I love the last ten days before a big show, when final pieces of the program start falling into place. Sun's Nicole Yankelovich will be keynoting on Tuesday the 18th, discussing Wonderland: Sun's powerful 3D collaboration world for knowledge-workers. Yankelovich is Principal Investigator in Collaboration Environments for Sun Labs, and is a bonafide pioneer in user experience design -- an early innovator in IP telephony, speech UI, shared shells and similar technology. Following up at 2 PM PST/5 PM ET will be Sun's Chief Gaming Officer, Chris Melissinos, who'll give us Java-heads the latest and straightest on Darkstar, Sun's massively-scaleable "redshift" platform for multi-user game and virtual world building. Meanwhile, I've been on the email since the wee hours with Cisco's Christian Renaud, Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments, who's been (as usual) waxing insightful about how virtual worlds re-intermediate between people and economic actors who might otherwise be disenfranchised and driven apart by hyperconnectivity. We're looking forward to his keynote on Friday, March 21 at 9 AM PST/Noon ET.[MORE]

Exciting and interesting times! World2Worlds is the company I’ve owned for well over a year now and has been under contract to CMP working hand in hand with John Jainschigg for whom I’d been providing consulting services in the development, design, implementation and management of their virtual world presence and events, such as the Life 2.0 conferences. I’m very excited to be publicly sharing this with you![MORE]