Life2.0 - Tuesday, 18th March

Passing along the Life2.0 Events for today, Tuesday - March 18, 2008.
(Sounds interesting - shame I will miss the Wonderland and Darkstar talks)

UPDATE: Warning! I've just received an update from the organisers. Apparently there's an error somewhere in this lot - but unfortunately I don't have the time or wherewithal to spot it!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
9:00 AM PDT - 10:00 AM PDT
KEYNOTE: Project Wonderland - 3D Toolkit for Building Virtual Worlds
Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator, Collaborative Environments Project, Sun Microsystems Laboratories
Project Wonderland is an open source toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds for business and education collaboration. Within a Wonderland virtual! world, p s, interact with team members, and have chance encounters with colleagues, all using natural voice interaction. Most importantly, real work can be accomplished with Wonderland's support of X and Java applications as well as innovative telephone integration. With application sharing as the default, people can create, edit, and share documents within the virtual world. Wonderland is built on top of the Project Darkstar game server platform, which provides enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and flexible integration with other enterprise systems.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10:00 AM PDT - 11:00 AM PDT
PSYCHOGRAPHICS OF VIRTUAL WORLDS: MEDIA CONSUMPTION
Mary Ellen Gordon, Managing Director, Market Truths Limited - SL:Pebbles Hannya
Doing business in emerging virtual worlds demands understanding the behavior and preferences of users. Market Truths, Ltd., is among the first global market-research organizations to undertake disciplined research in Second Life and similar environments in an effort to map and project user behavior and preferences in ways marketers will find immediately applicable, both to go/no-go decisions on metaverse investments and to the design of effective programs in these environments. Dr. Gordon will use as her starting-point recent MT research on media consumption among virtual world users, and reveal some surprising facts about how this audience wants to engage, inform itself, and develop consumer relationships.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11:00 AM PDT - 1:00 PM PDT
MICROSOFT VIRTUAL EARTH: THE METAVERSE DEVELOPER'S VIEW
Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Live Search - SL:CP Kirax
Microsoft Virtual Earth offers and connects with a wide array of APIs for including real-world data functionality and general mapping and display in applications of all kinds. Chris will describe current APIs to Virtual Earth, and explain how this real-world geodata system can be helpful in the metaverse.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1:00 PM PDT - 2:00 PM PDT
NETWORKING ON "ORIENTATION" - SHOW FLOORS OPEN

During this break, please visit our sponsors, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems. We'll also be hosting an open discussion of virtual world orientation methods, over at the new UBM Orientation Area - SW corner of CMP 2.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2:00 PM PDT - 3:00 PM PDT
Project Darkstar: Update
Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer, Sun Microsystems - SL:ChrisM Sunmicrosystems
Darkstar is a highly-scaleable platform for deploying massively multiplayer games and similarly demanding applications. Chris will give us an update on progress in building a Darkstar community that offers zero cost of entry and the ability to leverage the "smart people who don't work for you."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3:00 PM PDT - 4:00 PM PDT
TOUR: SUN MICROSYSTEMS ARCHIPELAGO
Fiona Gallagher, Virtual Worlds Marketing, Sun Microsystems - SL:Fiona May
Sun Microsystems' Second Life archipelago offers a congenial and carefully-planned set of environments, serving the needs of Java and Solaris developers, the IT and opensource communities. Fiona and her colleagues will give us a tour of Sun's facilities, and show us how they're bringing Sun's diverse global business inworld to new markets.