Games People Way – the Road Map to Web 2.0 – MMORGP January 24, 2007
Posted by shaunak in Guest Lecture, Kerberos.1 comment so far
Kerberos, the Systems Club at VGSOM organized a lecture by Dr. Prithwis Mukherjee, Head, Learning and Knowledge – Global Delivery, IBM, on 6th September, 2006. The talk was on “Games People Way – the Road Map to Web 2.0 – MMORGP”
Residents of one of the Internet’s most populous virtual worlds shop, attend class, and even run businesses. Soon you may do the same - Second Life
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 342,944 people from around the globe. Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like Plane shift, Second Life represents a new genre of rich 3D applications that are going to dominate the contours of emerging internet techno scope.
Dr Prithwis Mukherjee, introduced the audience to this new field, a novel experience. He explained how one could exploit this opportunity for learning, for doing virtual business, for evaluating an employee’s team skills and so on. He himself is an active member of the Second Life community, and gave the audience a brief introduction about the history of Second Life and how it evolved from an era of online games to Plane shift to Second Life.
He described Second Life as “A community that is free to be joined by any one, which will earn you a certain Linden dollars (that can be exchanged for real dollars) and where one can be anyone, anywhere and do any task wished by him or her”.
On this community anyone can currently sign in for free at the link given at the end of the article and create his own AVATAR, in short be whom ever he or she wishes to be.
He then logged in at the IBM’s own Island as “Kolkatta Prince“(his avatar) in his funky and colorful outfit as of a teenager. There he showed us his team’s hangout place (the island).He then showed off his virtual gizmo cycle built by him on Second Life, which was his college time dream. He also had a cool car gifted to him by an online friend of his, which otherwise would have cost him certain 1000 Linden dollars!!
On a serious note, he showed us the various business opportunities that are possible in this virtual world. These activities are not merely a business situation simulation but also yield certain Linden dollars in return. And these Linden dollars can be then converted into real money (US $).
Business activities like buying and selling of land on Second Life and earning a daily amount of Linden $ 250,000, selling a projector system for business meetings, selling of high fashion clothes for avatars, giving funky haircuts for them, all are conducted on second life. All these activities are made possible through computer programming using high level languages and customization is done for the respective customers. On the same lines, one of the IBM associates is thinking of opening up a boutique for Indian styled female clothes and is busy these days programming full time for it!!!
He also showed a live business conference that he and other IBM associates had at a virtual board room on Second Life. A live presentation was also given by one of the associates in this meeting. IBM also uses Second Life as a platform to promote creativity, to test leadership skills and team player qualities of their employees.
He ended the session by taking queries from the students.
So Second Life turned out to be not just a virtual zone to have fun in but also a real life business simulator and enhancer.
All in all it was an enriching and a learning experience about a domain we were uninitiated about.
Resources:
http://Secondlife.com for more information.
Article courtesy Kanishka Bhambhani, Batch of ’08, VGSOM
Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services January 23, 2007
Posted by shaunak in Guest Lecture, Kerberos.add a comment
This talk was delivered on October 14th 2006 by Mr. Gopal Bhageria of IBM Global Business Services.
The students of VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur attended a very informative and thought-provoking guest-lecture on ‘Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services’ on 14th October 2006. The lecture was a part of a series of lectures being organized under the auspices of IBM and Kerberos, the Systems Club at VGSOM.
The lecture dealt with business modeling and the increasing need for service oriented architecture of business and software in today’s world. In computing, SOA defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users. Enterprise architects believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions. It can also simplify interconnection to and usage of existing IT (legacy) assets.
Mr. Bhageria also talked about SOA realization, SOA governance and web-services. He also made a suggestion that VGSOM could introduce a course in Enterprise Architecture as there was a great demand for good enterprise architects.
Mr. Gopal Bhageria is leading SOA initiative and Model Driven Business Transformation (an IBM Research initiative http://w3.webahead.ibm.com/w3ki/display/MDBT/Home ) based projects in GBS India. He is also a GBS India SOA and Web Services community leader and a member of TEC-IN an affiliate of IBM Academy of Technology. VGSOM takes pride in the fact that Mr. Bhageria, who has successfully lead teams in developing and implementing business solutions for IBM’s clients, is an alumnus of VGSOM.
SOA Resources
A great place to start is the wikipedia entry on SOA. Excerpts …
SOA is a design for linking computational resources (principally, applications and data) on demand to achieve the desired results for service consumers (which can be end users or other services). OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) defines SOA as the following:
A paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations.
…
Enterprise architects believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions. This style of architecture promotes reuse at the macro (service) level rather than micro levels (eg. objects). It can also simplify interconnection to and usage of existing IT (legacy) assets.
Article courtesy Kanishka Bhambhani (Member, Kerberos), Batch of ’08, VGSOM.
