Not Every Nobel is a Prize

According to the NY Times,

Michael Nobel, who is indeed Alfred’s great grand nephew, approached [the organizers of NanoTX’07] about announcing a new prize for advances in alternative energy. He wanted to be the featured speaker at a reception meant to honor the surviving members of the team of scientists who won the 1996 Nobel Prize for chemistry for the buckyball. ... [However] the organizers received a disturbing fax from The Nobel Foundation in Sweden. It advised them that Mr. Nobel had been voted out as head of the Nobel Family Society at a meeting in August of 2006 “mainly because of his unauthorized activities and involvements in the name of the Nobel Family Society.”

The original press release, a more current one, and comments from the Nanotechnology Law Report.

Business in SL - Conference

Conference in London, late September: Achieving Real Business Growth Through Second Life (Note: This conference title is registered) According to the sponsors, The International Quality and Productivity Center (IQPC), most SL residents are Europeans over the age of 30. The presenters' list includes head shots of their SL avatars.

Back in April, Mitch Wagner noted that "quite a few Second Life users are network engineers. These are Cisco's customers, and Cisco is aggressively using Second Life to communicate with them." In May, Business Week described SL in terms of Anshe Chung's "booming land development business, which she has built from nothing two years ago to an operation of 17 people around the world today. As we chat, her story sounds like a classic tale of entrepreneurship." And in July, Sheila Yoshikawa of Sheffield University reported on the Blogher 07 SL Conference, including the business and branding panels. Recent University of Utrecht research on business in SL is summarized Browsing the Metaverse (The full pdf report is available online in Dutch)

SLCC07 Reports

The Second Life real-life convention (SLCC 07) in Chicago over the weekend was sold out awhile ago, but Caroline McCarthy of c|net news has two reports on the event: Chicago, the Metaverse's Metropolis and on Philip Rosedale's talk.

The poster for the event is on Flickr. Pacific Rim points to SLCC07 presentations posted on Slideshare and to other media coverage of the event.

Daneel Ariantho's Second Life has a pointer to the Salamander project presentation by Jonathan Richter (avatar Wainbrave).

State of Play V Update

Thomas Malaby's notes on the panel discussion at the State of Play V conference, Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds are available now. He especially notes the tension faced by real world organizations operating in virtual worlds: how to maintain control over their brands while tapping into the innovation that virtual world users can provide.

Workshops today, the final day of the conference, include Educational Applications, Law and Regulation, Managing Identities in Virtual Worlds, Commercial Applications, and Online Poker.

Podcasts and videos from the event should be available here.

Open Source Retreat

The folks at Open Source Connections have just announced an open source Retreat in Charlottesville, beginning at the end of August. Their course description for Multigen Creator, by visualization master and course instructor Dean Abernathy, is exceptional. Professor Abernathy is best known for overseeing the modeling for Rome Reborn.

The Friends of BGN get a $750 discount for the August courses. There are more details at BGNentrepreneur.

Singularity Summit

Tickets are still available for the Singularity Summit for Artificial Intelligence to be held in San Francisco in early September.

The 2006 Singularity Summit, the first academic symposium focused on the singularity scenario, was held at Stanford.

Speakers include academics from MIT, Stanford, and Yale, as well as business people from IBM, Powerset, Google and Teknowledge and representatives from several foundations and institutes. Abstracts of the talks are available now.

More BarCamps

The BarCamp wiki has a list of BarCamps scheduled to date.

BarCampRDU is underway today at the Red Hat offices in North Carolina. (Registration for this event closed at nearly 250 participants) The Second Life event, Web3DCamp is scheduled for September 8 at the Corecon Convention Center.

Orlando Unconferences

The unconference BarCampOrlando is scheduled for September 23. Registration opens this Monday. The BarCampOrlando wiki includes a list of potential topics and participants.

BlogOrlando, sponsored by Hyku and the Society for New Communications Research, will take place on September 27 - 29. Registration for this event is already open. Both events are free.

BarCamps Continue

The 2007 BarCamp returns to Palo Alto in mid-August, as a block party among SocialText, Edgeio, IDEO, and iMeem. Additonal information on NetSquared

BarCamp is an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. Snippets from Wikipedia.

BarCamp rules are admirably clear:

• When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.

• When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

• Give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer or contribute in some way to support the event.

If you want to organize a new BarCamp, Clever, Clever Girl Crystal Williams has updated her Ten Steps (now available in German and French).

Hardware Sketching

Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM on hardware sketching: Sketching may begin with an idea, but the process fundamentally changes that idea. Sketches identify both what an idea is, and what it is not.

Presentations from the June Sketching in Hardware 2 conference are available now. The third workshop will be in December. The 2007 series theme is Boundary Conditions.

we will examine the boundaries in developing physical computing: boundaries between components, between standards, between making objects and creating experiences, between cost and sustainability, between the expected and the unorthodox, and between creator and toolkit.

Open Source Presentations

The O'Reilly Open Source 2007 Convention has a nice piece on Eric Pugh, of Open Source Connections in Charlottesville.
He will be speaking this week about using and writing Rails plugins. Pugh notes that Open Source Connections will also be hosting a Birds of a Feather session on Scrum War Stories Wednesday, July 25.

