Andromeda Media Group @ Virtual Edge Summit 2009

We've been hanging out at the Virtual Edge Summit 2009 since yesterday, which is physically located in Santa Clara, California.

Regardless of having a conference pass to attend physically, we've opted to attend the event virtually using the VirtualU universe option. Live streams from speakers representing Cisco, Linden Labs, and others have been talking quite a lot about Social Media this year - so you can imagine we've had to endure hearing the words "Twitter", "Second Life", and "Facebook" so many times that we feel the urge to jump across the table and smack people.

It's not all boring and mundane (just mostly), as there was an excellent speaker from Cisco who was on target talking about integration of technologies, and also the real world cross over and ROI. Stuff like AR (Alternate Reality/Augmented Reality) games that create long term relationships with a brand, as well as a number of other things.

Day One of this Summit was more or less boring with the exception of Zain from Microsoft who was talking about virtual worlds and their usage, but even him we give marginal kudos for acknowledging (ever so briefly) that real world cross over in a virtual event and vice versa is something to look into when creating virtual events.

Sadly, it was a topic which was glossed over and not addressed in detail.

Starting on Day 2, we've heard a panel from Linden Labs, VirtualU, and a couple of others talking about virtual worlds and how business can participate. While some of the questions were answered live by these people, there are still a number of questions which these experts are deftly dodging, such as what happens if your evangelizing of these technologies actually works and you convince businesses to use them in orders of magnitude higher capacity than we currently see?

The problem is that the virtual event today is drawing about 80 simultaneous people to attend, but what happens if business really latches onto this going forward and we start seeing 800 or 8,000 people showing up at the same time? How do we deal with scaling the technology in a cost effective manner for the business?

Right now, SecondLife would not scale upward in a cost effective manner, nor would most 3D virtual environments. The cost to user factor becomes prohibitive at a certain point, and we at Andromeda Media Group would like this to be answered by these industry executives.

Of course, they actually don't have an answer for this, and that is the point we're making right now. Scalability while providing acceptable individual user experiences is not cost effective in a full capacity for attendance. So we're left with the proverbial Elephant in the room.

We all know the Elephant is there in the corner, but nobody wants to acknowledge it.

If you're interested in jumping in during today's events, you can check out http://www.virtualbeginnings.com/start to get an account and the software for logging in. At the very least, you get to hang around people from Microsoft, Motorola, Sprint, Cisco, and many other fortune 500 companies.

Website Downtime

We would like to apologize for the recent downtime experienced on our website since 9:30am EST. Currently the issue has been resolved with the datacenter, and was pinpointed as caused by repeated fuse failure on the rack power supply, and later traced to a faulty power supply.

An electrician was called in and faulty hardware in the datacenter was replaced, bringing our servers back online. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused in accessing our website and possibly the link through to our forums.

Thank you for your continued interest and support, and we would like to personally thank those who brought this issue to our attention within minutes of it happening.

- The Management

So crazy it just might work... or not.

A couple of things on the plate lately, one of which is the 3D FTP system which is a scheduled component of Andromeda3D. Some recent testing shows that it is working but not stable enough to warrant a release to our beta team. There are still some things which need to be tweaked before that happens, but most of all we're going over the possibility of a total rewrite of the code via various programmers.

One such coder is our very own Director of Andromeda Labs, while the other programmers will remain unnamed in the spirit of competition. If you are part of our Beta Team in the forums, sound off and let the Director of Andromeda Labs know if you would like to see this component made and released for testing.

In other News

The current website design for Andromeda3D actually has a new and improved version in the works, but we're having trouble staying inspired for the final design. We've been scouring the entire Internet looking for some type of inspiration to fuel us into creativity, but we're not really having any luck.

Website design in general has put a black cloud over us lately, partially due to the web itself seeming redundant with designs. There doesn't seem to be any real innovation with interfaces, and the typical navigation bar/content area is wearing thin on us. When we build the next design, we want it to be something fresh and intuitive, not to mention creative and inspired.

Now, we know we're talking in corporate paradigm buzzwords, but for some reason this can't seem to be helped when looking for inspiration with what we hope for the new design. We do apologize for the inconvenience of having to read the corporate buzzwords, and we'll try to think of something better to describe it next time.

- The Management