Welcome to Nerdcast – Take 06: A Second Life!

In this podcast, I interview two gentleman from PA Consulting, Marco Tippmer and Claus Nehmzow. Their company has a leading business presence in Second Life (SL). With more organizations exploring virtual realities, and SL in specific, I believe you will find this podcast useful. My interview focus is practical business applications of SL.

• Nerdcast – Take 06: A Second Life

Background Data

• eContent (this blog) Second Life Links … including a tutorial !
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• PA Consulting Links: Company Site | Wikipedia Entry

Claus Nehmzow: Claus has almost twenty-five years experience in technology and strategy consulting as well as operational management experience. The majority of his industry experience is in Financial Services, New Media and Mobile.  He has worked with some of the largest corporations as well as small VC-backed innovative start-ups. 

Claus has broad international experience in global business development and consulting as well as from having lived for many years each in Germany, Switzerland, USA, and the UK. Claus was Managing Director of Viant Germany, an Internet consultancy, Partner and Vice President at Booz-Allen & Hamilton in London and New York, Senior Manager at Accenture/Andersen Consulting. In Zurich, New York and London.

Marco Tippmer: Marco has over eight years experience in IT Consultancy working for Government bodies, utilities and finance organizations. His focus is on IT Strategy Development, combining established and emerging technologies to create innovative solutions and solve complex business problems. In addition he has extensive experience in Business Process Management and Project Management.

Nope, I’m not crazy! The answer is a free iPod. Take a look at the attached screenshot (expand the thumbnail). Unfortunately, you needed to travel through the London City Airport before the end of March to have a chance to win. The iPod is even customized in Harvard Ideacast colors. I like this series … see my prior post … I guess Harvard is open to some new marketing ideas! (kinda cool)
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In my earlier posting today, I mentioned that ESPN needed to visit Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, and learn more about software design and test.  Sometimes one needs to swallow one’s own medicine … thus I spent some time on SEI’s web site. Part of SEI’s web presence includes their extensive collection of reports … essentially free eBooks in downloadable pdf.

Thus, I’ve incorporated the SEI content into my Google Co-Op eBook search engine. You may access all of my search engines via this link.

Here are the direct links to SEI’s publications:

• SEI Publications Search Engine
• Browse SEI Publications

ESPN does not understand the importance of software testing before rolling out a product. For those of you who have never participated in fantasy sports, ESPN just announced to tens of thousands of customers that they goofed big time, and will have to throw out all results, roster changes, etc and push everyone’s fantasy baseball team back to their pre-opening day rosters.  The implication of this action is all actions taken over the past month by participants were totally worthless.

ESPN needs to visit Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute and learn about software design and test! (eContent posting on SEI)

Here is an excerpt from their open letter to all players:

"Late on Wednesday night the ESPN Fantasy team will:
1) Revert all teams to their opening day rosters (Sunday, April 1).
2) Set the starting lineup of each team’s opening day roster as the active roster for all games played to date (April 1 – April 11).
3) Retroactively apply scoring for the entire season to date based on that roster.
4) Void all transactions to date (trades, waiver pickups, roster moves, etc.)."

As I had already surged to second place in our league … this is a bummer! Due to features ESPN was promising, our league had moved over to ESPN from Yahoo! The move was a mistake.
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This YouTube video is a hoot. If any of you are old enough to remember Fireball XL5 from the early 1960’s, you will appreciate how far we’ve come with animation.  If you are younger, imagine science fiction involving puppets / marionettes! At the time, it was big time cool.

Now a spoof from the 21st century … complete with laugh tracks:

• Superthunderstingcar!