Croquet 2 Play

Google just released a free versions of the Sketch-Up 3D modeling tool they recently acquired. Erick Schonfeld asks:

Is this an attempt to give Google Earth a Second Life by turning it into a virtual world where visitors can create their own buildings, vehicles, and other objects or just roam around?

Business 2.0

Perhaps, but the thing that’s driving SL is ownership of content which is awkward for Google. One thing is for sure it looks smooth and a lot of people will find it difficult to see the value in Croquet until the easy content creation tools allow developers to look as good as SL and GoogleEarth/SketchUp. Although Croquet is just a much more potent architecture for doing this kind of stuff we’ve got to find ways to make clear the value.

Want to know what’ll be happening in the metaverse in a decade’s time? A group of metaversal thinkers (myself included) will get together in California next month to start hacking out their vision of what might come to pass. The Metaverse Roadmap is a project of the Acceleration Studies Foundation that will seek to come up with “a 10-year scenario, possibility, and challenge document for the development of the 3D Web” and related 3pointD technologies (including massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds like Second Life, social software and Web 2.0 apps, among other things). [Press release.] It promises to be a heady event, with participants including Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Esther Dyson, Randy Farmer of Yahoo! and John Hanke of Google Earth, among others.

Turn Left At The Metaverse

What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When your avatar becomes your blog, your desktop, and your online agent?
Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web

Increasingly, we have it within our reach to become a movement of future-makers.
What are the available tools for making better futures?

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Future-making

CNN.com - Senators to push for $100 gas rebate checks - Apr 27, 2006
Senators to push for $100 gas rebate checks
Under proposal, every U.S. taxpayer would get one

Do they really think people will think everything’s ok just because they get a few refills? Eventually,  When live simulation/holodeck environments like Croquet are the norm, we’ll be able to have truely informed citizens. Folks will be able to ask questions like “Where are the calculations that led to the $100 figure?” and “How many hours did the Senators and their staffs bill us for in the process?(please include the spreadsheet and 3D graph)” RSS has had a huge social and financial impact, Croquet, Second Life et al will amplify that.

This post isn’t about games but rather the business of open source.

Every open-source program companies download, investors say, marks one step closer to changing forever the applications business long dominated by the likes of SAP (SAP ), Oracle (ORCL ), and Microsoft (MSFT ). Software that companies once paid millions for is now available for free via the Internet. Harried tech managers can simply download an operating system or application and play with it …
…  “We were looking at these open-source component companies like MySQL and JBoss, and every one of these things is just a little piece of a big puzzle,” says Lane. “We said, ‘Why don’t we play the whole puzzle?’”

Open Source: Now It’s an Ecosystem

Larry Ellison wants to play with a full stack, but he doesn’t want to pay a premium price for it:

I’m not gong to spend $5bn, or $6bn, for something that can just be so completely wiped off the map.  … So its all very interesting. You can build a sustainable business [in open source], you just can’t charge a lot for it. There’s brand value – there’s real brand – there’s people, and that’s it.

Financial Times Interview with Larry Ellison

Good food for thought for folks wondering about the economics of developing with the Croquet SDK. We’ll be much better off IMO with a thousand small businesses that are “highly profitable making $15 million year in and year out ” than than a few multi-billion companies dominating the ecosystem. We still have some large predators in our physical ecosystem, but they’re not dinosaurs.

Virtual worlds may end up playing an even more sweeping role — as far more intuitive portals into the vast resources of the entire Internet than today’s World Wide Web. Some tech thinkers suggest Second Life could even challenge Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT ) Windows operating system as a way to more easily create entertainment and business software and services. “This is why I think Microsoft needs to pay deep attention to it,” Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s best-known blogger, recently wrote.

A lot of other real-world businesses are paying attentio. That’s because virtual worlds could transform the way they operate by providing a new template for getting work done, from training and collaboration to product design and marketing. 
My Virtual Life