Beth Noveck in Virtual World meeting

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/workinginworld/blog/2009/07/21/white-house-deputy-cto-held-mixed-reality-event-in-second-life

Yesterday, Beth Noveck, the Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House and the person responsible for Open Government, held a mixed-reality event co-sponsored by the Markle Foundation and Global Kids, to discuss her new book “WIKI GOVERNMENT: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful.”

Introduction to Virtual Worlds

This is a 13 min overview of what can be done in OLIVE. It's not an orientation and doesn't get into details about how to use specific features. However it's a good introductory resource to show people who have never seen Virtual Worlds or know what can be done in them. http://www.forterrainc.com/index.php/resources/screens-a-video/149-introduction-to-olive-virtual-worlds-wm

Good Example Of AI on the Web

NextIT built an answerbot, Alex, for Continental Airlines -- http://www.continental.com . Recommend you test it out.

Beth Noveck, the new Deputy US CTO, is a fan of virtual worlds. http://ping.fm/SKgAc

GSA Announces Cloud Computing Initiative

Wow -- this was fast!
"This Special Notice identifies GSA’s outline of requirements for NIST FIPS 199 defined Low and Moderate Impact Cloud Computing (CC) Software as a Service (SaaS) offering." Link: https://www.fbo.gov/spg/GSA/FTS/SmartBUY-Fairfax/GS00T08SBA0027/listing.html

Cloud Computing as Policy

Why all the hype ... it is in the Federal Budget statement at OMB.

"...The Federal Government will transform its Information Technology Infrastructure by virtualizing data centers, consolidating data centers and operations, and ultimately adopting a cloud-computing business model."

Information Technology Policy, p. 156 - 160 http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2010/assets/crosscutting.pdf

Apple Opening Up iPhone to Augmented Reality

LA Times is reporting that Apple will give official support in the next release of the iPhone operating system. Now imagine what they could do with the tablet PC? BTW, this is ripe for cloud computing where image recognition algorithms will run on some server in the background. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/07/subway-augmented-reality-iphone-app.html

Enterprise Collaboration

Glenn Engstrand, the president of Dynamical Software Inc., writes about the advantages to using Forterra's OLIVE virtual enterprise product.
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/focusing-exclusively-on-enterprise-virtual-worlds-32859