a very late apoc wrap-up

For readers who haven't been following along -- or those I lost during the hiatus -- I spent January through June teaching at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. More specifically, I co-taught the APOC cmgt 534 course with Professor Karen North and Clint Schaff. In addition, I gave a bi-monthly faculty lecture series on virtual worlds. It proved to be more fun -- but substantially more work -- than I expected. For a recap, you can follow APOC label.

The faculty lectures were the hardest to prep for. I generally had a solid turnout of Annenberg faculty, so it was a room of very smart people with lots of great questions. I decided before the first one to create entirely new presentations for each of lectures, which often require a bit of last minute scrambling. I managed to pull it off and the process really helped me to coalesce my own thoughts around virtual worlds, innovation, education, and the future.

The class was work but I really enjoyed learning from my fellow teachers and students. The APOC program brings together an amazing group and I expect we'll be hearing from all of them in the future.

Finally, my copious free time at Annenberg were spent with the Network Culture Project, let by Doug Thomas. The project brings together a great collection of research and ideas around virtual worlds. Going forward I'll remain an adjunct professor connected to the project and depending on where I'm spending my time over the next year, I'm sure I'll be spending at least some time Annenberg. My thanks to Doug, Larry Gross, and Annenberg dean Ernie Wilson who all worked hard to allow me to spend the semester teaching at USC.

been off the grid a bit

Apologies for recent lack of posting. I owe a serious recap of my semester at APOC, but that isn't going to happen right now. I've been enjoying two weeks mostly off the grid, hanging out at home, teaching my daughter to swim, and learning that my wife consistently kicks my ass at Boom Blox. It's been most excellent and not at all conducive to blogging. It has also been the perfect recharge before starting my next gig. Details to come.

apoc week 13 aka the future of virtual worlds

This week was the 7th, and final, of my Annenberg faculty lectures. It was by far the most challenging and most fun of the lectures to put together. A look into the future. My guesses as to where this all is going. While I posted some of my early thoughts on Monday, the full talk goes quite a bit further.

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The trends fit together rather nicely, I think, and expose some of the false dichotomies that currently limit our thinking. Rich, always-on, networked, wearable sensors are a natural extension of bluetooth headsets, combined with cracking the mobile display challenge, mean that divisions between "mirror world" and "fantasy world" or "life logging" and "game" crumble. Accurate location and pointing information in a head-mounted display combined with crowd sourcing and filtering makes augmented, blended, and alternate realities basic parts of communication, collaboration, work, and play.

This is going to happen.

It's only a matter of whether Microsoft, Nokia, Google, or some startup is going to demonstrate it first.

apoc week 12

Jason Kirk, VP for MySpace TV, was our guest. I had never looked at MySpace TV, but was tickled to discover an extensive Top Gear section. It seems like MySpace has an interesting opportunity to explore how best to blend various media forms with user creation, although the fact that MySpace TV is somewhat separate will make that harder. The quality level of submissions is steadily increasing, and Jason spoke about the importance of better production and editing going forward.

(It seems like a very obvious combination would be for them to acquire one of the many web 2.0 collaborative video editing/sharing products out there...)

Consider the ways you could combine MySpace TV and MySpace Celebrity, for example...

They currently are US dominated, with 73 million unique viewers from the US, but are looking to become more international. Jason was very focused on their position as an internet company, not a media company, which makes it easier for them to remain creator focused. It also work well with his philosophy that he wants MySpace TV to be a storytelling platform, using video as the catalyst.

Another interesting -- and obvious in hindsight -- point was that user-generated video was very character driven, given the need to be relatively short. Recognizable, repeatable characters help build out the brand, relate to niches, and are transportable to other parts of MySpace and the Web.

In class, because we were behind on time, rather than the normal short presentations from the students, we bounced around the room playing "tell me one thing I don't know." I found this to be incredibly interesting and gave a glimpse into how good all these students are going to be after they graduate. They all bring such interesting prior experiences and interests that when they start making assertions combining their domain expertise and course material, those assertions are worth listening to. I look forward to visiting in 6 months to see their final projects.

