Making Connections

I don’t think I am jumping the gun (at least not by much ;-), but this morning UGS will announce one of the projects I have been working on for the past few months: UGS Innovation Connection in Second Life. When I first heard about Second Life last fall, I thought ‘might be interesting’. When I finally found some time to sign up for an account and start to see what was going on there I thought ‘we have to do something here’. A few presentations and executive review later, I had the green light to get something setup in January.

Now the obvious question is: why are we here? (UGS in Second Life, not all of us being alive in general…there are other blogs for that). The answer is three fold:

• First, the community of users in Second Life (aka residents) are interesting to us. All of you are developing natural skills or are interested in a social/collaborative/participative experience on the web and all of you want to build and experience it in 3D. That sounds a lot like what users of our software do. So we want to talk with you about how we can make our tools more useful to the overall 3D conversation going on on the web.
• Second, some of our existing users have expressed interest or are already launching presences in Second Life. Using our tools you have created a vast wealth of 3D information, some of which may be interesting to re-purpose in you ventures in Second Life for everything from virtual show rooms, to design reviews, to collaborative design with your partners and even customers.
• Lastly, we need to be in Second Life to learn about how Second Life (and things like it) are going to impact our business. I strongly believe that this is not one that you can sit on the sidelines and watch from the outside to see what happens. You have to be in the game to know what the rules are. So far all that is clear is that the 3D experience on the web has some serious traction at the user and company levels and we want to be part of how it turns out.

So, today we launch an experiment. A very public, very accessible experiment. I invite all of you to stop by, grab a free t-shirt and take a quick spin around UGS Innovation Connection. Then drop by the lobby and leave us a comment. Tell us what you’d like to see. Tell us what we did wrong. Tell us how you’d like to use Second Life to create the next category killer product.