IBM ‘rolling their own’ virtual world

The ZDNet blog has a post up by Dan Farber & Larry Dignan about IBM producing their own virtual world:

IBM cooks up internal virtual world for confidentiality, security

If you remember a year ago, Sam Palmisano was all excited about Second Life as a virtual business platform. Now it appears that they have gone and produced their own virtual world platform called ‘Metaverse’ (Neal Stephenson?) so they can hold private meetings. IBM CIO Mark Hennessey says “If you really want to make most of these meetings it has to be confidential”.

Michael Ackerbacker, Innovation Manager of IQ Collaboration Development at IBM says”

“We did learn a lot in Second Life, but wanted to do a world here internally where we could talk about IBM types of things securely,”

Click on the link above to jump to the article and read about the three key takeaways from their experience with Second Life. Maybe Linden Lab can learn from the last statement about keeping the interface simple for users. They only have 12 controls for the avatars in this IBM virtual world.