Early for digital world business opportunities

There are three different levels of business opportunities in digital worlds:

1. In-world economies
Digital world residents are providing products and services to each other. It might seem that there is a lot of opportunity given the substantial economic activity but the range of possibilities is limited. The magnitude of economic activity can be seen in the daily conversions from Linden Dollars or Simoleans to US dollars and the trading volume on eBay and digital currency exchanges.

However the scope of this activity is limited to a set of in-world products and services such as real estate, escort/sexual services and product sales (clothing, hairdos, home furnishings, other objects). The market size will grow as more people subscribe to digital worlds. The market scope will grow if functionality is added to the worlds, also if new user groups come online.

2. Physical world businesses marketing to digital world customers
Physical world companies are starting to go online to market themselves and their services to digital customers. A recent example is Wells Fargo marketing financial services to Gen Y through its entertainment portal Stagecoach Island in Second Life. The digital world customer market is still small, in October 2005, Second Life had 60,000 total worldwide subscribers and presumably fewer who are active on a regular basis.

The cost for physical world companies to establish a digital world presence is minimal in the scope of their overall marketing budget and the brand cachet of being online would likely drive physical world sales. There is also a bit of the land grab idea, companies sensing a great potential future payback for being an early mover in establishing a digital world presence.

Customer avatars could interact with store avatars for pre-shopping and/or discounted sales and companies could assess mini-launches of new products in a low cost way in digital environments.

It is actually surprising that Gen Y commercial brands such as Abercrombie and Fitch, MTV, car companies, etc. do not have digital world presences yet. Part of this can be explained by the still poor visual rendering quality for direct product viewing and buying decisions, but the abstract aspects and customer research in the sales process can occur online now. Another corporate consideration would be the cost and effort required to keep online content fresh.

As every company now has a website, maybe they too will have a digital world presence in the next several years where customers can come to find out about the company and interact with virtual sales staff or other corporate information representatives, for example for a job interview screening or business development partnership meeting. With a corporate presence, companies could have internal meetings in-world as well, an interesting alternative to video conferencing and conference calls.

Further, digital worlds could be an interesting exploration for physical world companies in service delivery. In the financial services example, would clients be more willing/comfortable to discuss the intimate details of their financial situations through their avatars than in person? Would an investment advisor be able to pick up unspoken clues from an avatar meeting? Avatar meetings preserve intimacy and depersonalize interaction in a positive way, maybe making advice more objective.

3. Physical world businesses bring physical world customers in-world
Given the current technical, economic and behavioral inaccessibility of digital worlds (see "Hurdles to faster metaverse deployment") to mainstream consumers, it is too early and too limited for physical world entities to bring their physical world audience online for their products and services. One obvious future application is learning, there are tremendous benefits of using a digital environment as a learning destination, including the ability to collaborate in a non-interruptive multi-channel way. Distance learning platforms such as those designed by market leader eCollege may merge with digital environments.

Conclusion
In-world economies are limited in their current mode but expandable as additional functionality and user groups area added. It is early for physical world brands to move online, but those with the Gen Y focus or aspiration should be establishing presence in the digital world. These are the halcyon digital days where Coke, Lexus and Cingular are not yet plastered around the digital environment, but online merchants have plastered their own advertising around.

It is sad though expected that the current digital worlds have such a heavy component of commercialization. As other entities provide online worlds, perhaps different worlds will become known for different attributes; e.g.; CollabWorld, LearningWorld, PhysicsWorlds to test different laws of physics, etc. It is entirely possible that Second Life and Sims Online will not be around in the next several years, having been superseded by the next metaverse platform(s).

Meme dualism

As with genes, the key role of memes, from the meme's eye view, is to replicate.

With the blogosphere, RSS aggregators/readers and Web 2.0 tools like del.icio.us, technorati and flickr, memes are replicating faster than ever and being sent to thousands of individuals upon each post. However, replicating and sending does not ensure reading. RSS readers, technorati and del.icio.us actively draw information to individuals based on subscriptions and key words requests, but with information overload, it is possible that many posts are never read and that many memes are never spread.

A meme is not spreading successfully unless it is read, by a being with cognizance, currently human, and passed on, possibly with variation and expansion. Memeticists might argue that per Darwinian evolution, the best memes are able to compete successfully for human attention and the ones that go unnoticed and deleted in RSS readers, etc. are not the fittest. Also that the proliferation and replication of many memes is better than less proliferation since there is a greater chance for fit memes to survive and thrive. This assumes the quality filtering the human must do is not detrimental to his/her absorption of fit memes.

