When Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi's John Sculley to join Apple he asked, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?"
More than a decade on, Coca Cola wants to reinvent itself as a world-changer rather than just a purveyor of sugar-water and caffeine, with the metaverse at least. We'll look at what Coca Cola is doing, but moreover, why they are doing it that way.
Also this week, we'll look a fond look at the recently departed Kurt Vonnegut, Parisian garden design, reforestation in ecologically sensitive areas, and our mixed reality metrics, after the jump.
Mixed Drinks
It was with relatively mixed feelings that I attended Coca-Cola's launch
event this morning. Coca-Cola is no corporate lightweight and large corporations
are quite capable of "going wrong with confidence".
Coca-Cola's Virtual Thirst campaign isn't about fizzy drinks (OK, well, it's not just about fizzy drinks), and it's not limited to Second Life - it's out there on YouTube and MySpace as well as on their own website. Coca-Cola have been lurking about in these spaces for a little while now, asking questions, and learning.
Coca-Cola's Mickey Douhet (aka Michael Donnelly) smoothly addressed the gathered press at the launch event this-morning. This is Coca-Cola's first step in Second Life and they're proceeding cautiously, he says, to see if the lessons they have learned are really worthy and if they really fit with their company ethos.
The result is a slogan, and a competition. The slogan, I was rather disappointed to find was "Coke. Alt. Refresh". I have a certain curiosity as to what the losing candidate slogans were, but honestly, it's not that strong.
The competition is... well, unusual for such a strongly branded entity as the Coca-Cola Company. They're not creating a controlled brand experience for you. They're inviting people to mix their own brand experience. I don't remember the last time a strong brand invited people to just mess about with the trademarks, if ever.
The competition is to design a Coca-Cola vending machine that will be built
by Millions of Us - but not something
that produces virtual Cokes - that would be silly, right? What they want is a portable device that is
freely copiable from avatar to avatar, and has the same qualities that Coca-Cola tries to align
its brand with: "refreshment, joy, unity, experience" - which to my autistic
ears initially sounds like marketing twaddle.
So I listened to Douhet's talk, all smoothly executed and orchestrated by their partners at Crayon, and the question and answer afterwards, and then the press were... unleashed.
You see, several prototype samples had been commissioned from resident artisans, and they were interesting and impressive toys indeed. Unleash a mob of journos, who - as we know - are invariably half-mad, half-drunk, or half unable to add on toys that are designed to be fun and nifty and cool, and chaos rather reigns.
They suit several tastes, and they're worth fiddling with yourself - descriptions and still images won't really do them justice. After the launch event is over, you can go and see them here at Crayonville (direct teleport). Some of them are undiluted fun.
* Disclosure: Millions of Us is an "SL Partner" to New World Notes.
Mixed Reality Traffic
Rich with gritty urban atmosphere and attention to detail, Zephyr Heights kicks ass and takes names.
Each week we build an aggregate mixed-reality metric from the traffic figures of several notable sites, and match it to figures for a selection of "native" content.* Here's our new mixed reality site lineup:
Mixed Reality Site |
Comparable Native Reality Site |
---|---|
The Weather Channel: 54.05 (up 21.26) |
Svarga: 21.69 (up 0.46) |
Circuit City: 39.72 (up 0.51) |
TOP/Tech: 37.64 (up 8.93) |
Sears: 33.01 (up 1.51) |
Home Depoz: 4.99 (down 1.25) |
The L word: 20.55 (down -11.93) |
Isle of Lesbos: 177.60 (up 28.44) |
AOL Pointe: 11.11 (up 3.01) |
Zephyr Heights: 3.39 (down 1.47) |
Thomson training: 5.26 (down 0.36) |
NCI: 356.33 (down 9.46) |
Nissan: 4.72 (down 0.31) |
Dominus Motor Company: 15.34 (down 1.92) |
Sony BMG: 3.30 (down 0.08) |
The Shelter (Music Venue): 142.42 (down 513.11) |
The Pond: 1.63 (down 0.11) |
The Shelter (new residents, events): 49.49 (down 2.59) |
Magnatune: 1.48 (down 0.47) |
Rave Island: 31.17 (up 12.03) |
Tateru's Overall Mixed Reality Index: 17.48 (up 1.30) | Tateru's Native Reality Index: 132 (down 48) |
The Weather Channel continues to pick up, apparently largely due to the interactive activities available, while the Showtime's popular L-Word media property continues its slide in the wake of the cancellation of its education program.
The Shelter in Isabel/Wingo has reorganized the land parcel layout, which has caused a massive drop in the reported traffic this week, while the Isle of Lesbos reorganization has similarly boosted the reported figures. We'll see if we can make more sense of the more complex sites in coming weeks.
Mixed Reality Shorts
Our own Hamlet Au stands with the (at the time) soulless avatar of
Vonnegut
Best-selling author, revered satirist, and one-time adulated Second Life visitor Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died at the age of 84. Vonnegut may not have had a lot of pleasant things to say about certain aspects of the physical world, but he certainly had enough praise for the world of Second Life when he was engaged in a mixed reality interview with LCmedia's John Hockenberry last September. You can see the whole interview here on Google video.
Like Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) you may love or loathe Vonnegut's work, but you stand to be the poorer for ignoring it.
"We are healthy only to the extent
that our ideas are
humane." -- Kilgore Trout's Epitaph, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Plant-It 2020 and Converseon launch the Second Chance Trees Reforestation Project in Second Life, allowing Second Lifers to get a real tree planted in the real world, by purchasing and planting one in the virtual world. It's not the first mixed-reality tree-planting scheme to use Second Life to hook up with donators, but heck ... we're talking about planting trees for reforestation here. That's a good thing.
L$300 and a trip to the project's Island (direct teleport), awkwardly named Second Chance Trees Island, will get you the virtual tree, ready for planting.
Mayor Bertrand Delanoe of the Paris City Council revealed plans in 2004 to revamp the Le Halles market district in the middle of Paris. Accomplir, a local Parisian residents' association feels that they have not been adequately consulted over a key community feature (just stop me if you've heard this one), the gardens.
Accomplir are holding a competition in Second Life to design these would-be gardens in Second Life. The winner will receive L$275,000, and the top five entries will be both displayed in Second Life and presented to the Town Hall in the hopes of producing a garden setting that both the Council and the Citizens can feel a part of. Find more information and links to the competition and specifications via 3pointD.
LaCoste is holding a one million Linden Dollar modeling contest. Big contests seem to be the order of the day.
Researchers at the Ames Research Center have been using Second Life to develop an open source strategy for NASA - to be launched in coming weeks.
Got a mixed reality tip for Tateru? E-mail her at [email protected]. And visit her blog.
*A Note on Mixed Reality Traffic Metrics: They are derived by monitoring Linden Traffic over the course of a week, averaging those figures and dividing by the parcel size, to remove some of the problems where the Linden metrics tend to prejudice increasingly towards larger parcels. Where sites have multiple parcels, the most favorable figure is used. Sites with multiple sims are not able to be properly calculated. Figures primarily indicate ordered rankings that roughly reflect holding or retention efficiency per square metre.
The selected entries are broadly representative of the sustained retention of a site, per square metre, or efficiency of interest. Hamlet asked me to include more native sites to match up with the mixed reality sites that we track, for comparison's sake; a bit tricky to pull off. Nevertheless, we've selected by feel, theme or genre as best we could. Some are businesses, but I can't say as I'm interested in endorsing them as such - after all, I've got no personal experience of them - but they fit our comparison criteria, and were selected largely at random.
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