Virtual worlds, like Second Life and Entropia, are well… virtual. Avatars created in these worlds often have little or no relevance to their real life users. However, with the fairly recent creation of Kaneva, the line between the virtual world and the real world may begin to look rather blurry.

Kaneva, which is still in its beta version, was developed by Chris Klaus, who created Internet Security Systems (ISS) and later sold it for $1.3 billion. Since selling ISS, Klaus has directed his attention full-time to designing Kaneva and giving a very different feel than virtually any other world out there right now.

What sets Kaneva apart is that it combines the elements of a 3-D virtual world, a la Second Life, with a 2-D personal profile website, a la MySpace. When users first sign up, they can create their own 2-D profile page on Kaneva and add friends, send messages, and share photos and videos in much the same way that users on MySpace can. After signing up and creating their own profile, users can enter Kaneva’s 3-D virtual world and create their own avatar, just like users can in Second Life.

While many aspects of Second Life are obviously tailored only to the virtual world (many Second Life avatars have wings and sometimes look more like animals than humans), Klaus’s goal is for Kaneva to be a virtual world that mirrors the real world. Through its 2-D profile website, many users create avatars that are similar to the real-world personalities.

Another unique aspect of Kaneva is that it provides its users with a free virtual apartment once they create an account and enter Kaneva’s 3-D world. Users can then upload pictures and graphics from their Kaneva profile and place them as framed pictures in their new apartment. Users can change the style of the flooring and walls in the apartment. In addition, they can shop in-world and place their own furniture in their newly decorated apartment. Finally, if users choose to buy a TV in-world, they can then upload videos that they have put up in their real 2-D profile site, and then watch the video on their virtual TV in Kaneva’s 3-D world. Through all of these features, Kaneva has seamlessly bridged the distinction between aspects of the real-world and aspects of the virtual world.

Klaus also said that Kaneva’s goal is to reach a different user demographic than many other virtual worlds. “Unlike most companies in the gaming space, we are not pushing the latest and greatest graphics. Our world is about connecting with people in a very casual way,” said Klaus in an interview that he gave in February to Digital Arts Online.

Because Kaneva is still in its beta testing version, no companies have signed on and agreed to promote their brands in-world. However, Klaus believes that because so much of the Kaneva experience is rooted in the real-world, it’s an ideal opportunity for companies like Coca Cola and IBM to advertise. One of Klaus’s main business objectives is to design Kaneva such that it has many different purposes and is able to be redesigned so that other virtual worlds can be built on it. Klaus’s long-term vision is to have companies like Coca Cola use Kaneva’s world, and later on possibly create their own worlds for purposes of e-commerce. Klaus feels like this type of e-commerce could lend itself to companies using the virtual world for all different types of experiences, from virtual town hall meetings to virtual conference rooms.

Kaneva has published on their website that the has a world population of over 290,000 (remember, they are still in early stages of development). Comparatively, that’s about 4 percent of Second Life’s population of over 7.1 million. All of Klaus’s current ideas and plans are projections. No companies have officially signed on to advertise in Kaneva.

Regardless, Kaneva has perhaps changed the virtual world landscape. The line between the real world and the virtual world is a little less clear-cut. It is possible that in the future users may see other virtual worlds that combine aspects of the real world and virtual world in much the same way that Kaneva has. It may still be to early to tell, but one thing is certain, in terms of marketing it has a great deal of potential and upside.

You are a marketer. You send a promotional email - time-sensitive, special deal - only to find that the click-through rate was abyssmal. As you begin the witch-hunt for why the message performed so poorly, you discover that Your ESP and their email server are found to be innocent. 

What if your creative piece is responsible? In this age of image-blocking, the importance of email usability is magnified. To illustrate my point, I submit these three samples:

Exhibit A:  The worst case scenario and truly the default view in Outlook 2007 (and the way this email first appeared in my inbox).

Exhibit B: What happens to the email when it is delivered to Outlook 2007 with a common preview pane size and images turned on (today’s lowest common denominator for email software due to it’s MS Word-based rendering engine)

You see who it’s from, but you’ve probably seen other stuff from them.  You’re probably still left thinking, “So what?”

Exhibit C: The designer’s intended creative execution of a promotional email.

Bottom Line:  Send emails designed like this one back to the kitchen every time. Your emails will perform better and you’ll know that you’ve optimized for usability. 

