On China and Meetings
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!