If you are an Web focused company in LA or San Diego, you should really start reaching out to these students, because you'd be lucky to get them.

apoc week 11 (part 2)

Continuing our string of excellent class visitors, Charlie Nooney, the CEO of MobiTV, spoke to APOC last week. He's relatively new to his position, but had a host of interesting comments about the challenges of bringing broadcast television to mobile devices. Big picture is that while half the world's population now has cell phones, virtually none of them are watching television, but carriers are confident this will change. In the last few handset releases, video has gone from 4fps to 20fps, although these advances have required custom clients for every phone. Quality and reach are now high enough for MobiTV to register significant usage hits when live events are breaking, such as Obama's speech on race.

He also had some interesting comments from his earlier career, in particular putting live video advertising into Wal-Mart. Turns out the shopping in Wal-Mart looks a lot like a scavenger hunt, with customers spending an hour on average in the store trying to figure out what's new, what's on sale, and where those items of interest are. Live updates in the store via video -- or, one presumes, eventually on mobile devices -- ended up being great drivers of business, got people through the store faster with more purchases, and were appreciated by the customers. Yet another example of well targeted advertising being seen as a service rather than an ad.

We've all shuddered when thinking about the GPS-enabled cell phone advertising future -- you're near a Starbucks and you get an SMS with a discount coupon -- but the Wal-Mart example shows people want that when they're shopping, so the challenge for mobile innovators is how to present those options when people want them. Given how much I now use iPhone's Google Maps and how often I'm working from Starbucks, I suspect location-based advertising could be pretty useful to me.

apoc week 11 (interlude for bragging)

I know, I go on and on about how brilliant the APOC class is, but sometimes I just have brag on their behalf.


Nonny de la Peña, one the students, has had a pretty good week.

First, on the day of class, she had a story featured in the New York Times. Her article about noisy fish was one of the most emailed NYT articles of the day, and made the national news.

Second, today, her project in Second Life, Virtual Guantánamo Bay, has an extensive write-up in Vanity Fair!

I'm kind of curious what she has in store for Friday.

apoc week 11 (part 1)

So, to be different, I'm going to post these during the lull between faculty seminar and class. Great fun preparing this one, because I've been doing a lot of thinking about how innovation, education, and entrepreneurship intersect and what interesting projects could be built around that intersection.

But more on that in a later post.

First, the faculty seminar slides:

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apoc week 9 (part 2)

So, this is quite late and unfortunately is missing Dmitri's slides for now. However, for completeness, here are the slides from the March 11th Faculty Seminar.

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If there is one takeaway from this talk it is that we are at the earliest stages of virtual world research. Lots of activity and lots of claims, but not a lot of data yet. Fortunately, that is starting to change.

no april fools on the hill

Tomorrow, Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale, along with New Media Consortium's Larry Johnson and IBM's Colin Paris, will be testifying before the House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee, chaired by Representative Ed Markey (D-MA). Both James Au and Adam Reuters have coverage and additional details.

It's exciting to see these hearings finally happening after spending a week in DC last fall laying the groundwork. That trip including an extensive visit with Representative Markey and his staff, plus a separate two hour briefing I gave to multiple House and Senate staffers. Apparently nobody could remember so many staffers sitting in one place for that long, so the interest in virtual worlds was clearly there.

Like my previous trips to the Hill, it was an interesting week of wearing a tie, hurrying up and waiting, and answering a staggeringly wide range of questions. I came away impressed by how intelligent and prepared both Representative Markey and his staffers were. I expect Philip, Larry, and Colin will face challenging and important questions relevant to all of us thinking and working in this space.

