The Innovation Blog by Pranab Sharma » ibm

IBM Virtual Universe Community – Guildmaster

Pranab — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:45:20 +0000

In recent news, I have been co-elected IBM’s Virtual Universe Community as it Guildmaster. Holly Stewart and I will lead this community of over 5000+ IBMers.

Formed in 2006, previous guildmasters have been:
* Kevin Aires
* Dave Kamalsky
* Brian House

The VUC as it is known was the breeding ground for the formation of the the Digital Convergence EBO (Emerging Business Opportunity) outfit in IBM Research in late 2006.

This should be a very challenging and interesting job !!

Presentation for IBM Software Universe 2007

Pranab — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:13:12 +0000

I uploaded the presentation that I made at the IBM Software Universe 2007 at the Renaissance Convention Center, Mumbai.

My presentation was part of Track B – Emerging Technologies Track. The session titled “Metaverses – Second Life for Business, Technology & Social Networks”.

It is embedded here:

The link to presentation is uploaded on Slide Share here.

Updates

Pranab — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:36:32 +0000

I finally figured out the way to upgrade my blog to a website. The blog can now be accessed at http://pranabsharma.com . I am currently trying to integrate email onto the website by implementing a very interesting functionality of WordPress integrated with Google Apps.

Both, the integration from the blog to the domain, and Google Apps integration has been smooth and seamless.

Been a bit rusty with blogging lately, am using a great tool called ScribeFire recommended by Luis on Twitter. However, I have been closely following several blogs and books and plan to be writing about them soon.

Meanwhile, I present at the IBM Software Universe 2007 at the Renaissance Convention Center in Mumbai. My session is titled “Metaverses – Second life for Business, Technology & Social Networks”. Currently working on my presentation and I’ll put it up on Slideshare soon enough.

“One Year of Second Life” – Why I still plan to be in Second Life!

Pranab — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:27:21 +0000

Today, I celebrate my (Second Life avatar’s) Rez Day. I entered Second Life last year on August 21, 2006. I am called Locutus Qi in this space. The name is inspired from my Star Trek fanaticism about the Borg. Locutus was the (avatar) name of Capt. Jean Luc Picard when he was captured by the Borg.

I remember going to Prithwis Da for learning about Virtual Worlds. I remember initially thinking this is so close to Counter Strike & Age of Empires that I used to play avidly in my college days in a multi-player environment. It was interesting to know these 3D environments and I could begin to see how they could be leveraged to business as well. Post that, I kept exploring Second Life and what it had to offer, when finally in December, when I was part of the Sears Second Life Build Team where I began more mainstream work. Henceforth, I have presented several papers / countless presentations around how Virtual Worlds can be leveraged for Business. And importantly, I worked on getting the first projects for IBM India in this space and currently manage several internal and external projects for IBM in this space of Virtual Worlds.
Well, recently a lot of the weaknesses of Second Life have been discussed in the various forums like Time naming it the Worst (#5) website. Also an old post by Eric Kintz about he still needs to be convinced about the use of Second Life. Well, I feel we have truly started to see the Trough of Disillusionment for this technology. We saw Second Life miraculously increase from 800,000 to 8 million registered users (whether that is for people who registered or not, is a topic of much debate. Giff Constable wrote an interesting article on that). And more recently the banning of Second life gambling joints by Linden Labs and the subsequent bankruptcy of Ginko bank. Well despite all this, Second Life as a world has taken leaps around Evangelizing what Virtual Worlds can be and should be in this space (interesting thoughts by Prokofy Neva & Gwyneth Llewelyn on LL’s actual business).

I feel SL showed how user-generated content could be so much in quantity and quality. It gave people – avatars to dress and design content around how they feel; established a virtual economy that exchanges USD 1.5+ million a day. They might not be the first in either of these but have been a compulsive case of what these concepts together with a 3D environment could do to the Internet. Suddenly the chip companies have an application to feed all the muscle they can pump into their processors, graphics cards, etc. The high amount of bandwidth is suddenly being channelized to this virtual environment which consumes it with ease and provides a compelling example. Is this the application that fuels the Information Revolution further ?

Well one clear thing, Second life does start to touch the surface and the broad idea of things to come, how corporates, individuals & the communities build these concepts further is something that remains to be seen…

Managing the Matrix

Pranab — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:50:52 +0000

Well, I work for IBM and one thing about IBM is structures and the matrix and the vast network of folks that are connected together. I remember Susan Curry saying in one of the Biztech meets about how she advises everyone to include “managing the IBM matrix” as a key point in our CVs. I just learnt today that there has been a major restructuring and that many folks’ managers have been/are going to be changed. Now IBM is a manager driven company and the manager or rather your people manager is the only clear connection you have in this matrix.

Well all I can say is that despite the matrix its this seemingly unstructured is actually in my opinion the true core of networking that leads to discussions, thoughts and collaboration across the board. There have been so many times I have pinged folks on Sametime and made great connections. I like it !