While I'm on the subject of business and the web. How about the merging of your real life office with a virtual world application.
An article by Dave Greenfield titled Doing business in the virtual world discusses industry trends in that direction. It appears in the March 10th (2008) issue of eWeek.
In a nutshell, it isn't just telecommuting by taping into the corporate network. This more like having people interact in virtual conference rooms, like they would in Second Life.
A little out of the ordinary for this blog. I read a paper on gaming that was very interesting.
First, the article is Alternate Reality Gaming by Jeffrey Y. Kim, Jonathan P. Allen, and Elan Lee. It is the Feb 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM (Vol 51, No 2). It is a very readable article, no equations. Unfortunately, unless you can get to the ACM portal, it isn't available on-line.
Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) is a mixture of web based puzzles and real-world information transfer (in the case sited through payphones). The ARG was a marketing effort to promote Halo 2. By the time the game ended, 12 weeks, they'd had over 3,000,000 unique visitors.
It is a viral marketing approach. A creatine way to generate buzz for a product. But the article describes the make-up of the design team. And, how they kept the gamers engaged. You don't always find business breakdowns for tech projects.
It peaked my interest because of marketing. There will be more ARGs in the future. It is something I need to be able to discuss with some of our high tech SCORE clients.
