Business Week on Second Life

Business Week Online article about business going on in Second Life: My Virtual Life.

Doing business in Second Life

Today, for the second time, I took part in a business meeting in Second Life. As we’ve grown used to IM and Skype for meetings, this was bound to be the next thing, taking it into a 3D avatar world.

As with IM and Skype, in Second Life you have to get familiar with the controls, and learn how to be expressive via your avatar. But once there and with practice, it starts to become more natural.

The next step is making things. I want to be able to build 3d objects to express ideas, then be able to hand them to people or point to them. The support is there in Second Life to do that. It is just going to take practice.
I get the feeling we are going to use this a lot for business in the future.

By the way, in Second Life I’m known as Gra Itoku. See you there sometime.

MP3 First Aid info for your iPod

The Guardian Online reports that the Sussex Ambulance Service are providing free MP3 downloads giving basic first-aid information for those walking around with an iPod.

What a great idea. Presumably the files are small (compared to most MP3 players) and can be quickly called up.

Update:  Have just downloaded the files and stuck them on the iPod.  Small, easy to keep there.  This is such a good idea.  I’d expect a flood of similar ideas coming soon.

Presence Labs Limited

A subtle little change has just happened here at Presence Labs.  Presence Labs is now a UK Company, fully titled Presence Labs Limited. Registered in England.  Company No: 578 4049.

This means we are pretty much fully set up for business in the UK, ready for our arrival there on the 16th of May.

reboot

The reboot8 conference looks really interesting. One of the many reasons to move to the UK is to be close to things like this and actually be able to get there without it taking weeks and costing a fortune.

Think I might try and get up to Copenhagen for the weekend of 1-2 June. We arrive in the UK on May 16th, so we’ll just be getting settled.

Here’s what they say reboot is about:

reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us… 2 days. 400 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.
Applied towards us as individuals, citizens, teachers, culture workers, entrepreneurs, creators and change makers.

Update 23/4:  I’m about to start booking flightsand stuff for this.  It just seems so much a good thing!

C-Gate documentation released

I haven’t talked about it much in the blogs, but I’ve spent a good amount of time in the last few years working with Clipsal Integrated Systems on their Clipsal C-Gate Server product, from the original concept through to developing a lot of the software itself.

C-Gate is nice.  It makes it really simple for developers and building automation integrators to build interfaces to  Clipsal C-Bus automation networks and C-Bus devices.

C-Gate know how to handle the specifics of the Clipsal C-Bus networking, and provides multiple text-based high level interface for control and monitoring that is easy to program to and easily accessible using TCP/IP in a telnet and SMTP-style  command-response interface.
I started developing the beginnings of C-Gate’s prior incarnation in Java back in 1998.  It was way back when Java itself was a pretty new thing. We’ve stayed in pure Java all the way through the development, so you can quite easily run C-Gate on Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, …  Basically, anywhere you can get a 1.4 or later Java VM running.

But I’m going on a bit here. There was a point to this post  — the latest C-Gate Server Guide has been released for download, reflecting C-Gate version 2.5, and coming in at 275 pages.  Again, I’ve been working on this documentation for some time and it is really nice to see it out there.  I wrote that.  Well about 99% of it, anyway :-)

Where am I?

i’m experimenting with Plazes, a social networking site based around your current connected network location. You can see where others are connected around you, name networks yourself, and see maps of where you have been. All that sort of thing.

I’m thinking of using is for adding a bit of presence for folk I’m working with around the world. As we move around the world, plazes can be making maps of where I am, where I have been, etc.

Auto-stalking? Yep. It is a bit like that.

It might eventually freak me out and I’ll turn off the tracking. But for now, you can find me here.

to Brighton

The big change is finally coming up here… One month today, May 4th, we’ll be climbing on a plane and moving to the other side of the world.

We are picking up everything and relocating from Fremantle, Western Australia to Brighton, UK.

More on the move and arrangements as they come up.

From mid-May, we’ll be setting up in Brighton. A big, exciting change.