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, will speak on Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties. Keynote speakers at the convention include Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Radar, Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs, Phillip Torrone of MAKE magazine, and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia.

UPDATE: Here's the first OSCON report from Wired. The list of blogs and bloggers covering OSCON this year is available at the O'Reilly Wiki.

Irving and the Monsters of the Id

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a fascinating piece on Dealing with the (Virtual) World in our Minds, introducing his reflections on the recent IBM - MIT Media Lab Conference on Virtual Worlds with the Monsters of the Id and the movie, Forbidden Planet.

He concludes

Some may find it ironic that an all day conference on virtual worlds is taking place with flesh and blood people at the Media Lab auditorium in Cambridge. But in the end, it is all about balance and harmony. We all live in two worlds - the physical world and the world in our minds. Perhaps what we are now seeing is the emergence of a hybrid world that attempts to close the gap and make it easier for us humans to deal with these two very different worlds, helping us better integrate them into our lives and into our work. Needless to say, each has its pros and cons. Creating such appealing, powerful and simple hybrid worlds may very well be one of the most important aspects of the Knowledge Age on which we are embarking.

Supernova Conference

According to WebWare, last week's Supernova Conference in San Francisco included a hoax startup presentation by ZapMeals, in a Spot-the-Fake challenge.

This conference has a rich online presence in the form of a Conversation Hub multiple authors blogging directly from the event, and a Community Connection that utilizes a Wink group for ongoing communication.

Conference speakers included Irving Wladawsky-Berger. The conference was produced in partnership with the The Wharton School.

Virtual Stuff at Stanford

Today's Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford University is focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Produced by Charles River Ventures, Susan Wu's article introducing the event on TechCrunch elicited a long string of comments in support of, and critical of, emerging business models for virtual goods.

The forum intends to address such issues as

• How will virtual goods and virtual currencies impact social networking?

• Are virtual goods the next big business model?

• What does it take to successfully launch a virtual goods offering?

• Are virtual goods poised to go mainstream?

• What does it take to nurture and develop a successful virtual economy?

• Why are users embracing virtual goods?

Digital Media Conference 07

The 4th annual Digital Media Conference will be held June 22 in Washington DC. The keynote speaker is Alex Welch of Photobucket; conference co-chairs are Ned Sherman, CEO & Publisher, Digital Media Wire, and Paul Sherman, Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Tech Wire Publications.
Virtual worlds will be represented by Damon Taylor of The Electric Sheep Company.

Best Practices in SL Education

Fleep Tuque presented some preliminary results from her survey of educational institutions in SL. Here are some of the initial observations and recommendations:

• Identify the educational institution clearly - on the ground in SL, in directories, in links from the institution's existing web site.

• Provide clear navigation - footpaths, teleport systems, signage. For a great example, take a look at the Chilbo region - Fleep is responsible for most of the helpful signs, sidewalks and teleport kiosks.

Much of the SL conference will be archived, and available at Second Life Cable Network TV

Fleep and Wainbrave

Two very creative SL avatars are speaking tonight at the SL Education Conference, avatar Wainbrave Bernal, of the University of Oregon, and avatar Fleep Tuque of the University of Cincinnati.

Wainbrave will talk about the Salamander project. Fleep, organizer of the conference, will wrap up at midnight (EST) with an overview of best practices in SL.

SL Education Best Practices

An extraordinary event is unfolding in SL today.

The International Education Conference has been underway since midnight, and SL is full of educators and librarians presenting their experiences in formal keynotes, posters, panel discussions, and informal meetings.

I checked out the Poster display, and spoke briefly with avatar Elaine Tulip of the Chicago Public Schools about their librarians' work in SL. For more information, see her blog and site.

Preparing for SL Education Conference

Wesley Fryer, at Moving at the Speed of Creativity, points to the upcoming education conference in SL this Friday. Are we far enough into the educational uses of SL to have “best practices?” I’m not sure, but I’m guessing we’ll find out at the conference!

Joop Van Schie, of Aggiornamento II has series of short posts about educators and educational experiments in SL. They include a pointer to a SL listserv for educators.

SL International Education Conference

The first SL International Education Conference: Best Practices in Teaching, Learning and Research (SLIC) is scheduled for May 25, all day in-world. SLIC blog.

Keynote speakers include avatar Kenny Hubble (Ken Hudson) of Loyalist College, avatar Pirate Shipman (Bill Moseley) of Bakersfield College, avatar Intelligirl Tully (Sarah Robbins) blogger from Indiana.

Conference Committee Co-Chairs are avatar Fleep Tuque, creator of //Metaver.se, of the University of Cincinati, and avatar Veritas Veriscan. "The conference will be held on May 25, 2007 in venues all over the Second Life world, with exciting presentations, vendors and exhibitors, and everything an educator needs to know to get started exploring the possibilities for teaching, learning, and research in Second Life!"

Since this is a SL conference, registration includes time zone availability.