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The last conversation I managed to have on Sunday evening at near 3am at the International Technology Expo in Second Life (see our coverage of the event here.) was with Texas Timtam, the CEO of Cattlepuppy Productions. Cattlepuppy are a young media company in Second Life that according to Texas, focus on bringing SL to the masses via SLCN.tv and SoundReach, their audio brand that helps events like the ITE itself handle streaming audio, phone ins and presentations.

I asked Texas if they were profitable. They're not, but she see's big bucks in virtual worlds over the next few years: "Because we've been online since day one, we are 100% sure that the virtual world and Second Life look, smell, taste and act just like the web did in 1993. We are only seeing the beginning of the snowball with SL."

I certainly agree with that. Cattlepuppy did a stand up job of providing audio and broadcast systems to the ITE, and im certain there investment in SL will pay off. Good job guys...

Think you're busy? Just be thankful you're not Liam Kanno. The International Technology Expo this weekend saw 64 vendors, (they'd planned for 40) and hundreds of visitors eager to listen to awesome presentations from the digerati of the 3D web, descend upon Silicon Island like tech vultures. Hundreds of cool gadgets were on show in the isles and the atmosphere was electric. Did V3 pull it off flawlessly? No. Does anyone care? No. Technical glitches were brushed aside by all attending. The products were great and nobody minded if they got booted out of the sim once or twice while things were patched up. Im not sure V3 expected such a huge success, but they certainly deserved it.

Sun Microsystems, one of the key sponsors of the even would like V3 to organize the technology fest every six months, but nothing has been decided yet. V3 began as a simple regular development agency but have morphed into "Creating commerce and communities through environments and events". A lofty tag line for sure, but from what I've seen these past three days, one I think they're well placed to pull off.

Apart from event planning and execution, V3 run "Silicon Island" which functions as a kind of technology hub for companies much as Silicon Valley does in the real world.

Watch out for more from V3, and look out for a Metaversed office opening up on Silicon Island. As I mentioned to Liam, we need to be where the action is, and he'd kindly agreed to help us do just that

In an interview with PixelTrix owner Cherub Spectre this evening at the ITE expo organized by the V3 Group in Second Life, I found out that the company, who make all kinds of cool gadgets for businesses in the Metaverse,  plan to release a "top secret" product that they say will "revolutionize" Second Life next year. Hyperbole is cheap, but Cherub seemed most sincere when we talked about this and promised Metaversed a first peek at the new product as soon as possible.

Ms Spectre was on a panel earlier today talking about robust user experiences, and her company specialize in providing tools/gadgts to smooth out interaction between customer and business in Second Life.

The big take away from the panel on creating great user experiences in Second Life at the International Technology Expo today was this: Dont bulldoze in, engage with the community, get the community to help and be respectful of the community.

The panelists were awesome, and the discussion invaluable. Damek Tretiak of SLQuery, Cherub Spectre of PixelTrix, Navillus Batra of i3DNow.com and Wiz Nordberg of SLCN did an absolutely cracking job of defining current thinking on creating great builds in SL, working with the community and the follies of companies trying to create 3D versions of 2D experiences.

Wonderful stuff.

A new tool written for Windows in C++ aims to turn your Second Life chat text into voice. Calhoun Hock, one of the guys working on Speech Tools as a translator (they're from Hungary) told me that once installed, the software reads the text you're chatting from the SL client, and runs it through a text to speech engine and outputs voice. The obvious question, is how will Linden's plans to bring voice functionality into SL in June impact the company...

Well, they dont see this as an issue. Though Calhouns English was a little difficult to understand, the impression I got was that they have other uses for their software.

They'll be presenting later in the day though, so if I learn more, you'll see it here!

While Im working on getting interviews up on the blog here at Metaversed you can catch my commentary live, as i think it :) via my Twitter page. Dont know what Twitter is? See here.

Something I read about a week or two back, but kind of skipped by, is MySLProject. It's a site that can be likened to such household (well, for me...) names as RentACoder and eLance where companies can post projects, and receive bids from individual coders, companies or development teams for the completion of said project.