Memes are still quite dependent on their symbiosis with the human substrate.

Mind the widening technogap

The fast pace of technology development and proliferation simultaneously creates gaps and provides tools for closing them. China and India will presumably industrialize more quickly and efficiently than Europe and the US did. Other quintessential examples are MIT's Open Course Ware project making free courses available online for anyone who wishes to follow them and the leapfrogging of technology generations such as going straight to cellular phone networks rather than copper wire networks in developing world telephony.

The technogap is changing - previously the digital divide meant developed vs. developing world. Now with broadband access, the Internet and globalized trade and culture, the new digital divide is global technophiles vs. technophobes. The technosavvy creative class has transcended nation states, but their brethren are still entrapped by local challenges.

The technophiles are rocketing to success. Now is a blank slate time like the US in the formative 1800s, those with initiative are seeing and acting on opportunities for advancement, while others are being left far behind and will not even know where they are when they awake because so many aspects of the world will have changed so much. Re-inspiring initiative is the most pressing cause du jour, not providing access to technology.

Privacy is actually increasing

From the usual varied speakers on the first day of the Pop!Tech conference, one macro theme related to privacy emerged, the inevitable decrease of privacy as a result of technological advances.

Even though privacy may be decreasing in some ways, it is increasing in others. It would also seem that politics has diminished more privacy recently than technological advances, however the future may be different.

Even though cams may observe one's every move in the physical world, there is considerably more freedom and anonymity in digital worlds, initially with message boards, email lists, chat rooms and now with 3-D environments like Second Life. While adults might be reticent to don a full-size raccoon suit and frolic in their physical neighborhood or specialized bar, they apparently have no trouble joining twenty of their plushy friends to do so online.

Privacy is a perception. The concept of privacy varies tremendously across cultures, for example Americans quickly disgorging personal details of their lives to chagrined Europeans and the full extended Middle Eastern family getting involved in decisions pertaining to one family member to the surprise of Westerners.

Another flavor of cultural differences in privacy stems from a society's focus on the individual or the group. The West's emphasis on individualism probably emphasizes privacy too, whereas Asian cultures with more emphasis on groups may have a broader perception of privacy.

Personal space norms have also influenced our notion of privacy. In the US, with the last several generations, the amount of space available to each person in each new generation has been expanding. Today's teenager cannot image not having his/her own room whereas one family may have had one room a few generations ago. Interestingly, this trend is already reversing as the densities of cities are increasing. Also interestingly, mental space has been increasing more quickly than physical space is now decreasing. With the Internet, entertainment options and free time available, there is a lot more space for one's mind to go.

Physical world privacy is being diminished and this trend will continue especially with the advent of continual video recognition technology, for example, having the search results and profile of a person walking toward you on the street instantly appear in your heads-up display. One hopes the benefits outweigh the detriments, and simultaneously recognizes the technology's inevitability. In addition, in important thought and behavioral ways, privacy, freedom and anonymity are increasing and will probably exponentiate, particularly with immersive simulations and other digital experiences.

Future of Telecoms

It could finally be time to divest landline telecoms (e.g.; Verizon, SBC, BellSouth) as a core portfolio holding. Their prices have plummeted (down 26%, 14% and 11% respectively) vs. the S&P 500 (down 2%) so far this year. The price declines have made telecoms' 5% dividends look attractive, but dividends cannot make up for the capital depreciation and the long-term fundamentals of the businesses are in jeopardy.

The behemoths re-agglomerated (in stages, the cellular stage being nearly complete now) after being separated in the 1982 antitrust split-up of AT&T. The problem is the shift in future business dynamics in the form of viable substitute services. Cellular revenues and profits have been driving telecom companies for the last few years and propping up the landline business. DSL has not manifested profits.

Landline telecoms were always a portfolio staple because they owned the last mile and the residential customer. For the first time, it actually seems possible that traditional carriers (also called ILECs) can be displaced. Residential customers need voice and data. With cellular phones, Skype, open source PBX Asterisk and other Internet-based telephony services, local landline service can disappear; an unofficial estimate of US VoIP users in 2005 is 2 million. With wireless broadband, currently early stage but with increasingly likely widespread availability in a 5 year timeframe, DSL can be supplanted. Cable internet service currently has a one third market share.

Business customers need voice and data too and have traditionally been customers of large global carriers (IXCs) like AT&T and Sprint. However, AT&T and Spint have also gone the way of the dinosaur with their respective mergers with SBC and Nextel.