Leave it to Barry Diller (is it me or does he look like the grandfather on Everybody Loves Raymond?) to finally create a new way to search online and possibly compete with the almighty Google.  Ask.com’s new search engine has come up with what they call their “Ask 3D” engine - named for what they call the three dimensions of search: Expression, Results and Content.

Believe it or not, search is still one of the most underdeveloped areas in online and represents an enormous opportunity for improvement.  It’s true that Google helped to improve search engine results when Sergey and Larry cried “there must be a better way!” back in 1998, but even their new search engine was limited in that they focused on what was the current paradigm of online searching.  They made the results a little more relevant and certainly sped up the process of delivering the results.  But they did very little to help in understanding the direction of someone’s search.

Here’s an example of how Ask.com is breaking out of the norm of search engine results and delivering something different and IMO better than what we get today.  If someone searches for “golf” on Google they get the following type of results:

• Link to golf.com
• Link to PGA.com
• Link to PGATour.com
• Link to Wikipedia’s definition of golf
• Link to GolfChannel.com

Likely I didn’t search “golf” to find a link to one of those sites.  I was most likely trying to answer a question, such as “Who won the LPGA championship this past weekend” or “What are some funny golf jokes I can tell on the course this weekend” or “What are some golf courses near my house that I can try” or “How can I feel with one swing that I’m ready to go head-to-head with Tiger and with the next swing feel like I might be better off trying to play with my left hand because it can’t get any worse”.  If we can agree that people aren’t searching for links, but rather are searching to answer a question, then we can start to see the difference in what Ask.com is now producing.  Here is a sample of what you get from Ask.com when you search for “golf“:

• A “Narrow Your Search” column on the left with suggestions such as:
• Golf Tips
• Golf Courses
• Golf Jokes
• In the middle search area, the first result is “Latest Golf Headlines”, underneath which is essentially the same list of results to sites that Google listed
• On the right hand side you have Images, Shopping options and a definition for golf straight from Wikipedia

Overall this is a MUCH better experience than what you get from Google.  Did it take an extra 5 nanoseconds to come up? Sure, probably did.  Did I notice that?  No, though I’m only on my second cup of coffee so give me a few more hours and who knows.  But what Ask.com is attempting to do is answer my question, which is a huge shift in what the other engines do.

I guess you could say that Ask.com is finally living up to its name.  And since Google (which is actually googol) means the number one followed by 100 zeros, I guess they’re living up to their name too.

Recently, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the first phase of an exciting new era in its web presence:

• Radical redesign of its home page.
• More ways to find information–by topic, A to Z list, popularity, lifestage, and more.
• Improved search engine.
• New topic “gateway” pages, such as Healthy Living. 
• 2.0 touches such as RSS, tag clouds, and blogs.

It holds great promise to make science-based health information easier to access than ever.  And I daresay it’s revolutionary for a federal government website. Remarkable when you think about the staggering amount of useful information that CDC houses–everything from outbreak updates to AIDS prevention to swimming safety. 

CDC 2.0 takes public health to the next level, indeed.

According to a Washington Post article, Google and Salesforce have teamed up.

Long story short, Salesforce plans to release a new version so that its customers can distribute online ads through Google from within the application. The partnership means that users will be able to buy keywords and track clicks and sales metrics directly tied to Salesforce - i.e. leads, opportunities, deals … etc.

Google has made a very smart decision here - a great match, lead generation tool fused to lead management application. Just another brilliant partnership from Google that means another tick higher for the stock price - in fact, a new high this Tuesday.

Marc Andreessen finally has a blog.  You might remember him as the guy that started Netscape or as a co-founder of recently launched Ning.  As a legend in the interactive space I plan on adding his blog to my continuously growing RSS feed list.

He has an interesting post up today about why there is no such thing as Web 2.0. In my favorite part of the post, he writes:

“As a result of the widespread adoption of language like “Web 2.0 companies” and the “Web 2.0 space” — and startups referring to themselves as such, most of which will fail — you get a predictably cynical backlash from people who then dismiss the whole category as trendy marketing hype full of me-too wannabes and in the process throw out the baby with the bathwater and dismiss all the legitimately new and exciting products and companies that are being created all around us.” 

I couldn’t agree more with him on this point.  The biggest problem I have with labeling something “Web 2.0″ is that it is likely to be dismissed as a marketing fluff idea that is all hype and no substance - although I suppose one could argue that all the VC and M&A activity that we have seen in the past year would suggest that everyone is buying into the hype.

