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The Coaches Centre is a new immersive environment for sports coaches and coaching education professionals worldwide, in affiliation with the International Council for Coach Education (ICCE). The ICCE’s mission is to create awareness of sports coaching as a profession, standardize coaching education requirements around the world, and provide insight and advice for rules committees and sports-related organizations. The mission of The Coaches Centre is to cultivate sport coaches around the world via a unified destination and foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the spectrum of sport coaching disciplines.

The Coaches Centre has the potential to modernize the sports coaching profession. Initially, sports coaches and coaching educators will use the immersive environment to deliver self-paced learning, 3D real-time interactive collaborative learning and training, and face-to-face meetings and events. Coaches and coach education professionals will be able to deliver theoretical, practical, and physical coach education — the latter typically requiring a coach educator to travel on-site, today. The Coaches Centre has plans to ultimately turn the immersive environment into a major online destination for a huge swath of the global sports coaching economic ecosystem.

The Coaches Centre will enter broad-scale pilot with 4,000 to 6,000 participants in March of 2009 and the ICCE has plans to take it global by the end of 2009, with premium for-fee services. This pilot will include three courses: one collaborative synchronous education program called “Making Ethical Decisions” and two asynchronous 2D self-paced training programs called “Plan A Practice” and “Nutritional Development for Athletes.” By the end of 2009, The Coaches Centre intends to deliver premium services like sports management, registration, and collaborative training services like coach-to-athlete, coach-to-coach, coach-to-parent, and coach-to-organization education programs.

Preliminary pilot results show tremendous business value

In mid-February, we spoke with The Coaches Centre president Peter Meli about the business drivers behind his decision to make a massive Immersive Internet investment (we’re talking several million dollars Canadian U.S.). To test and document business value, an ICCE The Coaches Centre  executive team ran a pilot in Canada comparing a two-day coach education program delivered in person with the same program delivered via the Immersive Internet. With the immersive environment, the ICCE was able to evidence a 14X greater return in income to sports association partners (Canadian national sports federations and territory partners) while saving participating coaches in aggregate of $1 million Canadian, compared to the traditional two-day program.

Now keep in mind that Canada alone has 1.7M sports coaches, from local schools through national and international teams, roughly 120,000 of whom go through the education process annually (which amounts to about $60 million Canadian in transactions). Now, picture more than 40 countries involved. The ICCE currently consists of 53 national member groups with an estimated 60 million coaches at all levels from volunteer youth coaches to scholastic and elite level coaches. If the numbers from this initial pilot hold true when The Coaches Centre goes into production, the economic impact could be staggering.

Keep your eye on this project

The Coaches Centre is well worth following for any advocate of the Immersive Internet at work because of the project’s potential to deliver:

• Innovative solutions to the challenges of working with people in far-away places. As even small-town coaches are given access to the broader world via the Internet, the way they do their jobs is changing. New professional networks and an opportunity to develop personal brand will elevate individuals to new star players. Coaches and coach educators will be able to learn from each other and share best practices, no matter where they are based. Athletes will be able to interact with coaches, peers, and even competitors without getting on planes and leaving home. Lessons learned from this effort apply equally well to people in banking, architecture, IT, or pretty much any other sector — people who need to work together on projects or teams across industries and geographies.
• Lessons learned that will be applicable to other sectors. As the Immersive Internet goes mainstream, early adopters will leapfrog competitors by learning from others outside of their core industry and geographic region. The Coaches Centre has challenges ahead; its target market may not be the most technically savvy — and certainly not in a consistent way across all 40 nations in which it has members. Not everyone who wants to participate may have a computer that can run a non-browser-based immersive environment at an acceptable performance level. And — very importantly — how well will the technology scale? (Pearson Learning Solutions built The Coaches Centre on the Nexus technology developed by Engineering & Computer Simulations (ECS).)

Based on findings from the initial Canadian pilot, the cost savings and revenue generation potential for The Coaches Centre is huge. But the potential benefits don’t end there. With vast quantities of performance data and research available to ICCE members who use The Coaches Centre, the coaching process and coach development could be improved. The ICCE says it will put 90% of the proceeds from The Coaches Centre back into each country’s coaching system, which will help countries better identify athleticism at a young age and monitor athletes’ development. Creating a hub for coaching could also create a whole cottage industry of affiliated businesses. This is just conjecture on ThinkBalm’s part, but imagine collective bargaining groups forming to secure lower prices on equipment and sports services. And direct communication among national sports organizations could pave the way for larger international clubs and leagues. We’ll be watching The Coaches Centre closely as it moves forward.

Last month I ran a little experiment. For about two weeks I stayed logged into ReactionGrid to see if it would lead to valuable serendipitous interactions. (I wrote about this in the related article, Lightbulb moment: for serendipity, stay logged into the immersive environment.) What I found: staying logged into my virtual workplace made me feel like I have a window looking out on my world — rather, looking in on my world. And yes, staying logged in did lead to new and deepened relationships.

