immersive Internet experience

In my blog post How can Sales 2.0 webinars, presentations and virtual conferences evolve beyond the 1.0 style? I pointed to web.alive as an immersive Internet experience, that with its 3D voice (spatial audio) allows for collaboration in virtual worlds right within your browser. All you need is to install a browser plug-in (just like you need a browser plug-in to see Adobe PDFs) and then it works best with a stereo-headset.

An example for one out of the three main markets web.alive targets is assisted eCommerce or lets call it social shopping.

web.alive is also targeting the education vertical for eLearning / distance education and the third target market is of course online collaboration.

BusinessWeek on web.alive from May 19, 2009:

“[…] Lenovo has more ambitious plans. The company’s eLounge site — available on the Web to any PC user—will let customers talk to Lenovo sales reps, and voices will get louder as avatars get nearer to other residents of the site. “It allows us to create a cocktail party effect” in which people can listen in on several conversations at once, says Nic Sauriol, leader of Nortel’s Web.Alive unit. Open Universities Australia of Melbourne plans to use the Nortel software to let prospective students chat with instructors and each other. […]”

[Disclosure: Until October 1, 2009, I used to work for the company behind web.alive]