On a "the world is a terrifyingly small place"-tangent, my coteacher at APOC, Karen North, used to work in Representative Markey's office and has an endless set of stories backing my impression that he and his team are among the most inquisitive and thoughtful on the Hill. Virtual worlds are fortunate to have their first major Congressional discussion with his committee.

apoc week 10 (part 1)

So, Apoc Week 9 (part 2) is still waiting on some slide issues, so time to skip ahead to week 10. This week focused on regulatory issues around virtual worlds:

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We also had Todd Rosenberg from Userplane give a talk on user acquisition and retention. Userplane provides flash chat and video to community sites and currently is used in over 200,000. His talk very much reinforced topics we've been hitting all year:

• start with niche communities
• usability trumps everything else
• make barriers to entry low

Time to run for my plane home!

apoc week 9 (part 1)

This week was my fourth faculty seminar. Dmitri Williams tag teamed with me and I'll get the slides up with commentary early next week.

Class was exceptionally interesting this week because Janice Rohn of Yellowpages.com was our guest speaker. Now, I have to be honest. I had never been to Yellowpages.com and approached the class with a pretty negative opinion of the Yellow Pages because I haven't used one in a decade yet they keep tossing these huge, useless books on my front door.

Janice changed my opinion. Completely.

Janice is a usability expert who has worked at Stanford, Apple, Sun, World Savings Bank, and Yellowpages.com. She has a spectacularly clear view of the process of usability and ability to convey its importance. She is also a great spokesman for Yellowpages.com. Did you know they were the number one local search site and are owned by AT&T? Me neither. Their site has a very polished iPhone interface that works very well. Who knew?

More generally, she spent about 90 minutes laying out her approach to usability design and answering questions. I can't hope to do it justice -- try to hear her give it sometime -- but among the many interesting points:

• User experience, like all interesting fields, traces its methodological roots back to IBM and Xerox. It has only become a basic part of most businesses since the Web emerged.
• User experience is a mix of the usefulness, learnability, memorability, and efficiency of the activities a user takes part in, all trumped by the satisfaction they feel upon completing a task. For example, the satisfaction at the end of a search task is more important than the time it takes to find information. (I find that balance of particular interest in regards to Second Life)
• She recommended Danny Meyer's "Setting the Table" as a great discussion of user experience. Interesting that I'm not the only one using restaurants as an example.
• In the balance between product presentation and structure, user are more aware of the presentation, but in the long run usability is actually driven by the structure. Again, very salient to virtual world discussions.
• Companies never publish their data, but user experience has the highest impact on retention, sales, and support costs of any product factor.
• In product development, lack of user involvement is the number one driver of missed deadlines and canceled projects. What does this say about game development, generally viewed as the latest and riskiest software projects?
• During user testing, it is critical to remember that people think in terms of solutions, but you are trying to tease out requirements instead.
• For every 100 people who have a bad user experience, 50 will tell 8 to 16 others. Bad experiences are incredibly viral!
• When trying to assess user experience on small projects, decide on target market -- so niche is easier! -- and create user profiles. Find out what is important to those profiles, understand their top requirements and stick to them. Don't try to solve everything! Use your competition to held define the profiles and understand what makes your project unique.

So, lots of good bits of information. Thank you, Janice!

The rest of class was taken up by presentations on our second module, which included viral marketing, legal issues, and investing which I will get to in my next post.

apoc week 8

David Pollock, a managing director at Bear Stearns and member of the Southern California angel investment group Tech Coast Angels, visited the APOC class this week. Interesting guy, thoughtful, and provided a nice overview for the class on the various steps of funding, the differences between friends and family, angels, and VCs, as well as being very open to answering questions about what he looks for and thinks about. I've been fortunate to meet a lot of investors during Second Life's development, as well as a larger group in the time since, but more information is always useful.

He had a few interesting data points and comments:

• He did a study at the Milken Institute that determined that 75% of the value in the US economy is the human capital
• 7 out of 10 venture investments fail completely
• LA area angels and VCs don't want seed funding to be spent on patent protection

More generally, he gave the impression that LA VC scene is a bit more of a sellers market -- ie, more money looking at fewer entrepreneurs -- compared to the Bay Area. Maybe he was just being nice to the students.

As I explore the funding landscape, a couple of trends are jumping out.