The owner, PK O'Toole tells me he started the site because he was fed up with the difficulties of finding talent. It's not that it doesn't exist, far from it, but there needed to be a 2D web based way to easily get bids on work. Seeing the opportunity, MySLProject was born.

Right now, they have 20 projects open. They've been open 2wks so it's early days but they're off to a cracking start and in my mind, deserve to succeed. The site looks great, and is easy to use, so they should go from strength to strength as there's certainly a demand for SL skills right now.

I spent a good half hour or so talking to Craigster Hax, the Community Evangelist for SAP's Second Life project that launches this week. They have an office on Silicon Island, and are working the ITE expo this weekend to get word out about their community building, information sharing and collaborative projects upcoming in the Metaverse.

Craig told me that the reason they've been working for the last few weeks to get into SL is to "add more value" for their alreadly large developer community and business process expert community which together boast almost a million members. "We hold conventions worldwide, but not everywhere and so travel is often times a problem". Second life help solve this problem and bring more community members together he told me.

Apart from being able to bring video, and audio content into Second Life to aid communication, it's the face to face aspect that excites SAP.

SAP events will begin in a couple of weeks, and we've been promised invites :)

While I was at Sun's Jim Parkinson's keynote for the opening of the ITE expo in Second Life earlier, all I could hear (apart from Jim talking) was the click/whir of SL cameras taking pics. You can see these pics streaming into Flickr, Snapzilla and catch my own pics tagged with ITE here.

My first stop at this weekends International Technology Expo in Second Life was at the SLInternet stand, a company making strides toward bringing web like functionality into Second Life.

Anyone that's been in SL for more than 5 minutes will know that even just linking together notecards (simple text files) is a pain, and that web like functionality is seriously needed for things like advertising, information, and educational resources inworld. With that in mind, SLInternet, which launches at this years ITE Expo hopes to provide that functionality with what it calls SLHTML and a trio of technologies.

The three basic components to SLInternet are:

1. Browser
2. Server and
3. Display

The server can be either a virtual SL server included in the package, or a regular web server. The browser comes in the shape of an SL object that looks like a laptop, that projects the parsed SLHTML onto a display. The display itself resembles, and functions like a touchscreen.

Arnout Sequent, the guy who was kind enough to demonstrate the SLInternet app for me showed me that you can do a great many of the things you might expect a web page to do. Play media, link pages, format nice displays of text, lists etc etc and allow a fair amount of interactivity and control for the end uers. He pointed out that for stores, educational institutes and pretty much anyone wanting to provide information inworld in a familiar format, it was very useful.

II have to say, I loved what i saw. It was neat, I understood it, it was attractive and simple to look at and I can see companies in SL using this as a great information hub in landing areas on their sites. As a long term solution it may have limited appeal though, as Ubrowser, the so called "web on a prim" project from a Linden Employee that uses an instance of Mozilla to render real web content in 3D could kill it dead.

Additional

I spoke to Arnout once more after writing this story and he assures me that far from kill SLInternet, LLmozLib, the libraray uBrowser is based on will just enhance it. It will add functionality, and SLInterent will then have the best of both worlds (if you'll pardon the pun) as it will combine regular web browsing with the SL interactivity and object communication built into the project as it stands now.

Special coverage of the International Technology Expo in Second Life this weekend will begin shortly.

Watch Metaversed.com for posts covering major items, and you can follow blow by blow on my Twitter page for every detail.

See you there!

The International Technology Expo will open in Second Life this coming Friday, and run through the entire weekend on Silicon Island. The ITE conference held by the V3 group will showcase Second Life technologies aimed at both businesses and developers and feature key panel discussions on such subjects as:

• "Digital Property: Creating It, Using It, and Protecting It;"
• "Developers Perspective on Client Demands: Community, Architecture, Technology & Environment;"
• “Making Sense of Market Research Related to Second Life;"
• "Breaking the Boundaries of SL: Developing a Robust User Experience for Corporations & Residents Inside & Outside SL."

The conference will kick off with on Friday at 12 noon SLT (PDT) with a keynote from Sun Microsystem's Jim Parkinson and feature a stack of product debut's from sponsors as well as exhibitions from over 50 technology vendors.