standard for its XPS, XML Paper Standard, a
,
potential competitor to Adobe PDF the widely accepted de facto standard in the
industry. www.microsoft.com
Open Source Update
The Free Software Foundation, FSF has released General Public License version 3,
,
GPLv3, with a group of 15 open source projects simultaneously releasing their
own projects under the new license. www.fsf.org
Google has released a beta Linux version of Google Desktop that supports a wide
range of popular distributions and has been designed from ground up, unlike
other Google for Linux offerings, which use the Windows Emulator. www.google.com
Sun has started to release the source code for Solaris Cluster technology, starting
with the agent code in a move to encourage wider use of High Performance
Clusters. www.sun.com
Mozilla and eBay have jointly launched the Firefox companion for eBay following
months of testing; the new add-on to the Firefox browser provides the ability to
watch trading changes on eBay in real time. http://pages.ebay.co.uk/firefox/
Microsoft has unilaterally changed the conditions for Novell SuSE certificates it
sells in a move intended to prevent Microsoft from being subjected to the new
GPLv3 open-source license terms, which require royalty-free patent licenses for all
developers and distributors of GPLv3 software. www.microsoft.com
Zoho has released Zoho Meeting, a new Web conferencing application capable of
being embedded into other formats including Wikis and blogs.
http://meeting.zoho.com
Nokia Open C Challenge is to encourage Open Source development on its S60
Symbian based OS platform and is sponsored by Forum Nokia, Orange and
Symbian Developer Network. www.nokia.com
HP has been awarded Evaluation Assurance Level 4, EAL4+, the top International
Linux Security certification for a wide range of servers, notebooks, and work
stations. www.hp.com
Changing The Game: Monthly Technology Briefs (August 2007) 4
More Noteworthy News
Google has acquired phone management service provider Grand Central
Communications who offer a Web-based service that allows users to link and
manage multiple phones through a single number and voice mail account. A
German court has decided Google does not have the right to the Gmail name in
Germany as this is too close to the trademark of an existing German business G-
mail. The acquisition of Postini takes Google into the security market where its
products will be used to increase the security of Google Apps and the acquisition
of PeakStream provides tools to run single thread applications on multi-core
processors. www.google.com
SAP and Oracle are in dispute over “inappropriate” downloads of documents by
SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow, which was acquired for its specialized services in
maintaining and transferring Oracle systems onto SAP systems.
http://www.itweek.co.uk/computing/news/2193316/sap-admits-unauthorised
Autonomy is to acquire email archiving SaaS provider ZANTAZ to allow the
provision of an integrated risk management product combining archiving,
analytics and real-time policy management into a single cohesive system.
www.autonomy.com
Amazon and Microsoft have teamed up to launch the 1,000 Indies project to
make it easier for filmmakers to produce movies on the HD-DVD standard by
providing free authoring and setup services for 1,000 selected titles and access to
the Amazon CustomFlix manufacturing on demand technology.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jul07/07-02CustomFlixPR.mspx
MySpace and Microsoft are partnering in China to provide an MSN Community
Channel in a move to place the two competitive companies together and try to
increase both parties over all market size.
http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2194560/myspace-partners-microsoft
Nortel is launching the “unwired enterprise” by integrating a range of 4G wireless
technologies to make business networks claiming that offices will increasingly
need to cover the growing number of devices that use some form of wireless
communication. www.nortel.com
Expresso is a start up offering a beta for users to share Microsoft Excel
spreadsheets via a hosted SaaS service through turning posted spreadsheets into a
back-end style database. www.expressocorp.com
Plaxo, the popular provider of Web-based contact list management, has released a
free beta for Plaxo 3.0 adding an address book synchronization tool using the
SyncML open standard to allow online or offline capabilities to combine any
number of different types of data formats into a single Plaxo address book,
together with a wide range of other new Web 2.0 features. www.plaxo.com
Tibco iProcess Suite 10.6 update improves the user interface to aid process design
in an SOA environment. www.tibco.com
Dell will add a utility to its PCs that will allow users to easily remove pre-installed
software in a move to reverse the bundling of more and more “free” software onto
new PCs; remarkably this was a popular request on the new Dell IdeaStorm
website which allows Dell customers to tell Dell what they believe it should do,
with removal of “bloatware” coming out top. www.dell.com
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the way we see it
SpikeSource has released a hosted version of SuiteTwo to its Web 2.0 package of
Blogs, Wikis, RSS, and Social Networking software. www.spikesource.com
Dell is acquiring Managed Services Provider SilverBack Technologies to add
capabilities to package software, provision it as a Service, and manage it remotely
to its existing services. www.dell.com
Salesforce.com is opening its Apex Code developer environment to customers of
Unlimited Edition and Developer Edition so they can create their own programs
to run on SalesForce.com servers. www.salesforce.com
Analysts Informa World Cellular Data metrics report shows paid services
accessed via cell phones other than SMS exceeded $10 billion in Q1 07 making
one third of revenues for operators now coming from non-SMS services and in
line with the general rapid growth of the mobility market. www.informatm.com
BEA is supporting the demand for Web 2.0 capabilities in the workplace with
additions to its various software suites to integrate the provision of MashUps,
Wikis, and Social Networking style sharing and collaborating capabilities.
www.bea.com
EMC is revising its Symmetrix storage array product together with changes to
Enginuity storage management software to provide a claimed 30% plus
improvement in performance. www.emc.com
About Capgemini and the
Collaborative Business Experience
Capgemini, one of collaboration-focused methods and tools.
the world’s foremost Through commitment to mutual success
providers of Consulting, Technology and the achievement of tangible value,
and Outsourcing services, has a unique we help businesses implement growth
way of working with its clients, called strategies, leverage technology, and thrive
the Collaborative Business Experience. through the power of collaboration.
Backed by over three decades of industry Capgemini employs approximately 75,000
and service experience, the Collaborative people worldwide and reported 2006
Business Experience is designed to global revenues of 7.7 billion euros
help our clients achieve better, faster,
more sustainable results through More information about our services,
seamless access to our network of offices and research is available at
world-leading technology partners and www.capgemini.com.
Andy Mulholland
Global Chief Technology Officer, Capgemini
Tel: +44 (0)207 434 2171
andy.mulholland@capgemini.com
Changing The Game: Monthly Technology Briefs (August 2007) 6
www.capgemini.com/ctoblog