Around fifteen years ago, some big brands started playing in Second Life. For me, memorable names and what they did include General Motors with a cool Pontiac sports car: that’s virtual me behind the virtual wheel in the photo above. GM issued a press release in October 2006 about starting up in SL. There was Dell who experimented not only with letting you configure and buy a computer in Second Life but also getting customer service and tech support. They…
It’s only a vision at this point, but technology companies like Facebook are aiming to make the metaverse the setting for many online activities, including work, play, studying and shopping. How do we ensure everyone has a say in how it develops? It’s a question Shel and I considered in the primary discussion in the August episode of The Hobson & Holtz Report aka episode 210 of the For Immediate Release podcast published on August 23. We started with a…
Augmented reality will be a huge part of our individual and collective experiences in the not too distant future. Our daily lives will be like a journey in virtual reality except in actual reality, immersively overlaid with personalized information that we will engage with, where everything we do is part of a giant contest that awards points to reward behaviours and actions. This is a future vision that I think is persuasively presented in a high-definition video (embedded below) that…
Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz co-presented a session on the second day of Ragan Communications’ Public Relations and Social Media Summit at ING House in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on April 12, 2012. The session covered how a podcast can transform independent listeners into an engaged community. The presentation included audio clips of familiar FIR voices including correspondents Dan York and Michael Netzley, as well as other PR podcasters, and explored how the communities these podcasts build can be attained by…
Do you ever pause and think about the avatar you use online as the visual representation of you: your persona or alter ego? What it says to others about you and the organization you work for or represent? Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behaviour and computing platform requirements, according to a report from industry analysts Gartner. Gartner predicts that by year-end 2013, 70 percent of enterprises…