First, Y Combinator (and its many copies) will generate a much broader exploration of Web 2.0 consumer services. As the number of available services becomes large, matching users to services will become a very interesting problem. What will take us beyond marketing, search engine optimization, and viral approaches? Will the news sites targeting this space, such as Tech Crunch, Mashable, Paid Content et al, take on a more of an aggregation role? Specialized search to help consumers find the services they want? Or, will service businesses emerge to build custom mashups, maybe using Yahoo Pipes?

Second, there may be a funding gap around the $200 - 400k level. Angels and some VCs, such as Charles River Ventures, are focused on this amount, but both face the challenge of being time consuming at a time in product development where a lost month or two to close funding is a significant percentage of total development time. Especially if the visionary founder is the one most distracted by the funding effort. A funder who really streamlined the process would meaningfully change the performance of their investments, since an extra month or two of progress 9 to 12 months into an idea could be the difference between having launched or not.

What I like about both trends is that solving them well requires a mix of search and reputation, both interesting problems to work on.

apoc week 7

So, after missing class last week due to the Metaverse Flu, I returned to USC for the 7th APOC class and third faculty seminar. Despite glorious weather, a large number of faculty showed up for a look at innovation and how it interacts with virtual worlds. Innovation can be a vexing topic to discuss. Everybody is pro innovation and claims to "know it when they see it", but few have dug in enough to grok what it means to talk about innovation at the edges of social networks, the tensions between organizational structures optimized for ideas versus execution, or the boundaries between innovation, invention, and improvement. Fortunately, this audience was up to the task and while we started slowly, it evolved into a very active discussion.

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The examples from within Second Life demonstrate the general principles we would want to maximize the chances for innovation anywhere. A large, diverse cohort of entrepreneurs exploring design space while cheaply learning from each other. The exciting part for the future is to consider how to build on this approach to innovation within real-world corporations and projects.

Class this week was mostly catch up on their first module papers. The students who hadn't given presentations ended up talking about micro- and niche communities, which is not a surprise given the breadth of communities they've been exposed to in class and through their own careers. What is a surprise is how directly their ideas and challenges echo a piece of reality TV I watched while wiped out by the flu.

I know, I know, reality TV. Shudder. But given the options when fighting off a high fever during the daytime, I found "Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares" to be not only entertaining as hell, but very apropos to anyone thinking about online communities. For those who have not seen the show, it is on BBC America and has the renounced restaurateur going into failing British restaurants, elevating swearing to remarkable heights, and turning them around.

On the surface, it looks like Ramsey is pretty much being a tool, mostly because every third word is bleeped and he ruthlessly identifies weaknesses, but watch for a while and you realize that Ramsey is someone who deeply understands the restaurant business. He gets what the tricks of the trade are and how to use them to best effect. Even better, he has a keen eye for whether employees are playing to their strengths and how to balance skills and weaknesses within the stresses of a restaurant. Finally, he is able to understand the customer -- both the current crop and the customer the restaurant will need to ultimately succeed -- and to provide an experience the customer will happily pay for, tell their friends about, and return to again and again.

Sound like skills you'd need to manage a niche community? Or maybe even a not-so-niche community?

another class

Last night I visited Lauren Gelman's class at Stanford Law School. Lauren is the Executive Director of the Center for Internet and Society. Fun discussion about law, regulation, and virtual worlds. What stood out for me was how positive the class described their experiences in Second Life, especially when compared to what I saw with the APOC students. However, once we dug in a bit more, we discovered was that the law students' initial reaction was quite similar to those of my students. The difference was that the Stanford students were required to visit Second Life several times over a few weeks. They ended up building enough social connections, knowledge of the world, and interest to overcome the initial challenges.

apoc week 5

This week at USC was both my second faculty seminar and 5th APOC class. The students' first significant papers were due and most gave short presentations. For the faculty seminar, since my first talk had generate a fair amount of Second Life-specific interest -- and inspired by James' new book -- I decided to use the history of SL as a backdrop for the themes, behaviors, activities, and topics worthy of further study and exploration. It runs a bit long, but I had a lot of fun doing Google archeology. Sadly, there is very little content from the early Alpha and Beta period, so I hope more of that makes it onto the web.

