OTOinsights

Google's Virtual World Effort Underway?

Since last year, after One to One held the "Get a Second Life" conference in conjunction with MITX, I have agreed with the idea that the next major player to enter the virtual world market (i.e. Second Life) would be Google.  In fact, I am a staunch believer that any major player with a 3-D mapping platform in place (Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, etc.) will be looking to add some type of metaverse/social networking functionality to their efforts in the near future.

Well, it seems as if there is some signal intel generating from the blogsphere regarding a "major Internet company" recruiting beta testers at Arizona State University to experience a new 2d/3d social network/virtual world platform called "My World".

Taking into consideration that the sign-up form only asks for a GMail Account and that ASU is also involved with a program around Google Apps, that idea that "My World" is in fact a Google initiative is not that far out of the question. 

Below are some additional links that may be useful to anyone who finds thi development interesting:

• http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-01-29-n22.html
• http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=4225374
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/24/google-preping-a-second-life-competitor/

Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive

Halo "Believe" Campaign

As anyone who's ever played a videogame can probably tell you, Halo 3's upcoming release is pretty big stuff. Halo 2's first-weekend revenues exceeded any Hollywood movie release of all time, including all the Spider-Mans and Pirates of the Caribbeans, and Halo 3 is expected to be even bigger, with better graphics, more multiplayer options, better online support, and a conclusion to the trilogy's storyline.

Recently Microsoft has kicked off a new "Believe" campaign for the game, which focuses on the "humanity at war" aspect of the series, earlier this week premiering a new Saving-Private-Ryan-esque TV ad with an old man visiting the "Museum of Humanity" and looking at a model of one of the battles as he recounts how he survived. See it here:

On the heels of that, however, Microsoft opens up this website, which -- after certifying that you're old enough to enter -- which allows visitors to take a 3D Flash tour through the same battlefield model the old man was staring at, stopping along the way for 360-degree views and the ability to click on icons buried in the model for more info, screenshots, and screensavers. It looks rather like a real model they built, with cotton used at one point to represent a tank's rocketfire, and plays sad piano music in the background to presumably build up the sense of loss from the war.

It's all very well done and does a fantastic job of drumming up the epic scale of the coming "war". Here's hoping the game itself is as good at creating such a mood.

Anthropomorphism vs. Lifelike

As "mobiusace1" comments on the YouTube video for Wired Magazine's posting of the Japanese robot Keepon dancing to the latest Spoon hit "Don't You Evah", "It amazes me to see that we can like and relate to something so cute and simple when more complex looking robots can't."

It's true, though -- see later in the video when the far more humanoid robots show up, yet don't manage to seem nearly as lifelike as a little yellow blob with two buttons for eyes and one for a nose. Check it out. What exactly is it that makes him more relatable? Just that he's dancing?

Plus, it's just a good tune.

GAPPLE?

I have been jonesing to write a post on a potential Google/Apple merger ever since Google's Erick Schmidt was elected to join Apple's Board of Directors last August.   Does it make sense.....hell yes!

Instead  of me gassing away at this theory, I thought it would be fun to quote the rationalization that was provided on the Fake Steve Jobs Blog (admittedly not a very authoritative source....but damn funny!!!).

"So the idea I guess would be that we'd bring Squirrel Boy onto the board for a while, let him learn all about the company and develop a comfort level, and then at some point Apple becomes the consumer-facing side of the Google cloud operation. The combined company controls search, and controls the utility computing data centers that Google is still secretly building, a virtual supercomputer girding the globe, in effect the world's most powerful single machine which in ten years will be delivering not just email and word processing but also television programming, movies, games and phone calls. Basically, everything. Cable companies? Phone companies? Our kids won't know what they were, unless they look them up on Wikipedia, using GoogleNet.

What does Apple bring to the party? We have the best UI engineers in the world, plus a really slick Unix-based desktop OS that meshes pretty easily with Google's Linux-based back end. (Yeah, our engineers have tinkered together.) Sure our desktop OS has very little market share, but perhaps we boost that by evolving the Mac and selling loads of iPhones and also creating some new kind of home computing appliance or even a Google-branded business appliance that puts a pretty face on all those in-the-cloud Google applications and makes them work together really well and interoperate easily with our iLife suite, which just happens to complement Google's applications.

Meanwhile Microsoft keeps cranking out its bloated, butt-ugly OS and apps, and struggles to figure out search, and struggles to develop its Live stuff, and struggles to fight off Linux in the desktop and server markets, a taxing and exhausting battle that ends up being pointless when customers stop building data centers and instead run everything in Google's cloud, on Google's version of Linux, or Open Solaris, or some OS that Google develops on its own."

Signs of the collaboration are everywhere.  Look at your iPhone (if you do not have one yet, shame on you).  Every internet enabled application (sans Safari) is Googles: Google Maps, Google Search, Google YouTube.  Google has started to highlight Apple based applications for download here and they have recently launched the first Google Mac Blog.

I know that it's probably a long shot....but if there is even a sliver of a hope that there is life beyond Microsoft, I am grabbing on to it!

Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive