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Press Release: Serious Games are Effective Learning Solutions for ‘Soft’ and ‘Hard’ Skills From leadership and program management, to emergency evacuation or electrical safety – games, simulations and virtual worlds provide an effective learning experience. Through interactive case studies, attendees at the 2010 Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum at HarrisburgRead More →

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Hollywood celebrities can now get their own virtual islands — at no cost — through Virtual Celebrity Islands, launching at this Sunday’s 2010 MTV Movie Awards. Between 70 and 80 celebrities will be able to get their islands at the Virtual Celebrity Gifting Lounge, sponsored by Los Angeles-based GBK Productions,Read More →

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Hypergrid travelers are more likely to be looking for shopping than any other kind of individual destination, according to May visitor statistics of the Hyperica hypergrid destination directory. The top five pages viewed overall were the full list of hypergrid-enabled grids, the hypergrid-enabled regions on OSgrid, the list of hypergrid-enabledRead More →

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Virtual events platform provider On24 has rolled out a suite of social networking tools this week, including integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. “We have a standard Twitter widget that can be embedded in a virtual event,” said Denise Persson, On24’s chief marketing officer. “You can see the conversation goingRead More →

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The Second Life and OpenSim platform are the best bet for educators, according to a white paper released today by virtual worlds research firm Daden Limited. “It is the only one offering reasonable graphics with in-world building tools, and as a result high levels of flexibility,” wrote author David Burden.Read More →

(Image courtesy Unisfair.)

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Press release: Annual Unisfair Marketing Survey Probes 500 Technology Marketing Professionals on ‘The Future of Tech Marketing’ Data Reveals Lead Generation as Top Priority and Virtual Events as Emerging Marketing Channel Menlo Park, CA – Unisfair, the leader in virtual events and environments, today announced new research that provides aRead More →

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Japan’s PR News, a press release distribution service, will hold free virtual seminars this summer on how to use Twitter and other social media for marketing and promotion, the company announced today (English translation here.) The seminars will be conducted in a virtual world — OpenSim — and accessed viaRead More →

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Press Release: Ford Recruits Virtual Soldier to Boost Quality; Santos Feels the Same Strains That Humans Do Santos was created for the U.S. Department of Defense as part of the Virtual Soldier Research program at the University of Iowa; the military employs Santos to find ways to ease the physicalRead More →

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Press Release: Enterprise Human Capital Management Goes 3-D RWD Technologies, LLC and ProtonMedia forge partnership to deliver world’s first 3-D immersive workplace for human capital management BALTIMORE & LANSDALE, Pa. — RWD Technologies, LLC , a global company that develops and implements human and organizational performance solutions, and ProtonMedia, theRead More →

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Developers released a new version of OpenSim this week, with support for group management of land, the ability to offer teleports to other avatars, and other minor improvements and bug fixes. Many OpenSim users would already have seen these features on OSGrid, the Diva Distro, and other grids running theRead More →

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Altadyn, the developer of 3DXplore, a Web-based virtual world platform, announced this week that its immersive worlds can now run in the cloud, allowing users to scale up conferences quickly to handle thousands of simultaneous attendees. Today, the company also integrated a voice platform into its system. Previously, customers hadRead More →

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There are three ways in which a particular platform or service can be considered to be “open.” One is whether it runs on multiple systems, or is locked into a system from one particular vendor. For example, Apple’s Leonard operating system only runs on Apple computers. The Windows operating systems,Read More →

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Press Release: U.S. Department of Agriculture Awards Virtual World Contract to SAIC Company to Provide Enterprise Grade Software Platform OLIVE to Help Build and Host 3D Virtual Worlds MCLEAN, Va. — Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) today announced it has been awarded a new prime contract by the U.S. DepartmentRead More →

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Press Release: The Virtual World Web Network Reaches 25,000 Independently Developed Virtual Worlds Webmasters Become ‘Worldmasters’ in Internet’s Next Generation VANCOUVER, B.C. – Virtual world developer Utherverse Digital Inc. today announced that the 25,000th virtual world was created in the Virtual World Web (VWW), a network of independently developed, interconnectedRead More →

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Press Release: USDA Awards Contract for Teleplace as a vGov Virtual World Platform Teleplace to Provide Secure Virtual World Environment for Federal Government Agencies REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Teleplace, Inc., a leading provider of trusted collaboration solutions, today announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded a contract forRead More →