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The student's module papers were their opportunity to focus on the first four weeks -- online communities, niche communities, virtual worlds, and journalism -- and tug on some thread that had caught their interest. I hope more of them end up online, as they are quite good. Lightning round tour of interesting thoughts from students:

• Until recently, usage time on social networking sites have been declining. Facebook and LinkedIn have still grown. Is this a sign of social network fatigue? Amusingly, Facebook just posted a sharp increase in their usage time, reversing the trend. Political interest perhaps?
• Is anyone using Twitter for non-business use? Outside of the geekosphere, Twitter and microblogging are not yet making an impact, although some use cases do exist. Twitter, in particular, is losing credibility through outages and lack of transparency around usage.
• Even as newspapers attempt to shift to online ads, current trend lines indicate 10 years before online revenue grows enough to replace offline. Trends will get worse, because of continued generational shift away from offline reading.
• Mostly led by the brilliant Jeremy Bailenson's group at Stanford, a ton of research is continuing to support how strongly we connect to our avatar representation. Huge implications for trust, learning, and training online.
• Whyville makes some good steps toward being a strong learning platform, and tries to offer protections for young users.
• What happens when hyperlocal meets collective intelligence? Innovative media organizations are trying to find better ways to balance information flow between citizen journalists and media organizations to generate local media options that never existed before, particularly in more rural areas.

We also had a guest speaker, Gregory Markel, the president of Infuse Creative, a SEO/SEM company. Very bright, compelling guy. Plus, he was a rock star. He did a great job of synopsizing current best practices of search engine optimization. We were chatting afterwards about search in Second Life and he thought the direction our new search was going sounded like good steps, although we agreed there is a rich opportunity to add more behavior data into the search mix.

apoc week 4

For this week, the class had to take a look at virtual worlds. WoW, There.com, and of course Second Life. Everyone who develops 3D worlds requiring a download should have the chance to do this. Given a group of a dozen highly intelligent, motivated, connected, reasonably tech savvy people -- whose grades could conceivable be impacted by whether they successfully joined these worlds -- want to take a guess how many had smooth, positive interactions with these products?

Make your guess smaller. Now divide it by 2.

A minority of folks were able to get them running and wrote some insightful commentary on them in their reflection papers. Best line ever came from Er1N's "I'm Too Sexy for My Real Life" post about Virtual MTV's Laguna Beach:

The TV and now this virtual environment lie about what Orange County is like. Lame. I am fake offended.

During the class discussion, students raised good questions about the challenges of moving into 3D and how different the communities felt to the 2D and text communities of previous weeks. In particular, the change from the partial attention of browsing, IM, and email to the demanads of immersive 3D, although more experienced gamer/virtual worlds folks did point out that you can use SL in a partially attentive way. We also spent a big chunk of class talking about the Microhoo! merger, with some good questions around how Microsoft's culture would interact with Yahoo's.

Finally -- and ironically given that we were talking about search -- Karen pointed us towards one of the funniest sites I've seen in a while -- Whitehouse.org -- which I can't believe I hadn't seen. Makes you think about just how effective social based search could be.

snow!

Thanks to my APOC class, nearly every Monday I fly down to LA. This week was a little different because I had an unexpected consulting opportunity in New York City, so last night I caught the redeye, did 8 hours of meetings, and am now waiting at JFK airport for the flight to LA. I got snowed on, which was an unexpected bonus. Plus, I got to read all the Superbowl coverage in local NY papers -- hey, they beat my Packers, so I had to root for them in the big one!