By staying logged in I connected with at least 10 people who already were — or now are — members of the ThinkBalm Innovation Community. I got to know things about people and tell them a bit about who I am and what I do, thereby building up the all-important foundation of trust. I learned about projects other people are engaged with and went over to visit works in progress. And I had a conversation with someone who happened to stop by that is on the way to turning into sizeable business for ThinkBalm. I learned a couple of other lessons, as well.

Having two monitors really helps balance the pros and cons of interruption

I have a monitor on my desk above my laptop and I left my Hippo OpenSim viewer running there. Usually, nothing happened in my view. I focused my attention on my regular work done, on the lower monitor, looking up only when out of the corner of my eye I saw an avatar fly into view. Without the dual monitor, I wouldn’t have that sense of awareness of people coming and going unless I ALT+TABbed to Hippo, in which case I’m no longer focusing on my regular work. Sometimes I would see avatars walk or fly by on their way to somewhere else. Other times, they approached me to start a conversation. It’s  the virtual equivalent of seeing colleagues walk down the hall past your office.

Having an “I’m busy” space required more effort than it was worth

If I’m looking at my screen I can see who comes by my space while I’m busy, even if they choose not to leave me a message. But I don’t really like the space I originally created (for a picture, see the related article, Here’s a way to communicate “I’m busy” in immersive environments). While the circular wall was translucent, it still felt like a wall and I didn’t like having the image of my avatar sitting inside the space up on my screen. More importantly, it turns out the “I’m busy” space may be more trouble than it’s worth. I had to remember to park my avatar there when I was interrupted or going to be away from my desk. And in ReactionGrid, which is based on OpenSim and therefore works very similarly to Second Life, when someone doesn’t interact with the environment for some period of time — say, 5 minutes — their avatar looks like it’s fallen asleep standing up (see Figure). If someone stumbles across my sleeping avatar they can always send me an instant message. I don’t think I need much more than that.

IBM Research is a big proponent of the Immersive Internet, especially in the Digital Convergence business unit. But what about the IBM Software group – in particular, Lotus, which produces IBM’s enterprise collaboration software products? ThinkBalm’s theory about the enterprise immersive platforms market is that ultimately software companies that provide information worker infrastructure (like IBM) will deliver an immersion  layer that integrates with existing communication, collaboration, and content systems (see Figure). In search of validation (or invalidation, as the case may be) of this theory, this week I attended IBM’s Lotusphere conference in Orlando with one primary question in mind: Where does the Lotus group stand with regard to the emerging Immersive Internet market?

Searching for insights, I met with director of Lotus strategy Doug Heintzman, Lotus new business development executive Gopal Gupta, IBM Digital Convergence business unit marketing executive Karen Keeter, and others. I stopped by the innovation lab for a demo of Sametime 3D (see YouTube video below), which features collaboration spaces built in OpenSim and integrated with Lotus Sametime. In the innovation lab I also saw a demo of Olympus, a 2D Web overlay technology to add simple avatars to Web sites (in particular, Web conferences) in a similar vein to ROCKETON or Weblin. I wandered the show floor and visited Forterra Systems in their booth for a demo of the latest version of OLIVE and OLIVE integration with Lotus Sametime.

My takeaways after a couple of intense days at Lotusphere:

• Lotus is focusing on partnerships with third-party ISVs. Lotus is in the process of opening up APIs to products like Lotus Sametime so partners can integrate their products with IBM’s. The Lotus executive team is closely watching customer implementations of partner products like the Forterra OLIVE . Joint customers are just now beginning to drive adoption of each others’ products. Early indications are that IBM will initially evolve toward delivering an immersion layer via a partner ecosystem — though ThinkBalm’s take is that eventually (in 5-7 years) many aspects of immersive technology will go the same route as collaboration services (e.g., presence, instant messaging, calendaring, email, etc.) and find their way into an enterprise platform offered by large vendors like IBM.
• Lotus is keeping an eye on IBM Research developments.  In September of 2008, IBM Research announced that it was doing work to integate OpenSim with Sametime in a project code-named “Sametime 3D.” Sametime 3D includes collaboration spaces for meetings, brainstorming sessions, and presentations. Sametime 3D does a good job of using 3D technology to do things that can’t be done using flat 2D technology – like brainstorming and then prioritizing ideas collaboratively. This week at Lotusphere, IBM made public that  IBM Lotus and IBM Research are now offering an expanded version of Sametime 3D to customers that want to run Immersive Internet pilots, with plans to announce an IBM Software Service for Lotus (ISSL) offering later this quarter. Until this time, IBM’s Sametime 3D pilots had been internal-only.

IBM as a whole is taking groundbreaking steps with the Immersive Internet. And ThinkBalm expects that eventually large IT providers like IBM will offer an immersion layer that integrates with enterprise systems. (For more on this see the Aug. 13, 2008 ThinkBalm article, Information work is going immersive.) But this is a long-term vision. Don’t expect Lotus to develop an enterprise immersive platform on its own during the next 2-3 years. Instead, Lotus will expand relationships with Immersive Internet ISVs with which it partners, and work with those partners to integrate the immersive technology ever more deeply with products in the Lotus communication and collaboration portfolio. As the business value of the Immersive Internet in the enterprise becomes clearer and more widely understood over time, IBM will be right there in good position to capitalize on the growing opportunity.

