Chinese Virtual Economy to Launch Nov. 8th, VWM's Christopher Sherman to Present at Opening Ceremony

China will launch the Chinese Virtual Economy (CVE) next week at the China International Cultural & Creative Industry Expo (ICCIE) taking place in Beijing November 8 - 11, 2007. Virtual Worlds Management (VWM) Founder and CEO Christopher V. Sherman has been given the honor to present the blessing at the CVE opening ceremony taking place at The Great Hall of the People. (VirtualWorldsNews.com is published by VWM.)  Mr. Sherman is a recognized expert on virtual worlds industry and has helped significantly expand and define the market through his efforts. China Recreation District initially disclosed the plans about the Chinese Virtual Economy at VWM's Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo (VWCE) in October.

The CVE infrastructure will enable China to integrate existing real world business operation technologies with new virtual world technologies.  China envisions being able to use virtual world technologies to simulate business operations, environments, communities, as well as social interactions and collaborative education.

More than 200,000 people attended last year’s ICCIE. This year’s ICCIE Summit speakers include Sir Howard Stringer, CEO, Sony Corporation; Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Group USA; Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London; Rupert Murdoch, President and CEO, News Corp. and others.

In addition to giving the blessing at the CVE opening ceremony, Christopher will also participate in a panel conversation on the emerging virtual economy. On November 10, Christopher will present a special lecture on the State of the Virtual Worlds Industry at the offices of the China Recreation District (CRD), a partnership between the Chinese government and private industry charged with building the country’s national infrastructure for a virtual worlds economy.

With more than 17 years experience, Christopher is one of the world’s foremost experts on the virtual worlds and video game industries. He currently helms Virtual Worlds Management, which produced the industry-defining Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo held in October in San Jose and is organizing the upcoming Virtual Worlds 2008 scheduled to take place April 3-4, 2008, in New York City.  He also serves as the managing editor of VirtualWorldsNews.com, the industry’s leading information source.

In 2003 Christopher founded Show Initiative, the parent company of Virtual Worlds Management, and created the Austin Game Conference (AGC). In October 2006 AGC and the company’s the game industry conference portfolio was sold to CMP Technology in order to focus on the Virtual Worlds media and events.  Last century, Christopher founded UGO Networks, which was recently sold to Hearst Corporation.  He was also a contributor to the launch of the now defunct E3 Expo.

Comments

[Jeffrey Pope]

Chris, you are becoming quite the figure around Asia Pacific ;^) Next time be sure to swing by Tokyo and see us!

[Troy McLuhan]

What does it mean to present the blessing? (I'm afraid I'm a total noob when it comes to Chinese culture.) It sounds like an honour, so congrats.

[Aaron]

Congratulations, Chris. You must feel very honored!

[Stephen Keaveny (Joi Koi)]

Well done Chris, good on ya!
I particularly like the line "Last century, Christopher founded ......" makes you sound ancient!
Cheers
Steve

[SuezanneC Baskerville]

I suspect that the CVE project is an ill conceived idea dreamed up by a government worker who isn't thinking clearly and that this will turn out to be a big waste of time and an embarassment to the virtual world industry.

[Alex Fedotov]

Chinese government is proving one more time that it will not give up a bit of control over people. They are not 'lagging'. Every time new means of communication and free speech emerges they instantly get ahold of it. I'm fascinated by persistence and devotion of chinese government to keep a grip on its people's throat FOREVER. Maybe they know their people so well that we should all thank them, btw.

[len]

They get more information than you might believe. All data systems leak and the Internet is no exception.

A harsh question for westerners is do you believe all cultures want what you do for themselves and their children? I have Chinese co-workers who have come recently to the US and express shock over what we expose our children to in terms of violence and sexual content.

How many of you have Indian co-workers? Do they celebrate Diwali at work as we celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas? Do we encourage it? Do we discourage it?

This isn't a moralist position. The problem for western business is western culture in China. If they choose to build their own, IBM will sell them all the servers they can put up and the virtual world software vendors will scramble to do the rest. As in the movie, Network, ebb and flow. Information systems are to this decade what oil was to the 1970s and 80s. Ebb and flo... and the rest of the Turtles.

[Alex Fedotov]

I meant just what I said: "... maybe we should thank them." , because I'm not quite sure (actually I'm more or less sure in the OPPOSITE) that chinese people like Western way of life (besides consumption) so much.

[Prokofy Neva]

len, the problem with your concept is that we hear plenty from *other Chinese people themselves* that they want something different than these government officials want to have by controlling them.

If the Chinese people don't like the Western way of life, why do so many of them struggle to come to the West to get education, start businesses, remain? Sorry, but the cultural conversation would have to go deeper here.

I'm also looking for something that explains why a secular government having a public event like this would having something called "a blessing".

?

[len]

It isn't a problem with a 'concept', Alex. It is a sample size. Given the size relative to the population, statistics say they prefer their way of life.

It's not something I prefer either. Consider the impact on our 'virtual worlds with social networks' using
back-end telemetry (an ontology) and routing that through the San Francisco AT&T installation that has a semantic analyzer on it examining ALL the traffic. Wow... whatta standard that will be. So much for our constitution.

So before we go too far into the 'what's wrong with the rest of the world', we may want to keep tabs on what our government is doing and determine if they are actually converging toward the same predatory model.

[len]

Oops. That should have been addressed to Prok. My bad.

Girl, open your eyes. It's a good thing to fight for the right cause but be bloody well sure you know what's going down first. Otherwise, you become the problem.

Virtual worlds are products to get and control power and money which are roughly the same thing in a world of us vs them values. The middle guy gets all the juice. When there is one set of rules for one group and another set of rules for a different group occupying the same space, there are no rules.

The day you signed up as Prok in SL creating a fake identity and hiding behind it, then claimed SL was some kind of standard without knowing how or why such are created, that is the condition you accepted: might over right, spin over truth, and numbers over rights. If that is not what you want, consider signing your own name and becoming a real person.

What you risk determines what you value.