In a second bonus, the "Yes We Can" video I linked to is playing on CNN right now -- I wonder how many people will see it before tomorrow?

apoc week 3

This was an exciting week at USC for two reasons. I held my first faculty seminar and our class had two great guests. The faculty seminar was Annenberg Dean Ernest Wilson's idea. Since I was going to be down at Annenberg anyway, why not pull together a group of faculty and grad students to dig into where virtual worlds are, identity areas that need further research, explore how the lessons from Second Life could be applied to Annenberg, and generally bounce ideas between a pack of smart, opinionated people. I gave the first talk yesterday and I've posted my slides here on Slide Share.

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It was a successful kick-off meeting and it clarified logical topics for the next several sessions, with full days needed on:

• Usage and behavior in virtual worlds/mmos
• Legal and regulatory issues for virtual worlds
• Education
• National security and public diplomacy
• Connections between virtual worlds, games, and social networks

Giving the talk was also a turning point for me, as it was the first speech I've given not as a Linden Lab employee. Fortunately, other than the occasional pronoun confusion -- must remember to substitute "Linden" and "them" for "we" -- it went well.

For the class, we were joined by Sue Cross and Sarah Nordgren from the Associated Press. Sue is their VP Online and is responsible for all the online services for the AP, including the many news sites that publish AP stories. It was a lively and candid discussion that focused on the impact of citizen journalism, the general painful trends impacted the newspaper business, and in particular how those trends have impacted the AP. I think the AP is in a very interesting position. While newspapers have been diving for the hyperlocal markets in an attempt to be more relevant than broader online sources -- more on that in a moment -- AP attempts to provide a worldwide news bureau that is able to source stories for any paper in the world. Imagine trying to write stories about Iraq that both the Washington Post and Washington Times would publish? And they do this with a relatively small staff. They've also seen an increasing demand for their international coverage as even major papers have continued to cut their newsrooms.

The hyperlocal focus of papers is going to be tough as the web really gears up in this area. Yelp is already well established with Yellowpages.com leveraging its brand as well. In addition, one of the students pointed out Everyblock, which is neat. How cool was it to see the health inspection report of my favorite restaurant in San Francisco? However, while attempting to find the listing again, now I can't find it. So negative points for missing obvious search options.

The students also spent time examining three small sites/communities, Kingdom of Loathing, xkcd, and magnatune. All three demonstrate that you don't need to start big to create a thriving and interesting place on the web, although there were nits. This week, students will be looking into virtual worlds and games. Any bets on which worlds and games get the most time? Which ones install correctly for the most students? Generate the most comments in their reflection papers?

apoc week 2

Last night was the second meeting of our APOC class at USC. We're still tinkering with the format of the class, but a major component is a review of news from the previous week. Appropriately enough, last week we had raised Scrabulous as an online community and business to watch - both because of the clear legal risks and the superb design and execution.
Lo and behold, a week later, Scrabulous is all over the news and we're all on the edge of our seats to see how it plays out.

Part of the homework for week one was to explore various wikis and blogs in order to select the best options for their own blogs and the class wiki. On the wiki side, the usual suspects were explored but two -- wetpaint and pbwiki -- were nearly uniformly selected. Why?

Video tutorials. "When I use it, I don't feel stupid."

How obvious is that? Well, probably not obvious enough to tech geeks, but obvious to everyone else. How much more conversion would difficult products -- like virtual worlds -- get if their front pages had a friendly human showing them how to use them?

Much of the class' work is also moving its way online. Check them out. You'll learn about wikis, a review of the Aspen Institute's report on "Next Generation Media," an overview of tech blogs, and an argument for why Scrabulous should be saved.

I can't wait to hear what the class has to say about virtual worlds and games.

i <3 my class

Last night was the first meeting of Cmgt 534: Introduction to Online Communities. My co-teachers, Professor Karen North and Clint Schaff, got to meet our students for the first time. What an amazing group! I had been generally excited about the idea of teaching but was completely unprepared for the diversity of expertise present in this group. From the Second Life CSI:NY project at CBS to the Institute for the Triple Helix, from a mystery author -- who's book looks very cool -- to Gone Gitmo, this APOC cohort is definitely going to teach me as much as I teach them.

I think the real challenge will be not grabbing them for startup ideas :-)!