Nortel web.alive is an enterprise immersive platform currently in beta (general availability release date not yet announced). Nortel is targeting three use cases in large enterprises: enterprise collaboration, eLearning, and what it calls “assisted community eCommerce.” The company recently announced that PC manufacturer Lenovo is doing a web.alive pilot to support the sales process (see figure).

While ThinkBalm’s focus is on enterprise use of the Immersive Internet, rather than B2C use cases like Lenovo’s, we think this announcement is an important one because:

• Web.alive marks the entry of a big vendor into this emerging software market. The future of Nortel is in question as the company files for bankruptcy protection. But this doesn’t diminish the significance of a multi-billion dollar IT and telecom vendor entering the Immersive Internet platforms market with a commercial product. (For analysis on this market see the Nov. 17, 2008 ThinkBalm report, The Immersive Internet: Make Tactical Moves Today For Strategic Advantage Tomorrow.) Web.alive, formerly code-named Project Chainsaw (still the name used for Nortel’s internal implementation of the software), is an enterprise immersive platform that runs in a Web browser as a thin client plug-in. It provides highly rendered, realistic visuals and positional audio. Under the covers, Nortel is using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Rather than provide lots of built-in business collaboration tools for things like document collaboration and brainstorming, customers or system integrators could integrate web.alive with Web-based tools and arrange them in the browser alongside web.alive. An important set of features for enterprise immersive platforms, web.alive can run behind the firewall and provides integration with enterprise directories for security and identity management. Web.alive can be integrated with other systems, as well, like CRM; Nortel says that anything you can do in web.alive can be called via JavaScript. Some functionality — like avatar selection and configuration — is Flash-based.
• Brand new Lenovo eLounge pilot already exceeds the company’s expectations. Lenovo eLounge is an immersive environment in which sales professionals interact in real-time, in 3D, with customers and prospects. On January 13th, 2009 we spoke with Ajit Sivadasan, Lenovo’s VP and GM of global eCommerce, about the business rationale behind this pilot. Lenovo’s investment in web.alive was driven by the need to reinforce its brand promise: innovation and exceptionally engineered PCs. To decide where to focus its initial Immersive Internet foray, Sivadasan looked for complex issues that are difficult to address with the flat 2D Web. He selected a narrow scope and objective for the initial pilot: improving the experience for customers who are browsing for information about notebook computers. So far, thousands of people have been through the Lenovo eLounge experience and enough of these are legitimate sales leads that Sivadasan considers the experiment a success already.

We think this is just the beginning

What’s next step for Lenovo? The company is planning to train 15% to 20% of its sales force to be able to interact with customers and prospects via Lenovo eLounge. The end goal: a higher conversion rate and, ultimately, increased sales. Lenovo’s Ajit Sivadasan said that the typical conversion rate for phone-based sales is 25-30%, meaning that about one out of every three people who call buys something. He suspects that the conversion rate for Lenovo eLounge will be higher than this and could even reach 40-50%. This is purely speculation on our part, but given the quick early success Lenovo is seeing with Lenovo eLounge, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the company start using the technology in additional ways — like internal training (especially for sales people using the environment to interact with customers) and customer training and support.

The ThinkBalm Innovation Community has been experimenting with a new form of immersive event: the “un-lecture.” An un-lecture is a 60- to 90-minute event during which four or five community members each deliver a 10-minute demo, tour, or presentation about something enterprise Immersive Internet-related that they have done or are working on. The purpose of the community’s new un-lecture event series is to spread the wealth of knowledge and experience that exists in the community, strengthen bonds among members, create opportunities for serendipitous interactions, and collectively master how to move beyond traditional, often unexciting presentations to deliver high-value interactive experiences. Participants can move their avatars around in 3D space and interact with environments and objects. They can talk with the presenter and each other via voice, group text chat, or private text chat. In our view, participants in an un-lecture event walk away with an experience, not just a few bullet points and a set of printed-out PowerPoint slides.

On December 1, 2008 the ThinkBalm Innovation Community held its first un-lecture event. We structured the event as a four-stop tour that included:

• A presentation by Claus Nehmzow, entrepreneur and advisor with Alcus International Ltd., on CIGNA’s use of Second Life for healthcare education
• A hands-on demo of Jeff Lowe’s 3D mindmapping tool project — Jeff Lowe is a project manager at University of Oklahoma Center for Public Management
• A presentation on the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI)’s use of Second Life for marketing and R&D by John Kinsella, VP in charge of educational curricula and products at PADI
• A tour of Michelin’s island for training IT pros on enterprise architecture concepts by Philippe Barreaud, chief enterprise architect at Michelin

With the help of six ThinkBalm Innovation Community members who attended our first un-lecture event — Barbara Schwarz, Claus Nehmzow, Eilif Trondsen, Jeff Lowe, Leslie Pagel, and Santi Garcia — we wrote ThinkBalm’s second issue in the Immersive Internet Storytelling Series, titled “End Death-By-Lecture: Tours, Not Speeches.” For a PDF of the article click this link or click the image of the article’s cover above.