Roughly 5000 IBM’s customer support and service team members have been virtually shipped online to 50 different virtual islands on Second Life.
The intention is to bring on board IBM’s potential and existing clients and partners to be able to interact with their staff online. IBM has lifted various staff from its Australian and Asian offices to join 3D game to help boost and improve its customer service and educate the users on its products. Some of the 5000 team members also use other social interaction sites and programs to communicate.
The various islands are used for research, new staff induction, and meetings.
By means of putting them in a 3D social environment, the users are able to communicate by voice, text and read materials available in the game.
IBM claims that about 10,000 visitors have moved to this type of communication channel since it open in May.
General Manager of IBM.com said “In our IBM virtual Business Centre, we’re combining the content from our 2D website with our real IBM sales people, all in an immersive, 3D virtual experience,” “This forms a new, 3D client interaction model, one that we feel will be very effective. It may even be, we believe, the way some of our clients prefer to engage in the future.”
IBM stated that this early adoption of a 3D environment is a risk that it has taken however works as a tool in completing their current website, as opposed to a replacement.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/ibm-expands-virtual-world-presence/2007/08/24/1187462452853.html
A similar concept was applied by Hyro to recruit new staff members – http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/9525/50/
In gamers can visit Hyro’s virtual office to view current career opportunities, submit applications, attend interviews and get more information about the company.
First we had the luxury of using a revolutionary search engine, then they moved to giving us the view of the Earth, further to maps of streets, and now we’re going to be seeing stars.
With an additional add on to the Google Earth application, users can now view the rest of the universe spending endless number of hours browsing through millions of stars and galaxies.
That probably explains why NASA gave Google a portion of their land and access to NASA data a year or two ago.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2005/09/28/google-plans-expansion-on-nasa-grounds
Hopefully this doesn’t kill time that office workers spend in front of their computer desk, or am I being naive? Duh!
Alright Google – so you’ve done Earth, the Moon, Mars, and now the Universe – what’s next?
Facebook as most of us know is a highly booming and addictive social network site.
The site allows for people to communicate with friends they know by adding them to a ‘friend list’ allowing for various interactions from private messaging, a publicly viewable wall of messages, photo galleries, videos, and all sorts of apps that keep pulling users back into the site repeatedly.
The site started off as a university directory in America, but then took off as a worldwide social network.
Australia alone subscribed to an amount of 195,000 by 29th July 2007. 10 days later this figured jumped up to 224,000.
There are various groups on facebook that are dedicated to each company, down to people who just ‘slack off at work’. Users who sit not far from each other at work bypass the use of internal email and use facebook instead for non work related conversations.
While some companies are restricting facebook internally, others are establishing protocols by which these sites, or other social networking sites, can be used.
On an average, an employee would spend an hour each business day on facebook – costing the company roughly $6200 per day.
Multiply that 800,000 business across Australia and you have your $5bn problem.