Virtual Worlds to Reduce Commuting Costs?

As gas prices, pollution and traffic congestion increase, daily commuting to the office becomes less and less acceptable. With the average person travelling 40min each direction to work in Toronto, there must be a method of avoiding this!

Online networking tools like Lotus Sametime, ICQ, MSN and Skype have all reduced costs of communicating with remote offices and improved information transfer. There is however new methods of communication that will change the way business is done.

Virtual Worlds! (like www.secondlife.com)

In these online worlds you can communicate, educate, network, start a business and even make money. While different users would obviously have different applications for this type of environment, the most common applications are:

1) Online meetings with visual/verbal communication with people, presentations, product models and so forth.

2) Product Marketing showing the actual function, appearance and relative cost of the system. The currency conversion allows you to try pricing strategy in the virtual world prior to releasing it in the real world. This could be the future of market research as it is the most realistic response to a product launch next to the real world launch.

3) The platforms are great for online training due to the different interfaces and communication methods.

Large companies like IBM, adidas, Samsung, Toyota, BMW, and many Universities are all using these tools giving it some sort of validity. Additionally, with Intel making a similar system focused for the China market, the future increases in online traffic to these worlds may great a large potential for reaching new market segments.

While the social impacts of these are debatable, the impact on marketing costs, marketing channels, communication costs and travel-time are all going to be unprecedented.