Let me start off by apologizing for the lack of posts. Things really are a bit crazy on the meatspace side of the screen. I’m not scouring the net right now and so instead I find myself peeking in on a couple of good posts elsewhere. That can be a good thing as I’m following some cool comments that I might have otherwise missed.

One such post is over on Clickable Culture where Tony has – amidst all the recent news of marketing efforts making their way into Second Life – called out some of the problems with the latest bandwagon jumping. Go read both his post “Marketing Mistakes in ‘Second Life'” (Link) and the comments. Well worth the few minutes.

Seems like Nokia is going after some Chinese manufacturers alledgedly ripping off their design according to an article over on TMCNet.com (Link). This isn’t anything new of course. Everyone knows that design rip-offs are everywhere. It wasn’t long ago that news an entire corporation was pirated made the rounds and I mentioned it here (reLink). I raise it again only because there were a couple of recent articles that discuss the potential effects.

Yahoo News carried an AP story, “Piracy hurting China’s own industries” (Link), detailing how Chinese software developers are being hurt by their fellow countrymen. From the article:

Kingsoft Corp.’s English-Chinese dictionary program is used on most of China’s 60 million PCs. That’s the good news. The bad news: Kingsoft doesn’t make any money from it, because 90 percent of those copies are pirated.

One by one, the Beijing-based software maker has seen its sales of such popular products destroyed after black market producers flooded the market with cheap copies.
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I caught this over on the Core77 forum a couple weeks back: UGS NX for Macintosh (Link). What makes that bit of news of interest to me is 1) there is, in most people’s opinion, no truly worthwhile CAD application for the Mac, 2) NX is about the most capable CAD application you’ll find on any machine and 3) take a good look at who’s behind this – UGS.

For those who haven’t followed along, UGS is the company I’d credit with currently being the most aggressive PLM developer in the world. And PLM is, in my opinion, a big part of the Metaverse future.

One of the links in that forum post took me over to a very cool blog called WorldCAD Access, which provided a link to something else of interest: a post over on Think Secret (Link). From that post:

UGS Corp. announced that it will deliver a Mac OS X version of NX and Teamcenter, marking the first product lifecycle management (PLM) software for Mac users. While the news is primarily of import only to companies that need such a solution which touches the “full range of development processes in product design, manufacturing and simulation,” according to the company’s Web site ”Apple played an unusual role in ensuring the product’s arrival on the Mac.
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Seems like a long time ago now, but about a week ago I received word from Paul Hemp, senior editor at the Harvard Business Review, informing me of a virtual discussion scheduled to take place inside Second Life. Some of you might recall Mr. Hemp’s recent article, “Avatar-Based Marketing”, about which I posted last month (reLink). Anyway, I made some time to attend and at least several other bloggers have since covered the discussion – most notably Ilya Vedrashko over on the MIT Advertising Lab/Brands in Games blogs (Link), and Wagner James Au over on the New World Notes blog (Link).

A couple of things I’d say at this late point is that the transcripts I’ve read aren’t actually complete; they’ve been cleaned up and parts have been removed. That’s the problem with texting inside a simulation: not everyone knows to what it is that someone else might be referring when a comment is made out of order (and most are). I suspect the raw log is posted somewhere, but I didn’t read everything all that closely since I was at the thing and don’t need the rehash. The bigger issue, however, is communication. And I mean communication on a much broader scale. Think internationally; think culturally. In a virtual world that spans global borders, communication on a variety of levels – including marketing – becomes a different and more complex endeavor.
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I probably could have simply titled this one “Wired. Regina.” and most people would know that this is an entry linking back to a Wired News story about cybersex (Link). However, I’ve noticed a number of visitors that I’ve not had before, so I have to expect that not everyone who stops here is familiar with Regina Lynn’s articles.

This latest one by my favorite (okay … only) cybersex reporter isn’t as sinsational as some earlier ones; it’s more about the practical issues of developing for that particular brand of entertainment and those particular users. For anyone into virtual worlds, however, it’s worth the read. So head over and give it a few minutes. Personally I really like the fact that these are virtual worlds being developed and maintained by individuals or small teams. Very niche. And that’s also very much a focus of my interests.