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The world’s top public OpenSim-based grids slowed their growth rate this month, possibly due to the growing popularity of standalone grids. As of today, the top 40 grids totaled 11,240 regions, up 7.2 percent from 10,588 regions in mid-April. However, half of that growth was due to ongoing scalability testingRead More →

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Second Life, Openism, Blue Mars, 3D Explorer.  If these mean nothing to you today, they certainly will in future.  They are all example of Virtual Worlds and this evening in Manchester I had the job of Chairing a really interesting mixed reality debate called The Death of Distance.  Around 800MRead More →

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These days, we are experiencing a period of extraordinary growth in the Virtual Events space. Let’s face it, air travel isn’t getting any easier as long security lines, service reductions and flight delays take their toll on traveling executives. Recent pandemics from bird to swine flu prompted companies to implementRead More →

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Today, Web space is free. Almost. You can get free accounts for blogs on Blogger.com and WordPress.com — among many others. And storage space is so cheap that some Web hosts offer virtually unlimited storage. At Dreamhost, for example, you can add new sites to your hosting package for noRead More →

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Virtual events platform provider InXpo rolled out a suite of social networking features last week – including built-in support for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – as well as a social gaming platform. InXpo is a “pseudo 3D” virtual meeting platform. InXpo’s Web-based virtual meeting platform combines multimedia – video, presentationsRead More →

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Press Release: 3Di, Inc.’s 3D Virtual World Technology Powers Language Learning Service Offered by NTT Learning Systems and ALC Press “Virtual English Conversation Class” Service Opens, Enabling Avatar-Based Learning in 3D Virtual World 3Di, Inc. , which develops and offers 3D Internet solutions, announces the deployment of its 3Di OpenSimRead More →

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Press Release: Cisco Virtual and Hybrid Events Take Top Honors with Grand Ex Award Cisco Sweeps Global Event Awards Program With Virtual Events in Two Categories and Takes Top Honors Among All Global Brands with Grand Ex Award. Chicago, IL – May 5, 2010 – Virtual Events emerged as aRead More →

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Press Release: Kaplan EduNeering and ProtonMedia Announce Alliance Partnership to combine Kaplan’s online compliance and knowledge solutions with ProtonMedia’s leading 3-D virtual environment, ProtoSphere, to help life sciences companies speed collaborative decision-making while meeting regulatory requirements PRINCETON, N.J. & LANSDALE, Pa. — Kaplan EduNeering, a leading provider of compliance andRead More →

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Today, Hypergrid Business officially launches the Hyperica directory of hypergrid regions, covering more than 200 destinations on 47 different grids. “We’re seeing the beginning of the 3D Web,” said Hypergrid Business editor Maria Korolov. OpenSim, though still considered “alpha” software by core developers, became stable enough for non-mission-critical applications lastRead More →

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Second Life has rolled out some great features recently, such as media-on-a-prim, which are great for business. And chief product officer  Tom Hale’s promise of mesh imports in the second quarter of this year is also great news. As a business user, both of these features promise to be veryRead More →

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Virtual worlds have been offered up in recent weeks as alternatives to physical events because they are disaster-proof. No volcano or tsunami can take down the whole Internet. And virtual events are particularly budget-friendly during that other kind of recent disaster — a financial crisis. But virtual worlds are proneRead More →

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The owner of the Aesthetica sim — a rich and detailed artistic build created over the course of several months — learned on Monday that his region was gone for good. And five months of scheduled nightly backups? Never happened. What happened to his region could happen to other regionRead More →

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Virtual worlds run by non-profit organizations focus on providing a low-cost platform for other non-profits and individuals. To many in the non-profit sector, in-world economies belong on for-profit grids like Second Life and Blue Mars. However, some non-profits running grids on the OpenSim platform are beginning to embrace in-grid paymentsRead More →

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Early mainstream adoption of enterprise immersive software will most probably not take place in 2013 because of issues regarding the ease of use and the scalability of those immersive environments. That is what Erica Driver, a co-founder and principal at ThinkBalm, told me. I interviewed Erica about OpenSim and theRead More →

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Press Release: ProtonMedia Named “Cool Vendor in the High-Performance Workplace” by Leading Analyst Firm Vendors selected for the “Cool Vendor” report are Innovative, Impactful, and Intriguing LANSDALE, Pa. —ProtonMedia, the developer of the ProtoSphere virtual collaboration environment for the high-performance workplace, announced today that it has been included in theRead More →

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Press Release: UK Company wins U.S. Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge Birmingham, UK — UK Virtual Worlds solution provider Daden Limited has won first place and second place prize respectively in two categories of this years inaugural U.S. Federal Government’s Virtual World Challenge (FVWC). Birmingham-based Daden entered both its PIVOTE andRead More →

