Future of Web3D

I had the good fortune to present on the Future of Web3D as part of a panel at the Web3D symposium at SIGGRAPH 2008.  This is the segment on Youtube.

It was a great panel put together by Rita Turkowski of Intel and featured Remi Arnaud, Johannes Berh, Mimi Harris, Doug Twilleager, Christian Renaud, Vladimir Vukicevic and Mark [...]

Farewell to China and my friend Robert

On June 25th Dr. Robert Lai (Mr. Lai Chi Tau) Chief Scientist of China’s Cyber Recreational District (CRD) passed away in his sleep at the age of 50. I met Robert at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo (VWCE) and in November I had the privilege to be invited by Robert to speak at [...]

What is Community?

Jeremiah Owyang posted a question about how we define “Online Communities”. In referencing Jake Mckee’s post on the subject he wonders is Twitter a community?
Before we answer that question we have to define what a “Community” is? As has been pointed out by Robin Hamman, “Community” “has dozens if not hundreds of distinct [...]

Moore’s Law vs. Dunbars Number

Moore’s Law wins.
In a recent twitter conversation Jeremiah Owyang asked the question, ” Did we break Dunbar’s Number of 150 members per social network? Or are tools more efficient?”
The reality is that we have been pushing Dunbar’s number since we first invented the little black book. By offloading much of the social context [...]

Who is the Long Tail?

We have been making a lot of noise about the long tail for a while now in our little world of Web 2.0 and it struck me this morning while reading a post by Gordon Haff that we don’t really talk about where it comes from.
The long tail has many forms, some obvious ones being [...]

Is Disney good for Club Penguin?

On GigaOM Carleen blogged that she thought that Club Penguin sold out to Disney and it might ruin Club Penguin. I think she came close on a couple points, but missed the bigger picture.
Disney is by its nature a big lumbering beast that is mired in bureaucracy. Having worked there a while [...]

Penguins + Disney = Duh!

If you have been curiously watching the news around Club Penguin you may have wondered aloud, is this really worth $500-$700 million?
The answer is it depends on who you are. Certainly on its face the projected revenues by themselves don’t seam to make sense, especially as was mentioned on TechCrunch that penguins [...]