Clever Zebra has been talking up its virtual conference technology, following its recent vBusiness Expo, which saw 170 companies attending remotely to listen to speakers from Sun, IBM, Kelly Services and Gartner. The success is tempered somewhat by the fact that the subject of the conference was... how virtual worlds are changing business. So attendees by definition would be more open to attending a conference virtually than other industries might be.
“We think flying to a virtual worlds conference misses the point,” says Nick Wilson, CEO of Clever Zebra. “Companies that really want to learn about virtual worlds in the enterprise need to experience them, not just talk about them.”
Obviously, this blog is part of the Virtual Worlds Forum, a conference which takes place in the real world (that’s the declaration of interest). One advantage to being in the same place is the ease of demoing virtual worlds. For example, if I’m at the conference, and an exhibitor is there showing their new virtual world on a computer, it seems quite fiddly to try and do that virtually (or, to put that more simply, if I’m at a virtual event like the vBusiness Expo, how easy is it for someone to demo me, say, Club Penguin in real-time, rather than as a video or slideshow?)
That’s a quibble, though. Wilson certainly has a point when he talks about companies in other industries increasingly not wanting to fly around the world to conferences, whether to save money or for environmental reasons (or a combination of the two). “I can’t imagine why anybody would want to fly half way around the world for a conference when they could just login from home,” he says.
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