Focus on America

Businesses Find New Ways To Make Money Online

A university professor wants to use the principles and technology of online games in business.
The technology in complex, multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, Second Life, EverQuest or EVE Online -- which organize thousands, sometimes millions, of players online to compete for points or populate “virtual” worlds -- offers new ways to get work done, Stanford University professor Byron Reeves says.

Gaming principles could make boring work fun and increase collaboration among distant experts, according to Reeves.

Already, the 50 largest companies in the United States have “private islands” in Second Life, where they market their brands to customers or recruit workers from a membership hailing from more than 100 countries.

Second Life is an online virtual world created in 2003 by Linden Lab, a San Francisco company.  It offers free membership to players who create “avatars,” or online personas.  Real people then manipulate their avatars to build infrastructure, including landscapes, homes, schools, islands and even nightclubs.

Cisco Systems Inc., of San Jose, California, has registered several of its executives -- whose avatars have the last name “Cisco,” and the company holds press conferences and product demonstration events on its Second Life “island.”  Cisco has given three-dimensional product briefings and has held contests offering $10,000 in equipment to Second Life members who can help the company build a better computer-network router.  Jeannette Gibson of Cisco said the company has hired real engineers after getting to know them through their avatars.

But business could do even more by borrowing features of Second Life and other online games, Reeves said.  For example, he said, virtual economies employed by some online games can be recreated within companies. The games use play money, but their money supplies are controlled.

Reeves founded a company called Seriousity, which has developed a banking system and economy around the same type of play currency used in online games.

Seriousity has done experiments with International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation and currently is working with other Fortune 500 companies.  Using a currency called “attent,” whose supply is limited by a board of directors that includes economists, Seriousity has set up a system whereby business managers reward employees or seek their quick attention by attaching the scarce attents to e-mail or other requests.  To make it fun, a business using the system can track (and publicize to staff) who is exchanging attents in what amounts. Reeves said this “industrial-strength play money” gives information about how executives value particular projects or employees.

Reeves also says that the ability of the online games to bring together collaborators from around the globe is something businesses should emulate.  He cites a company called InnoCentive Inc., in Massachusetts, that posts scientific and business problems on its Web site -- and advertises awards ranging from $5,000 to $1 million to anyone who can solve them.  “They use the Internet to create a work force that couldn’t be assembled otherwise,” he said.

The InnoCentive Web site has been used by small companies that cannot afford to build up research and development (R&D) departments and by larger companies that may have R&D but want to pose a problem to thinkers outside their industry.  The companies seeking innovative solutions may maintain anonymity; they often do because they are developing consumer products.  But the Oil Spill Recovery Institute in Alaska has publicized its experience with InnoCentive.  It posed a problem involving how to separate cost-effectively frozen oil and water it had stored in barges after cleaning up an oil spill in Prince William Sound.  The solution came from the cement industry and involved an existing tool used to remove bubbles from setting concrete.  The person who came up with the solution was awarded $20,000.

Another collaboration-among-strangers technique is being tested by Amazon.com, the Seattle-based company that operates retail Web sites. Called “Amazon Mechanical Turk,” the service pairs businesses that need an elastic work force with temporary workers able to identify objects in photos, erase duplicate entries in data, transcribe audio tapes or do other tasks that human eyes or ears can do better than computers.

Teleconferencing is evolving through the Internet as well. Cisco has developed “Telepresence,” a product that allows life-size, high-definition videoconferencing that features a mirror image that makes participants from diverse locations across the world feel that they are literally across the table from one another.

Businesses will continue to innovate with ways to work smarter using the Internet, experts say.  “The nature of collaboration is the big thing we’re pushing today,” said Cisco spokesman John Earnhardt.