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Two more grids have switched to the recently-released hypergrid-enabled OMC (Open Metaverse Currency) from Virwox, FrancoGrid and Avatar Hangout, bringing the total number of grids using the currency to six. The other four grids supporting the currency are Grid4Us, GermanGrid, OpenNeuland, and WilderWesten. Between them, the six grids total overRead More →

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Press Release: Murrow Center 3D Newsroom Debuts in Second Life A Shared Media Experience and Citizen Journalist Training Center Sponsored by the McCormick Foundation PULLMAN, Wash. – The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University and the McCormick Foundation are partnering for the creation of the MurrowRead More →

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If you’re a business manager considering rolling out virtual workspaces, you may think that an avatar identity is nothing more than yet another user account, the login credentials for a particular piece of virtual world software. At second look, you might think that avatar identities are closer to email addresses.Read More →

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The world’s top 40 OpenSim-based grids gained 1,055 regions over the past month, from 9,533 to 10,588, an increase of more than 11 percent. By comparison, Second Life grew just 1.4 percent during the same time period, according to data from Grid Survey. As usual, OSGrid was the single biggestRead More →

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There are few things worse than making a large investment in technology only to find out a couple of years later that the rest of the world has decided to go in a different direction. Not only do you now have to put in the time and money to ripRead More →

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Press Release: Virtual Runway Helps Fashion Designers Accelerate Their Sales and Marketing Fashion Research Institute launches immersive, interactive runway show for apparel industry NEW YORK —  This month, fashion leaps forward at warp speed as Fashion Research Institute launches Virtual Runwayâ„¢, a 24/7 on-demand 3D runway show service for fashionRead More →

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Former Linden staffer Meadhbh Hamrick has vowed to continue her fight for virtual worlds interoperability. However, the commitment on the part of Linden Research is unclear, and the project is currently being overshadowed by the success of the hypergrid, an alternative method of bridging worlds. Hamrick — also known asRead More →

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Last week, I surveyed the state of OpenSim commerce, in the column Business in OpenSim. This included the beginnings of in-world retail shops, OpenSim hosting providers, and design and development services. These are new industries, only really born last year, when OpenSim became stable enough for deployment and hypergrid-enabled. ButRead More →

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Educators in primary schools, colleges, and other institutions looking for lower costs, better controls, and no age restrictions are considering switching from Second Life to its open source alternative, the OpenSim virtual world server platform. The OpenSim server software can be used to power an entire public grid, or aRead More →

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[Update: You can browse all hypergrid-enabled public OpenSim grids with Hyperica, the directory of hypergrid destinations. Directory indexes more than 100 shopping and freebie store locations.] Is it too early to start doing business in OpenSim? We are certainly not in an age of v-commerce, though we can see itRead More →

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Clever Zebra is about to roll out its Campus toolset for educators in OpenSim, company president Nick Wilson tells Hypergrid Business, with work already underway for the first beta customers. OpenSim is an open source platform for creating and serving virtual worlds, which uses the same viewers and interface asRead More →

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Press Release: The Hypergrid Worlds directory of hypergrid-enabled destinations indexes 100th regions yesterday The Hypergrid Worlds directory of hypergrid-enabled destinations has indexed its 100th regions yesterday. The directory, a service of Hypergrid Business, is a hierarchical, categorized listing of sites accessible via hypergrid teleport in more than 30 worlds runningRead More →

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The Internet is a wide, and anonymous place. For me, it’s always a slight shock when I comment on someone’s blog post — and they comment back, or send me a personal “thank you” email.  Except for these blogs, most Websites are run by anonymous Web administrators, and when I’mRead More →

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Press Release: Immersive Education 2010 Summit Attendees to Receive $2,500 in Permanent Virtual World Land BOSTON, Mass. – The Immersive Education Initiative today revealed that it will provide permanent virtual world land for one year to every school and non-profit organization that has at least one teacher, administrator, or studentRead More →

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Back in the early days of Internet technology it was feasible to have “security by obscurity” — putting up a document on the Internet, say, but making the address so complicated that nobody would be likely to stumble upon it by accident. That was in the days before decent searchRead More →

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One of the common complaints enterprises have about OpenSim is that if they set up a private grid, they’ll have to create all the content from scratch. Employees will have to create their own hair, fashionistas will have to make their own shoes, teachers will have to create their ownRead More →