In a revolutionary and completely novel spin to the current TV measurement wars, MTV Networks is telling the marketing world that they are in fact a system of important audience collectives and won’t be treated like the other traditional measured media - like the rest of those old-fogey-grey-beard nets.

As part of this fascinating approach, MTV is advising the ad world that just as “regular” television is being pushed toward a more responsive and responsible measurement platform (looking at commercial pods instead of total program viewership, and eventually actual spot position audience), the MTV Net’s audience is too busy and non-linear in their attention focus to watch commercials. But, what a great looking audience it is!

Basically, MTV is telling media buyers that they should pay up because of who watches the Network’s shows, not for the idiots that bother to watch the commercials that support those shows. You know, like, how pedestrian is that?

The reason the Network that basically invented premium cost per demo and that began the stratification and delineation of audience power Qs wants us to judge them differently?

 “When the American Association of Advertising Agencies first looked at commercial ratings in 2005, MTV lost more than 20% of its 18- to 34-year-old prime-time viewers during breaks. Over the course of a day, VH1 lost 14% of its 18- to 49-year-old viewers during breaks”.

Thank God at least the 14 year-olds are sticking around to see the latest prepaid wares from Amp’d mobile.

But to turn this back into a constructive position, and one that would actually help consumers and networks alike, MTV is asking for an engagement measurement – which not only makes sense given their content, but would also elevate the general state of TV advertising overall (imagine if networks could punish marketers and agencies for ads that cause program attrition: “Ok, Skittles, even thought the Clio folks loved the weirdo-long-beard-guy, 12% of our audience didn’t and they changed the channel. You owe us $286/CPM on that loss). I want my MTV indeed.

MTV (the channel, not the Network) was once a giant at inventing new programming genres that could attract and keep finicky teens and YAs: , Remote control, Yo! MTV Raps, Liquid Television Real World, Newlyweds, The Osbournes, Jackass…  Now, let’s see if they can temporarily redirect the focus of even finickier media buyers and their clients. I want my MTV indeed.

Video, in the end, may just kill the video star.

On Wednesday, May 30 (coincidentally my birthday), Microsoft unveiled their newest attempt to expand the company’s consumer electronics business with Surface, a touch-sensitive computing system that somewhat resembles an old pac-man table-top video game (a relic of the 80’s that can still be found lingering in a few bars and pubs). While Microsoft has made previous attempts to leap from the confines of the personal computer (some more successful than others), Surface is perhaps their most intriguing venture yet.

Resembling the “Multi-touch” system first unveiled over a year ago by Jeff Han at NYU, the Surface screen allows multiple input points to be active at once. For example, if you want to enlarge the size of an image, simply put one index finger on a corner of the image, put your other index finger on the opposite corner, and move your two fingers apart. Magically, the image will grow to fit the dimensions of the imaginary rectangle formed by the diagonal distance between your two fingers. Likewise, move your two fingers together, and the image will shrink; pretty cool.

Microsoft has taken this idea even further by allowing Surface to not only interact with our hands, but also other types of peripheral gadgets that we may be fond of. To transfer songs between two MP3 players (Microsoft Zunes, perhaps), simply place the devices on the Surface surface (?) and begin dragging files between them with your fingers.

Another neat demonstration of Surface’s potential involves paying the check at a restaurant: you place your credit card on the table and your date places their credit card on the table (you’re going Dutch tonight) and you move pictures representing the food you’ve ordered onto your respective cards, thus divvying up the tab.

While this mode of interaction seems to open up a new world of possibilities for how people exchange information, I’m having trouble thinking of scenarios where I could immediately benefit from this technology. Myself and Mike, another developer here at Spunlogic, were considering ways we could use this device around the office. While I sat at my desk and Mike sat in the little papasan across from me, we couldn’t define a way that Surface would allow us to be more productive (as we were sitting around talking about Surface while at work, it’s safe to say that it has so far proven counter-productive).

Thus, I fear that Surface may become the Segway of computers; a really cool idea, perhaps too novel and ahead of its time to be immediately useful. I certainly see Surface providing a medium for the elusive convergence between devices that electronics manufacturers have been seeking for some time now, but until an ecosystem of Surface-friendly devices become available, it may not have much of a leg-up on the plain old PC.