The FCC summer 2005 decision that cable internet and DSL are "information services" not "communications services" is backwards and protectionist (carriers are no longer required to interconnect independent service providers; e.g.; SBC could kick Earthlink DSL customers off their lines) but is ultimately probably of little relevance given the overall weak competitive position of traditional carriers and the small revenue and profit percentages DSL provides; telecoms have the more urgent challenge of the complete erosion of the landline voice business. Unless traditional carriers finally peek out of their litigation core competence and start providing wireless broadband (very hard for them to do because it cannibalizes traditional services), they may finally go bankrupt. Maybe rumored new entrants like Google or more likely other telecom carriers offer high-quality cost-effective wireless broadband networks and help the US regain competitive position on the international broadband stage.

Majority of boomers able to experience Power Years?

Long-time gerontology expert Ken Dychtwald in his new book, the Power Years, suggests that aging boomers are not entering retirement but rather beginning their power years. The boomers are powerful because they have more money, experience and wisdom than they have had at any other time in their lives. However, they seem to have fewer opportunities at their finger tips.

Dychtwald rightly suggests that with the increase in life span, 20-30 years of traditional retirement will not be interesting, stimulating or financially possible for most boomers. Instead, they will seek to reinvent themselves in another career or volunteer opportunity.

It may be quite challenging and unpalatable for boomers to step into another career. Attending a class at the local community college will not create real understanding and experience with new fields or familiarity with modern work force culture, values and mindsets. Boomers will start to appear more often in lower-paid service jobs for which they will have to out-compete immigrants and youth.

Even if a boomer completes the significant amount of effort required to be skilled in a field of the day, say, enterprise software programming or flash web design, and bests hiring ageism, starting at entry or low level may seem like an unrewarding match for the boomer's perceived life skills and experience.

It will need to be truly evolved boomers who can accept greatly reduced status, power and remuneration in their new work force roles. Unfortunately financial exigencies will drive behavior but the under-actualization is an unfortunate personal and societal side effect. It would be nice if corporations would adjust to adequately challenge, reward and utilize boomers who are short on recent technical skill sets and long on wisdom and life experience. However in reality, the boomers are not qualified for what the corporations need and it is hardly usual corporate behavior to accommodate under-qualified workers, it is usually the work force not the employer that does the adapting. Even though there will be an increasing shortage of workers, it will probably continue to be met by outsourcing and automated productivity gains.

The point is that there is an opportunity to help boomers (and really anyone) to actualize. Actualize in the sense of using one's unique skills and competences in a context larger than one's self involving creativity and making a real external contribution. It seems that actualization opportunities for boomers decrease upon their leaving the work force and though everyone has the responsibility to actualize (including figuring out how), current societal and institutional venues for boomers to contribute their real capabilities are not obviously present and there is a tremendous opportunity to create them.

Macro and micro science pursuits necessary

Sometimes it seems that advances in macro scientific fields such as astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics and astrobiology are less possible and more costly and time-consuming than advances in micro fields such as semiconductors, nanotech, quantum mechanics and even biotech. About the same number of log scale ratchets occur going up to the macro scale as down to the micro scale but somehow macro scale projects seem more objectionable. Recent failures in the US shuttle program and in rocket launches have also drawn attention to the high cost per project, the risk and that the reward may not be commensurate.

In fact, challenges exist in the pursuit of both macro and micro science and even if there is not a positive ROI on each project, the overall contribution to science and human knowledge of both kinds of projects is important. The competition for funding does not suggest that all funded projects are broadly worthwhile but at least acts as some sort of gating factor, this is even more true in the current era of scarcer funding. Science is turning to philanthropy and other non-grant capital sources more regularly than before.

Next phase tools and methodology breakthroughs are needed at both ends of the spectrum; for example, accelerator technology, with the purpose of creating and detecting some of the smallest particles, is close to the limit for future effectiveness at the $5b current price tag for new accelerators. A new and better means of creating, colliding and observing particles is necessary, perhaps by machine simulation. At the macro end, anything that would compress the time, cost and in-mission reusability of all manner of space missions, particularly telescopes, would be helpful.

Hurdles to faster metaverse deployment

After some extensive exploring around in social MMO (massively multiplayer online) Second Life, it is more clear than ever that metaverse worlds are in Mosaic (e.g.; in the phase of the Internet at the time of the Mosaic browser – the early days). Unfortunately, not Mosaic in the exciting sense of the big pop being around the corner but in the somewhat disheartening way of how early stage the Internet 2.0 metaverse worlds are.

