computers should be less friendly

What do you do when you can’t make it to a conference because your boss won’t pay or you can’t find the time?  Well, if you are a SAP professional you can attend bits of the conference in Second Life.  SAP has began an interesting experiment to broadcast parts of the their developer conference, TechEd, in Second Life.

This is the “Community Clubhouse” where a session is going on with people in their first life in Las Vegas and two people at SAP’s office in Second Life.  These two people couldn’t make it to the conference so they attended a roundtable style discussion about business KPIs from the comfort of their offices in Palo Alto and Germany.  I’m still not 100% sold on Second Life and it’s use in business but, what I do believe is at that it can greatly increase your communication bandwidth.  Since Linden added the ability to stream audio in it has moved far beyond just a phone call and stepped ahead of video conferencing on the communication bandwidth scale.   The idea of have a “physical” person moving around immerses you in the conversation much more then video conferencing can.  This side benefits of this immersion should be pretty obvious for both conferences and large multi-nationals to allow better collaboration among distributed teams.

Also if you are interested in what has already happened check out Craig Cmehil’s uStream channel to watch all the sessions that were live streamed yesterday from Community Day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 2:48 pm and is filed under et alii. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.