THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

So, in a week or two, we’ll announce our first Chinese client. What we’re doing for them will be a bit of a surprise to a small subset of US intelligentsia and to some fanbases. Don’t panic–it’s nothing illegal. It’ll just be interesting when we announce this “first.”

In the meantime, we’ve been coordinating with Ken Brady, Our Man in Asia, via Second Life and Second Talk. It’s surprisingly effective, even given the connection from Shanghai. The only problem is the time difference. Even the wonders of Second Life can’t change that.

But.

Stephenson said that his metaverse didn’t take off until there were reliable expressional and gestural cues in-world, and I totally believe this. Second Life and Skype are, in terms of you-are-there bandwidth, better than WebEx or Netmeeting (and free), but we have a long way to go before we can do enterprise-level business deals within Second Life. No problem–just more to work on!

As you probably know, Centric’s in Second Life. What you might not know is how deeply we’re involved in the world. As one of a handful of full-service Second Life developers, we’ve added new clients, new sponsors, and new international initiatives.

But today, let’s announce Second Talk.

Second Talk brings free, easily accessible voice chat to Second Life. Wear a Second Talk headset and it’ll automatically scan for other users in the area, let you choose one or more people to talk to, and connect you via Skype.

No, it’s not the magical fully-integrated voice application we’re all working towards, but it’s a useful enhancement to Second Life. Now, you can drop into a club and see instantly who wants to talk. Hand our Second Talk headsets at a business meeting and get things done faster.

Second Talk isn’t tied to a base station, and, since it uses Skype, it’s completely free to use. We’re starting out with a free public beta, so anyone who wants to try it out can drop into our office and pick up their own headsets.

Get Second Talk here

So yes, that’s the theme of the day. Enhancing Second Life. Second Talk is a start–and a work in progress. Now that the client is open source, we’ll be working on that angle, too.

Watch this space for more Second Life enhancements–coming soon!

More information on Second Talk is available at www.secondtalk.com.

Well, maybe not something so grandiose. But it’s something I’m seeing more and more. Like some b-movie monster, video is eating everything in its path.

Forget the traditional brochure–do a video! Drop the Powerpoint bullets for a quick movie! Drop the web text for an instructional video! Turn your blog into a vlog! Forget POP shelf-talkers–put in screens!

And you know what? It’s not surprising. Today, once you have a video, you can throw it up on your YouTube channel, run that through your vlog or website, and get in front of 50 million viewers–without even paying for the bandwidth!

“But . . . wait a minute,” you’re saying. “Video still ain’t cheap. Last time I shot a commercial, I paid $50K (or $150K, or $500K).”

Yeah. Of course. Do professional production, throw a bunch of CGI at it, and you can end up with some really big price tags. But if we’re talking video that’s designed to be shown on a vlog, you don’t need to break the bank.

Consider Wineass. We produce 10-15 minutes a week of finished video, three episodes a week. Our total equipment cash outlay was less than $5,000. Filming of 6 episodes takes 2 hours with 3 people. Editing is the time-consuming part–10 to 20 hours per 6 episodes.

But, for that 16-26 hours of work, we have 6 finished podcasts. At agency rates, that’s less than $5,000–or about $800 per video. And that’s for a heavily produced, heavily edited video podcast.

So what does this mean to you?

It means that for less than the cost of an ad placement in a trade mag, you can have a 4x/month video podcast.

It means that it pays to get your executives, your marketing people, your engineers, your people on the shop floor in front of the camera. You have in-house talent. You have people who would love to be your face. It’s time to discover them.

It means that 50,000,000 YouTube viewers are only a tiny investment away.

What are you waiting for?