The three main challenges to faster metaverse world deployment are 1) platform inaccessibility, 2) disappointing chatroom culture and 3) myopic video-gaming niche visioning of world creators.

1. Platform inaccessibility to the mainstream

The first hurdle is meeting the system requirements of having a high end processor and graphics card and broadband.

Second, beyond rudimentary walk around and avatar adaptation functionality, there is a steep technical learning curve and economic cost for participating in a meaningful way. Digital graphic design, object creation and programming/scripting skills are necessary to be creative. Like the multi-year wait for tools allowing non-html experts to develop web pages, one or more generations of technical and knowledge-building tools will be required to allow non-expert users to be creative in digital environments.

Third, one must actually spend real money in the world (even to access the environment as with the Sims Online and There; Second Life’s participation jumped when they made an environment login free) to buy and develop real estate and post it in the search engine and teleport people there. Money can also be used to purchase avatar clothing and objects but this robs the participant of creativity.

Platform inaccessibility restricts the community of participants to a small group of technical experts and excludes other individuals, groups and institutions.

2. Disappointing lowest common denominator and homogeneous online culture

Digital environment culture is disappointing in three main ways: behavior, appearance and activities.

First, in some sense, Second Life, the Sims Online and There are no more than their lowest common denominator, manners-free 3-D chatrooms.

The openness of the interactive medium is an important parameter but there is a social code of respect called for in specific venues, such as education classes. Interruptions can be in the form of distracting avatar behavior, irrelevant posts to the chatstream and offensive posts to the chatstream. This could be partially handled by giving the session leader optional control of the chat window and to screen comments so that questions related to the session are included but extraneousness is not included or posted to a secondary chat window.

Of course part of the whole point is to explore what naturally evolves in an online world, and censorship is no more applicable here than in the physical world but the degree of impoliteness is fairly high and suppressive in attracting a wider online audience.

Second, avatar appearance is surprisingly homogenous especially compared to the physical world where we have less control over many of our appearance attributes. Clothing and accoutrements are heterogeneous but shape, size, hair styles and age all display tremendous homogeneity. There are many further social science explorations possible regarding avatars and some early research on avatar construction is coming out, but here the point is citing the homogeneity.

Third, activities and venues are primarily related to commercial activities, sex and gambling. While not unexpected, the narrow slice of activities retards new users. The point is that the digital environment is a platform to develop and launch whatever activities one would like but new community members will start by joining not creating. Sex as a big focus area helps to explain the previously mentioned avatar homogeneity.

3. Myopic niche visioning and video-game culture of world creators

The third challenge to faster metaverse world development is the niche video-gaming mentality of the world creators. The companies running digital worlds, Linden Lab with Second Life, Electronic Arts with the Sims Online and Makena Technologies with There are myopic and under-visioned.

That the wide-ranging potential of their platforms is under-realized by the world developers is clear from the market positioning which narrowly targets video-gamers, skilled software graphics developers and software programmers. Clearly it is necessary to market to early adopters first, but these companies are moving too slow in addressing subsequent target market segments.

Perhaps the most important way the video-game mentality retards news users is in the attitude towards knowledge and skill development. Everything about the user experience has an attitude of anti-help. Instead of the obvious “Second Life for Dummies” move-to-the-mainstream helper, help is scarce and non-intuitive. As with video games, a user needs to use forums, fansites, blogs and talking to other players as a means of learning and getting help even on basic topics. The mentality is to figure it out as you go along, that the fun is in figuring it out. This approach can be followed by the users who prefer this approach; the mainstream takeoff would be speeded by more accessible help.

Video game mentality also means that the scale-down of system resources required (e.g.; open to a wider audience) will likely not be seen as an imperative.

Conclusion

At present, greater than rudimentary participation in the current digital worlds is generally inaccessible and meaningless to the mainstream. The expectation of metaverse platforms is greater than that of a video game or a chatroom; the expectation is that higher forms of human creativity, collaboration and communication can and are occurring in digital environments. Hopefully metaverse worlds will continue to evolve in this direction.

Podcasts facilitate meme transmission

Podcasts, basically non-music audio files, have gone mainstream. There are two main types of podcasts: an audio replay file of content that was delivered (e.g.; lecture, conference) or broadcast (e.g.; radio shows) elsewhere, and content that was created specifically for the podcast alone. It will be interesting to see how many of this second type of podcast will be re-broadcast over radio or other media, though perhaps not many.

