If you don’t already know Secondlife is one of the most popular Virtual worlds around. Lots of others are getting on the bandwagon but Secondlife was the first and is undoubtedly the most popular for now. There is also talk of technologies which will allow the merging of online virtual worlds in the future but why do you care? I’ll tell you why! The very same reason that this world turns : Money! More and more companies are utilising these virtual worlds to connect to new customers across a great geological divide (but not a virtual one) and using the environment for virtual conferences and meetings.  Simple really, as the following case study explains, if you reduce the cost of a conference by 150 plane tickets and building hire etc.. are you not going to save both travel time and money?

The following article was writtenby Amanda Linden on 22-Jun-2009 17:13:03

“You’ve been planning a conference with 150 of your colleagues for months and then—the whammy hits. It’s canceled due to budgetary cutbacks on travel. What to do?!  Well, increasingly, companies like IBM, Schneider Electric, and now Intel are holding their events in Second Life.

When Intel’s bi-annual Embedded Channel Conference (ECC) was canceled, the conference organizers sought a less expensive means to deliver the same content and level of interaction to 150 employees and business partners.  Encouraged by the work other groups at Intel were already conducting in Second Life, ECC organizers unanimously decided to execute their conference in the virtual world.  The virtual ECC conference (vECC) saved Intel $265,000 of the $300,000 budget for the real world event that they cancelled–not including saved travel expenses.  The vECC was executed the pilot event using The Immersive Workspaces™ solution by Rivers Run Red, a virtual world meeting and collaboration product developed exclusively for Linden Lab–for both Second Life and private networks–that hosted numerous keynote presentations, live product demos, and social networking.

That’s the good news, but the conference wasn’t without its set of challenges—as is true with any emerging collaboration technology. In this new joint Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red case study, Intel shares many lessons learned. Despite the short timeline of just three-weeks to organize the entire inworld conference that caused many of these issues, here are some tips that everyone can use:
-    Work directly with the corporate IT department early in the early planning stages to assess desktop system requirements, firewall portals, and software compatibilities.
-    Make sure that all participants are set up to run Second Life smoothly from their computer and at the location that they will be using during the event.
-    Pre-event training is key. The more prepared participants are for inworld events, the greater the focus will be on content instead of accidentally bumping other avatars or learning how to communicate.

“We learned so much from this first virtual conference – our next one will be much better,” said Elaine Cook, the Events Manager for Intel’s ECC and added that more time will be spent in pre-production in the future. In fact, Intel is committed to virtual conferences and now understands the best practices to produce an event in Second Life. And, now you do, too!

To download the full case, please click here. We are also translating this case into French, German, and Japanese so look for them on the Second Life Grid site soon.”

What do you think? Does your company already utilise virtual world technologies? I’d love to hear your comments.