Cisco's Holly A Personalized Avatar Concierge

Cisco was one of the early enterprise drivers of virtual worlds, promoting them for collaboration and community building. The company has become a little less publicly involved over the last year, but virtual worlds are still in the mix for its research and development teams. Today at UT's Virtual World Conferenc, Anne Lange, Director of Public Sector WW operations and Media at Cisco, said that the company is working to be ready for virtual worlds when consumers are.

But virtual worlds are only one part of of the Web 2.0 mix the company is experimenting with. They're an important part, though, or at least one avatar named Holly is.

Holly is an experimental avatar, a sort of automated concierge that right now sits on top of any Web page, but may eventually find a place in fully immersive virtual worlds. One potential goal for Holly, as Lange puts it, is to have a central point of contact in Web 2.0.

Cisco wants to build its human network to organize communities within the company and externally, not based on the organizational hierarchy, but on interests, skills, and practices. That takes time, though, not just for the company, but each individual. Holly could act as "multi-dimensional search person for us," said Lange.

"What interests us at this point is to make this avatar have value for us. We want to use Holly to save us some time or do some task that we don't want to do ourselves," Lange continued. "She could manage our Web 2.0 presence, bring in new friends. The time it takes to go through Facebook or LinkedIn, even if its automatic, takes time if you want to add 20 people. That's something Holly can do if she has the business cards. She could book meeting rooms for us or use a search engine."

That may seem more like a general bot than an avatar that benefits from a virtual world, but these sorts of avatars don't have to be fully automated. One direction Gartner sees online habits going is towards the adoption of avatars as a form of not just identity, but extended ability. We may eventually use our avatars for direct interaction with other communities, shops, jobs, etc., but then they can keep going after we leave them on a long leash.

Cisco seems to be focused, at least right now, on its internal collaboration tools, but other companies, like Big Stage, have similar goals for the consumer.

Comments

[Jay Asafi]

Cisco should use "Holly" as a virtual concierge between a person's computer system and their mobile device, so that a person can contact Holly on their computer from their mobile device and Holly can then provide the requested information (music, movies, documents, etc...) to the mobile device.