A rough history is that podcasting began circa 2003 with IT Conversations and others making conference audio transcripts available. Then a continually growing number of commentators started making daily or weekly podcasts; these are basically individual talk radio shows. Traditional broadcast media then got involved, making radio shows available in audio files and creating specific podcast material like CNET's Podcast Central. As many traditional media companies have now incorporated blogging (though with underwhelming quality) as an imperative delivery format, they have also adopted podcasting; Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and nearly every other major publication now podcast. Now even some corporations have convinced themselves of a podcasting imperative as Forrester's Charlene Li cites Whirlpool's podcasting activity, though this is more likely part of the corporate marketing trend towards more subtle advertising.

As with nearly anything, there is quality dispersion with a small percent of material being relevant and interesting to any particular person, but further underlining the individualized media trend with potentially a different set of podcasts being relevant and interesting to each particular person.

Early podcast aggregators like Podcast411 and Yahoo Podcasts (launched Oct. 2005) are not particularly useful yet because both the specific content and quality of listed podcasts is unknown. Like other sites, Yahoo plans a user-based ranking to help identify popular podcasts but another level of tagging is required to stratify the body of podcasts in more meaningful ways. A more helpful tagging system would identify attributes such as the level of erudition, degree of memes vs. personal blather and depth and breadth of focus of podcasts. At least it is now possible to search audio pod streams per PodScope and Blinkx.

Podcasts have gone mainstream because 1) a large number of people have portable MP3 players devices on which to play podcasts, although some percent of podcasts are still consumed via computer stream, 2) it is relatively easy to subscribe to an ongoing stream of podcasts, 3) podcasts are cool, the tech savvy have to be involved in the phenomenon either or both as creators and listeners and most importantly, 4) podcasts are useful and informative, a fantastic meme transmission technique in this day of the actualization hungry creative class.

Waxing McLuhan-esque for a moment, do we now consume more media since there is more? Probably only to the extent that consumption tools make it easier to consumer more media; there are still the same number of hours in a day. With more radical adjustment of humans and life activity organization, meme consumption will likely increase in the future. Now, it is clear that MP3 players offer more efficient consumption than broadcast radio with the capability to forward through ads and slow portions. Yahoo is apparently offering a setting for speeding up the transmission speed (although largely useless given that only applies in the Internet Explorer browser). Since nearly all podcast material is under Creative Commons licenses, humans or hopefully some more automated mechanism can create MetaCasts, a higher level summary of the key points in a category of podcasts such as a conference, topic area or segment of time. The efficient meme compression in MetaCasts would allow more media to be consumed and other mixing techniques should also be explored.

Vive podcasting and bienvenue aux techniques for increasing the quality identification, compression and transmission of memes via podcasting. Hopefully a similar revolution in video content searchability, accessibility, mixability and creatibility will follow shortly.

Self-help's new name...intelligence amplification

The October Bay Area Future Salon, discussing the Age of Anxiety and the tone of the Intelligence Amplification day at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference are two indicators of the trend to invite into science what was more traditionally narrowly segmented as self-help.

One reason for this is that many approaches to AI require more than just brute computation. Layering emotion onto computation or other ideas are thought to be necessary for creating a true general intelligence. Scientists have therefore had to get more interested in how human emotion functions in order to attempt to reconstruct, catalyze or build AI. Another reason is that futurists, in a panic of possibly not living long enough to upload (that glorious but illusive future, always 20-30 years away) have reappropriated and reshaped self-help materials to help themselves live as long and healthily as possible in case of singularity delay.

There is an argument that self-help has become more science-like but it is not clear that there is actually more science (e.g.; properly conducted experiments with statistical results) in for example the poster child books of the area, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness than in self-help books. The main reason techie readers bit was that both authors are academics. The academic veneer suddenly meant it was acceptable to discuss concepts like happiness (e.g.; the number one human goal) with scientific peers.

With self-help being retitled intelligence amplification, spirituality has also started its slow road from taboo science topic to discussability. Traditional flavors of faith, atheism and new age are being upleved and Starbucksified as boomers explore and techies collaborate for collective consciousness. One example is Steve Case's Revolution, an organization which, though not overtually spiritual, has shades as it seeks to shift power to consumers, bringing more (after all, this is America) choice, control and convenience to [initially] resorts, living and health.

Whatever the reasons and excuses needed, the actions and probable mindset openings that result from incorporating self-help and spiritual ideas cannot help but be positive. There is certainly always opportunity to re-name and re-market concepts as a sign of the changing times.